MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - FLAG

erayd · 04-07-2011, 08:52 AM

Quick version:
I've just written a new ePub renderer for FLAG (http://flag.erayd.net/), and would appreciate some feedback on the resulting files. Anything goes - bugs, complaints, suggestions, feature requests etc.

For those who don't know what FLAG is - it's a fanfic grabber for fanfiction.net. Enter a story ID, and it fetches the whole thing and spits it out in an ebook file for offline reading.

Long version:
As nobody really seems to be interested in collaborating on a new version of FLAG (see history - lots of talk, minimal action), and the webservice is seeing pretty substantial levels of traffic these days (i.e. several thousand stories per day), I've decided to do a ground-up rewrite of the app myself.

This rewrite will be a webservice only, although it will be designed in a way that allows me to add a CLI interface to it later - the current CLI version has never seen much use due to the difficulties for end users in setting up a proper CLI PHP stack on Windows, and generated more support requests than I had the time (of frankly the inclination) to deal with.

The first bit of this rewrite is the new ePub rendering class. While it was never really intended to work with the current version of FLAG, I've bolted it on to the webservice in order to get some larger-scale testing done, and feedback on how it could be improved. Any and all comments are appreciated, no matter how trivial - better if I can incorporate things at the beginning rather than have to retro-fit them later.

In order to facilitate the support of additional output formats, I've decided to simplify the way these are handled. The new version generates ePub files internally, with all metadata already included - this finished file will then be passed to Calibre for conversion to other formats as required. As everything (except raw HTML output) will be passing via ePub as an intermediary format, this obviously needs to be as good as possible.

So... please comment - I'd love to hear from anyone who uses or may use this service what you love, hate, want, etc in your ePub files, and where you'd like to see FLAG go.

04-07-2011, 08:52 AM	#1
erayd Zealot Posts: 134 Karma: 146 Join Date: Apr 2008 Device: Onyx Boox Poke 2	FLAG - webservice update & feedback request Quick version: I've just written a new ePub renderer for FLAG (http://flag.erayd.net/), and would appreciate some feedback on the resulting files. Anything goes - bugs, complaints, suggestions, feature requests etc. For those who don't know what FLAG is - it's a fanfic grabber for fanfiction.net. Enter a story ID, and it fetches the whole thing and spits it out in an ebook file for offline reading. Long version: As nobody really seems to be interested in collaborating on a new version of FLAG (see history - lots of talk, minimal action), and the webservice is seeing pretty substantial levels of traffic these days (i.e. several thousand stories per day), I've decided to do a ground-up rewrite of the app myself. This rewrite will be a webservice only, although it will be designed in a way that allows me to add a CLI interface to it later - the current CLI version has never seen much use due to the difficulties for end users in setting up a proper CLI PHP stack on Windows, and generated more support requests than I had the time (of frankly the inclination) to deal with. The first bit of this rewrite is the new ePub rendering class. While it was never really intended to work with the current version of FLAG, I've bolted it on to the webservice in order to get some larger-scale testing done, and feedback on how it could be improved. Any and all comments are appreciated, no matter how trivial - better if I can incorporate things at the beginning rather than have to retro-fit them later. In order to facilitate the support of additional output formats, I've decided to simplify the way these are handled. The new version generates ePub files internally, with all metadata already included - this finished file will then be passed to Calibre for conversion to other formats as required. As everything (except raw HTML output) will be passing via ePub as an intermediary format, this obviously needs to be as good as possible. So... please comment - I'd love to hear from anyone who uses or may use this service what you love, hate, want, etc in your ePub files, and where you'd like to see FLAG go.