Go get it. Bugs to the usual place, except for things we already know about.

I was going to rant and rave about how Bible software like Logos and Accordance makes you pay huge amounts of money for public domain texts. I imagine to replicate my Sword library of Bible texts and commentaries would cost me over $500 with either of those two solutions, which is a shame, because I got all that for free. But, just for once, before ranting, I thought I'd check out why it is this way. I wrote to Logos and Accordance to ask why they charged so much for free stuff. Accordance wrote back; Logos did not reply.

Yep, we're pretty much ready, at least for an alpha. There are a few things that need to be fixed, but now I think is the time for people to kick the tires of it.

Last week I wrote:

I realised recently that a significant proportion of the missionary job is actually a customer relationship management problem: keeping in touch with people back home, sending out newsletters, thanking supporters, etc. As well as that, I want to be regularly praying for many of my friends and contacts, because, well, many of them are missionaries too. And besides, I look back on the number of friends from university that I've fallen out of touch with, and I really don't want that to happen with my ANCC friends as well.

I'm expanding Glob, my blogging software, to enable me to blog in two languages. I really respect Martin and Hazel and their bilingual blog, and I want to do the same. Not just for the integrity of knowing that you're not "talking about anyone behind their back", but also because I have a bunch of Japanese friends who get my blog (syndicated via Mixi, a Japanese social networking site) and would probably find it easier to read in Japanese than in English. Also it'll be good for my language skills!

I tried to do some work on Ditabase today. I set myself three tasks: finish a little script off which fixed the svn:content-type metadata in a remote repository (as practise for scripting the kind of SVN manipulation we'll need to do in Ditabase proper); finish off the SVN Maypole model I've been writing; with that in place, generate XML directory listings of a repository to be handed off to Kupu.

OK, folks, I think I got the bits in the right order. After stealing the very clever trac/svn integration from work, and spending half an hour or so fighting with svk, I think I have a Songbee repository up and running here. Additionally there should be a Trac project management thingy.

I'm back in Wales, after a week working in Oxford and Reading. I did a few bits and pieces on DITABase, and now have something which sucks files out of subversion, renders them with XSLT transforms and displays them. The next step is getting them to be editable and sending them to SVN, and we've got most of a content management system written.

Some more updates on Songbee. First, I will be putting up a web site for it, although it's not a priority. The site will basically be a rearrangement of all the information you can find under the Songbee tag, so look there to begin with.