Alpha Group Meeting

Having decided to meet outside of class on Sunday morning at Starbucks, our caffeinated group plunged into work on our Mother Goose eBook project. Our outlined tasks for the day included adding the numerous illustrations that populated the original text, incorporating a CSS stylesheet into our otherwise plain text, finalizing our editorial decisions, and writing our forward for the eBook. At each step of our work, we planned to ensure that our eBook rendered correctly in the Calibre program.

In the midst of attempting to insert the CSS stylesheet, we encountered the major issue of our CSS stylesheet not linking appropriately to the eBook content. After pursuing several avenues of online inquiry, we contacted our professor, Arnie Grossblatt, through Skype. Ever helpful, Arnie promptly talked us through the process and assisted us in trouble shooting our project. We were also able to clarify several other issues such as the rendering of the Table of Contents, the cover page, and the Sigil recognition of the illustrations.

Inspired once more, our group began to fix the issues we had encountered. We inserted the Mother Goose coloring pages, wrote a new CSS sheet, formatted our table of contents, and decided upon the "look" that we wanted for each portion of the eBook. We also selected several devices profiles to test our eBook with through the Adobe Device Center program.  Arnie soon "called" us on Skype to further clarify the remedy for our illustration errors. 

While it seemed that our project was finally coming together smoothly, "Le Maitre Chat," the french version of the "Puss in Boots" tale, generated an error. The only viable solution to the error was the reinsertion and reformatting of the entire story. The "Le Maitre Chat" error transfered to a Table of Contents matter that was discovered and rectified. A small celebration ensued.

Moving once more to the editorial decisions, we explored methods to adjust our font style and color choices. Although we enjoyed the maroon we had originally selected for our chapter and section headings, we decided to experiment with replacing the maroon with green for the headings in an attempt to the eBook content to the cover page color scheme. Unfortunately, the green was hideous and the decision to keep the maroon was made.   

The testing phase of the project did not run very smoothly either.  The Adobe Device Center program does not like the ePub file format. The links to various testing websites also did not work.  The ePub file did render correctly in Firefox, however.  Through various family connections, we were able to attempt testing our ePub file on an iPod Touch. Unfortunately, the process did not work due to communication issues. A third Skype conversation with Arnie resulted in the realization that as our file is complete, including our metadata, that we can test our file in class on Thursday.