Re: [Loc-ndnp-mail] Loading Essays

[Ed S. <eh...@po...>]

Hi Karen,

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Karen Estlund <kes...@uo...> wrote:
> Any tips on loading essays into the app?  I have the HTML format that
> Ivey sent me previously to put the essays in, but that's it, and I'm a
> little unsure how it all connects.

Good question. Unfortunately this is an area where the opensource
Chronicling America project is a bit under-documented, since you are
the first person to try it :-(

At LC we use the Essay Editor [1] to manage the essay content. It is a
pretty simple Django app that allows people to create, edit and
"publish" essays. The Essay Editor provides an Atom Feed that points
at URLs for essays that have been published. Chronicling America's
essay loader [2] uses the ESSAYS_FEED setting to figure out where to
load the published essays from.

Right now we have an instance of the Essay Editor running behind the
firewall at LC, which staff use to manage the essays as they come in
(mostly via email). The plan was always to eventually make an instance
of the Essay Editor publicly available. This would allow awardees to
log in and create essays, where they could then be reviewed by NEH,
and loaded into Chronicling America. But since the app requires
authentication to track who is who, it is non-trivial to make
available from LC.

So before I get any further, help me understand what you are trying to
do. Do you want to create new essays and load them into your instance
of Chronam? Do you want to load the 6 existing essays [3] you've
already given to LC?

//Ed

[1] http://loc-ndnp.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/loc-ndnp/ndnp-essays/
[2] http://loc-ndnp.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/loc-ndnp/chronam-core/file/e839e18c41c6/chronam/core/management/commands/load_essays.py
[3] http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/awardees/oru/