Over the past couple weeks or so I’ve been spending time here and there putting Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species on this site. In many ways, the tools at my disposal to do this are as cool as all of the weblogging with automatic RSS generation.
My version of The Origin of Species started off with the Project Gutenberg text of the book. Then I added paragraph level anchors to the text. Next, I created a copy of that and added visible permalinks. The final version uses a cookie to let users toggle back and forth between hiding and showing the visible permalinks. A Javascript that Seth Dillingham wrote provides a nice highlight of a paragraph if you use an URL with a paragraph-level anchor.
The last touch was a navigation system at the top and bottom of each chapter. That’s not toggable (though it could be) but it and the visible permalinks do disappear if you choose the print-only version. Really little stuff that adds up.
Darwin’s book is probably available dozens of places, but I like having it on my server in a form that I find most useful (and that I don’t have to worry about disappearing or changing URLs on me). And it makes my evolution page all that more complete.
I hope to have all of Darwin’s major works up and in this format by the end of the summer.