Starting to think about a Redesign

Post by **hugh** » February 8th, 2009, 7:54 pm

We're starting to think a bit about a redesign, are there any great designers/integrators lurking around? Need someone with some chops with wordpress, anyone interested?

anoldfashiongirl · Post by **anoldfashiongirl** » February 9th, 2009, 7:25 am

What kind of redesign?

cefn · Post by **cefn** » February 9th, 2009, 7:56 pm

Hi, I'm not a designer, but I do data manipulation.

I was a bit fazed by your 'browse' catalog facility, so I wrangled my own navigation system.
http://cefn.com/librivox/catalog

I can easily restructure this with any data slices you want, and it updates using a single command from the original librivox XML catalog.

The current 'browse' interface is more of a search system and seems to assume you already know what librivox has in it.

My system facilitates an easy to scroll list of all authors and all titles so you can drill down into titles and downloads. I found the current system also makes it hard to define file groups of interest for downloading using an automated downloader, since results are split over multiple pages, which my design aims to remedy.

I'm very happy to share my source code with the community given the great value of the librivox resource, so anyone can maintain/improve on it. It is implemented in XQuery and depends on Saxon to generate static pages from the XML catalog.

I'm particularly interested in this slice of the data...

http://cefn.com/cefn.com/librivox/catalog/64Kbps%20MP3%20ZIP.html

...which was the thing I was most missing.

It will allow me to download the entire ID3-tagged librivox repository in the MP3 format onto my blind grandma's Rockbox-enabled iPod using a single wget command.

Then she should be able to audio-navigate the repository by author and title and chapter, as well as jumping to bookmarks in any current audiobook(s).

At the moment she has to order special RNIB audiobook media weeks in advance and she can only have 4 at one time. CDs are very inconvenient for her, since she loses her place - the device doesn't remember.

For the reason of bulk downloads for blind people, and to help make Librivox generally easier for blind navigators who are using a screen reader, it might be good to have an alternative browse interface which has multiple slices of data, but each page shows the complete set of results.

Just say the word, and let me know how you want pages and lists to be constructed.

If you're interested I'll do a dry run, and then you can take the whole catalog management tool source and schedule it to be updated daily (a run takes less than a minute to regenerate on the very OLD laptop I use). Obviously, if you have a style template I could conform to that.

Jc · Post by Jc » February 9th, 2009, 8:53 pm

(Off topic, I just realized, from cefn's page, that we have entries for 'Anonymous' and 'anonyme'. Should we be consistent and always use Anonymous?)

Post by **hugh** » February 13th, 2009, 6:34 pm

@cefn, oh that is fabulous... that goes a long way to solving our problems. i'll be in touch...

darrin2520 · Post by **darrin2520** » February 16th, 2010, 9:10 am

@cefn

I am very interested in what you have done here. I would like to do something similar to build a Mobile Web friendly search engine for Librivox. I assume that you are downloading the complete catalog from time to time and hosting it on a separate site with links to the actual audio files from librivox?

Is this kosher with librivox and if so, how does one go about doing this?

My reasons are somewhat selfish in that I am not fully satisfied with Android options currently available. While I am not an experienced Android developer, I am quite experienced in web site and data development and I am very keen on the development of mobile friendly web designs. I would make such a site publicly available and host it myself if I could get access to this information.

Any suggestions on who I should contact to find out if I can get access to this information.

kayray · Post by **kayray** » February 16th, 2010, 12:22 pm

Hi again Darrin, thought I'd post that API info here as well, for future searchers:

http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/LibriVoxAPI

egal · Post by **egal** » March 4th, 2010, 5:32 pm

I am a programmer (HTML, JavaScript). I may be able to help with a part of the redesign.

prwells32 · Post by **prwells32** » March 5th, 2010, 1:36 pm

A redesign would be nice, but I don't think it is necessarily. The thing that needs the most work in my opinion is the catalog, my take is that it would be a little confusing for someone who isn't that tech-savy.

prwells32 · Post by **prwells32** » March 5th, 2010, 2:04 pm

I have also done some work with wordpress and modifying it's PHP/CSS. I am capable of doing some stuff it it needs doing.