Category Archives: Python

In my last Python post, I learned how to get a single webpage from one of my old blogs and convert it from HTML into Markdown. My objective, if you recall, is to take a list of posts from my old blog and convert them into an EPUB.

I chose this task mainly to give me a reasonable goal while learning python, but I’m also thinking about some of the practical uses for a script like this. For instance, say you had a list of webpages containing primary source transcriptions that you wanted your students to read. A script like the one I’m trying to write could conceivably be used to package all of those sources in a single PDF or EPUB file that could then be distributed to students. The popularity of plugins like Anthologize also indicate that there is a general interest in converting blogs into electronic books, but that plugin only works with WordPress. A python script could conceivably do this for any blog.

I’m quickly learning, however, that making this script portable will require quite a bit of tweaking. Which is another way of saying "quite a bit of geeky fun"!

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This semester I have been trying to learn a little bit about Python, an open-source programming language. Python is the language used in the introductory undergraduate course for Computer Science here at Rice (and it’s actually the basis for Rice’s first Coursera offering). Fortunately, however, there is an even more introductory course on Python aimed historians. It’s called The Programming Historian, and it’s what I’m using to get started with the language.

The Programming Historian offers lessons and example code that can be immediately useful. Indeed, we heard from Scott Nesbit earlier this semester that he used the lesson on Automated Downloading with Wget to download the Official Records webpages used for the Visualizing Emancipation project. The Programming Historian is also built on the assumption that the best way to learn programming is to do it. History graduate student Jason Heppler puts the point this way in his excellent essay How I Learned to Code:

How do I continue to learn? I simply dig in. Computers are best learned not though books or lecture, but by hands-on experience. … I learn and I write. I trace other’s code to see what each line of code does and how everything fits together.

I decided that if I was going to learn Python, I was going to have to "just dig in" too. So I came up with something I wanted to do, and I’ve set out to see if I can do it in Python.

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