Building a Web Based Comic Book Reader / / No Comments Ok, so I know I’ve been spending way too much time lately talking about comic books, but I’ve been reading them for roughly 80% of my life now so they’re just a natural part of my life. Now, my best friend Todd Sharp told me this crazy lie that he’s never read a comic book before, but surely that’s a lie. Surely. Earlier this week, I took a look at parsing electronic comic books and sending them to GenAI as a way to get summaries of stories. That was a fun experiment and it actually worked quite well. I thought I’d take a stab at trying a similar approach with Chrome’s Built-in AI support as well when I discovered that… wait… I don’t... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: based, book, building, Comic, Reader
Building a Comic Book Reader in BoxLang / / No Comments I’ve been a comic book reader for just about the same amount of time as I’ve been writing code. Any computer using comic book reader (and there’s probably quite a few) will know that electronic versions of comics let you read comics on your devices. These comics typically come in one of two formats, CBR and CBZ, which are literally just RAR and ZIP files, nothing more. Over the years, I’ve had fun building my own web-based readers for this format, with my last one from a bit over three years ago, "Reading Comic Books in the Jamstack". I thought it would be fun to tackle this in BoxLang and see what worked well and what proved difficult. I’ve got a complete... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: book, BoxLang, building, Comic, Reader
Creating a PDF Book from Markdown with BoxLang / / No Comments Recently I’ve done some blog posts on BoxLang involving Markdown and PDFs, and I was curious if I could put together something that really demonstrated a complete tool of some sort. With that in mind, I built a "book" system where you can author pages in Markdown and use a BoxLang CLI script to generate a resulting PDF. It’s more a POC than a real app, but it was pretty fun to build. Here’s what I did. Functionality At a high level, the book is created from a source of Markdown files. Each Markdown file can use front matter (data on top) to define variables that are evaluated at the time the book is created. You can also use a "global" data file to define... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: book, BoxLang, creating, from, Markdown
The Book Banning Map of America / / No Comments The American Library Association (ALA) reports that attempts to ban books “surged 65% in 2023 compared to 2022 numbers, reaching the highest level ever documented by ALA.” Nearly half of the books targeted for banning were related to issues of LGBTQ+ communities or race.Now the ALA has partnered with Little Free Library and PEN America to release an interactive map which shows Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, banning, book