Dave's blog

One of the websites Tarakan created and continues to manage is Architecture & Governance Magazine, a community site with several hundred articles on the arcane art of Enterprise Architecture. A&G started as an actual print magazine, but it was discontinued with the success of the website. They continue to publish a PDF file for each issue, which is downloadble on the website.

Recently someone commented that they'd also like an eBook version of the current issue. Seemed like a reasonable request, and I was curious about the process of creating an eBook, so I decided to delve into it. And that world is still quite a mess.

An evolving standard used in iBooks and other places is the ePub format - "EPUB became an official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in September 2007, superseding the older Open eBook standard."  A single ePub book file is just an archive of other files, including XHTML and CSS for content and formating, an OPF file for metadata and ordering, and media files. 

I searched around the intertubes for info on creating ePub format eBooks and ... well, good information and tools are scarce.  So I just dug in, trying all the tools I could find to create a eBook from various sources files in A&G Issue 6-6. I had all the source text documents in RTF format, the original Adobe InDesign source file to create the PDF, the finished PDF, and all the image files. 

First I tried Calibre, a "a free and open source e-book library management application" which seems geared more toward eBook reading and library management. It has numerous conversion options though, so I plugged in the PDF file and hit "convert". I received an unreadable 100 page mess of graphics and text.  Converting from a fixed-layout print-centric PDF to a flowable multi-sized text-centric epub format wasn't going to be as simple as clicking a button.  I played with it a bit more, putting in the source documents and it worked better, but I could not get a new article to display on a fresh page- it just flowed through.

I had discovered a few intereting websites on ePubs, including the oddly named and likely search engine confusing Pigs, Gourds and Wikis. The author wrote a book that focuses exclusively on ePub, which I wound up buying (although in dead tree format via Amazon, because it was cheaper than the ePub format .. go figure).  It focuses on using Word or InDesign to create ePub books, along with some chapters that go into the process more deeply than anything else I had found. I found another post that goes way deep into the format, but focused too much on roll-your-own for me- I was looking for a simpler, more automated approach (since we might be doing this more frequently).

I happened to have InDesign CS5 and the Issue 6-6 InDesign source file, so I tried to follow her method in the book above. But again, trying to take a print-centric file and convert it was going to take too much manual effort to make a nice looking eBook. That and I had very little experience with InDesign.  So what else..?  A little more searching helped me find Sigil, "a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format."  Sounded perfect.

And it pretty much is- it works very well.  I had learned from the Pigs.. website that the only way to get chapter breaks to work in iBooks was to create a separate XHTML file for each chapter, so I created three XHTML files, one for each article in Issue 6-6. I cut & pasted the text from the RTF files into Sigil, which stripped all formatting. That was ok- it is better to start clean and build up, so I used the WYSIWYG features of Sigil to add heading tags, bold and italics and bullet points. I could even add images, although getting text to flow around them requires some CSS work (a similar method is shown in the ePub book). Perhaps a future version of Sigil will include a WYSIWYG method to make images inline.

The Table of Contents was created automatically using the Heading tags (so be sure to use them correctly- h1, h2, ..). I used the Meta Editor to add information on the Title, Publisher, Author, etc of the eBook. I took a screenshot of the PDF and created a document for it and moved it to the first- this caused it to be used as the cover image (maybe there is a better, more explicit way to do this, but I haven't found it yet).  And voila- that's it.  Since Sigil edits the ePub format directly, there is no conversion process - just save and you have an ePub.  The resulting eBook looked great on my iPad.

Sigil is a nice app for creating a simple ePub format eBook quickly. You'll have to dig into the code if you want to do anything more sophisiticated, but it has a nice split-screen code editor for that.  So unless you know InDesign well, I'd start with Sigil and see what you can do with it.

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the Why of building mobile websites.  In Part 2 we'll look at how to analyze your website for mobile traffic. We will use this information in Part 3 to correctly plan and implement the mobile version of our website.

Google Analytics

So how do you know if mobile visitors are even visiting your website, and if so- which pages do they frequent?  Google Analytics (GA) is a good tool for this, and is already installed on many sites.  If not- get the GA Drupal module and install it.  Then sign up for Google Analytics- it's free- add your site, and get the "UA-xxxxxxx" number for that site (it will come with a code snippet they send you- you just need that number).  There is a field for that number in the GA settings page on your site- put it in, save, and ... wait.  It takes at least one day before GA will have any data on your site, and perhaps many more days or weeks (depending on your traffic level) before you have enough data.

Below is a typical Dashboard for GA - this one shows a month of overall traffic for one site:

Good info, but we specifically are looking for info on our mobile visitors. One method of figuring that out is to look at screen resolutions.  You can do this by drilling down into "Visitors Overview >> view report" then "screen resolutions".  Below is a real example

Notice that #5 is "320 x 480" and #6 is "320 x 396" - either mobile devices, or a 1970 greenscreen terminal.  So we are getting maybe 11% of our traffic from mobile devices, which is likely enough to cause us to develop a better mobile version.  If that number was 0.1% then it probably isn't worth the effort.

GA can further break down the mobile traffic by device, if you need to know that.

More importantly is - what pages do mobile visitors read?  Often it is different than desktop users.  GA can tell you that as well, so you can make sure those pages are very mobile friendly.

Ok, so we know we are getting mobile traffic, and on what pages.  In Part 3 we will discuss ways to "mobilizificate" your Drupal site.

Some of the Lullabots were in town for a week of training, so some of us Dallas Drupal types invited them out for dinner Monday night.  We enjoyed some open-air TexMex and talked some Drupal.  

We had a big crowd show up (> 20), as sort of evidenced by this really crappy iPhone photo.  The Lullabots brought half their class with them.  We're taking one of the 'bots, Randy the UltraCyclist to ride the Wish 100K cycling rally with us this Saturday.