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• Palm SuperMemo databases for med school, which I had lost a few years ago in a harddrive crash, have been recreated from my web database by Doug Buxton and are now available for download.
• A podcast of Japanese sentences based on the textbook Japanese for Everyone, compliments of Leo Smith, has been added to the Japanese section of the site.

Enjoy!

Updated file

That’s where the topic of this post comes in. leosmith from the Reviewing the Kanji forum, has worked his way through the textbook Japanese for Everyone, and along the way has put together an Excel spreadsheet with example sentences based on the textbook. The sentences can easily be added to a spaced repetition system such as Twinkle or Mnemosyne for effective review. Leo asked me to post the spreadsheet here so that other students of Japanese, particularly those using Japanese for Everyone, can benefit. Thanks, Leo!

My initial approach was to use iPhoto’s HTML export and apply an XSLT stylesheet to insert a custom header and footer, thereby integrating the exported HTML into the general appearance of my site. I would write a Python script to apply the stylesheet to all of the HTML files in the photo album and use FTP to publish the files to my site.

I was able to create a stylesheet to convert the index page but ran into trouble with the pages for the individual pictures because iPhoto’s exported HTML is not XHTML. I began searching for alternatives.

My ideal iPhoto HTML export tool would

• Integrate seamlessly with iPhoto
• Provide easily customizable templates with clean HTML and CSS
• Work without a database or script on the server
• Be opensource

I considered Gallery, which integrates with iPhoto, allows customization, and is released under the GPL. I ultimately rejected it mainly because it requires a database backend. Gallery seems like a good choice for those who are technically savvy, don’t want to use a third-party hosting service, and have lots of photos to publish. It seemed like overkill for my humble site.

I also considered Better HTML Export, which is probably closer to what I was looking for. It integrates with iPhoto and allows customization of the HTML output, and it does’t require a database backend. Better HTML Export has received lots of positive reviews. However, it is not open source and costs $20.

I finally settled on Galerie, an imperfect but serviceable solution. Galerie integrates with iPhoto (and with other similar programs); it exports whichever photo album is selected in iPhoto.

Galerie offers a wide array of templates that are visually appealing. However, the underlying HTML in the templates that I examined left something to be desired, relying on a confusing combination of images, inline styles, and external stylesheets. I did not come across any templates that were valid XHTML with the styling relegated to an external stylesheet. The good news is that Galerie doesn’t stand in the way of the user creating cleaner code.

Galerie offers an intuitive user interface with all of the expected controls, including

• Main page title
• Layout and captioning of thumbnails on the index page
• Maximum size and captioning of images, including EXIF and IPTC
• Imprinting text and watermarking on pictures.

Once you’ve tweaked the settings, just click Generate Gallery and upload the results. Interestingly, if you attempt to remove the link back to the Galerie website from the template, you get an error message as the gallery is generated. This can easily be circumvented by commenting out the link or otherwise making the link invisible. (As you can see from my site, I left the link in but placed it at the bottom of the page.) This minor “nag” is the sort of thing one would avoid with an opensource solution.

Overall, I’m pleased with Galerie and would recommend it to anyone who has a modest number of photos to publish and prefers not to use a third-party photo hosting service. Galerie is not opensource but does offer integration with iPhoto, customizable templates, an intuitive user interface, and all of the features one would expect from a basic web photo publishing tool.

I’ve provided a zip file with the tools you will need to perform the conversion. Download and unzip the file, and while you’re at it, copy your text flashcard file to the downloaded folder. The zip file includes a couple of simple scripts I wrote and DOSBOX, a free DOS emulator for Mac. If you have any trouble with the copy in the zip file, you might try downloading the emulator directly from the source.

1. First, of course, you will need to create some flashcards. Any text editor will do, but I use my own program, SuperMemo Creator. (As an aside, when run on Windows, SuperMemo Creator handles text-to-PDB conversion behind the scenes. I haven’t tested it with the recently-released Palm SuperMemo 2.0, however.)
2. Windows uses line ending characters that are different from most other operating systems. These characters are invisible but will cause smconv.exe to fail if not in the Windows format. I wrote a little shell script to convert from Mac to Windows line endings. Open Terminal (usually located under Applications / Utilities), change into the unzipped SuperMemo directory, make the line ending conversion script (convert.sh) executable, and run the script on your text flashcard file:
   
> cd Documents/SuperMemo # Your path may vary.
> chmod 750 convert.sh
> ./convert.sh your-file.qna #Your file name will vary.

3. Next, launch DOSBOX by running the script dosbox.sh. This script assumes that DOSBOX is located in the same directory as the script.
   
> chmod 750 dosbox.sh
> ./dosbox.sh

4. In the DOSBOX window, run smconv.exe:
   
> smconv.exe your-file.qna
A SuperMemo PDB file will be created. In Finder, double-click on the PDB file and it should be installed on your Palm the next time you HotSynch.

That’s it. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.