Category: Quotations (WIST)

I mentioned the other day the quotations database I have.

My biggest problem that I have with it (aside from its care and feeding) is actually publishing the damned thing. I keep it in Access, but translating from that to some nice, simple static web pages is an ongoing lesson in frustration.

First of all, you can’t. Access doesn’t want to produce static web pages. It wants to generate some sort of active web page, with scroll buttons and searching this-n-that, and acts on the assumption that you’re running on an IIS server with all sorts of other Micro$oft bells and whistles installed.

(Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)

Well, really, it will actually do a static page. Or a set of them, as it will take the report/query and “print” it onto multiple web pages.

I don’t want that. I want all of the quotes by authors whose last names begin with “B” to appear on the “B” page. A single page. Should be simple. ‘Tis not.

I have gotten around this for the past few years by outputting the quotations through a report that has the frelling HTML codes embedded in it, and saving that report to a text file, then massaging that file further (correcting the odd artifacts this approach adds) with all the proper formatting into an HTML file, then uploading that.

You can see why I only publish an updated version once a year or so.

I have a MySQL database on my host. I don’t know how to use it, and I’m not sure I want to go to the effort of moving my quite-functional(-except-for-the-frelling-output) Access database onto a strange, hosted platform, then learn how to present from MySQL into HTML.

It occured to me, though, a couple of days ago that Access can output to XML. And, hey, XML is this universal databasey kind of thing that I should be able to format a nice front-end to and solve my problems. This would allow me, among other things, to more frequently update the online version.

Just one catch. The frelling thing doesn’t work.

If I start with a clean database, I can export a simple table to XML. But when I do it from my WIST database, it crashes. “So sorry!” the little dialog box exclaims. “An unexpected error has crashed Access. Do you want to recover your database and send us a report about it again which will have all the effect that pressing the crosswalk button a dozen times has on making the signal change faster?”

I’ve upgraded everything to the latest release (probably my first mistake), and it just frelling doesn’t work. I’ve imported the tables into a fresh database. It works a few times, then starts crashing (stupid Micro$oft POS).

I am sure there is a better solution.

I’m just grumpily stumped as to what it is at the moment.

For those who don’t know, I have a large quotations database I keep online, WIST (“Wish I’d Said That”). It’s been a labor of love for many, many years.

I end up doing a major revision or update to it about once a year, since it’s a fairly major semi-manual effort (see here for more details).

For this year’s effort, rather than focusing on adding more quotations (though there will be some), I decided I wanted to make my citations better. After all, there are eleventy-zillion quotation pages out there, but for the most part you’re lucky if you get the person’s full name, and their born/died range is a true luxury. Asking to know where a particular quotation came from is almost beyond the pale.

But that shouldn’t be the case. The liberal arts major in me says, “Hey, if you’re going to cite something, cite it well.” I’ve always put a lot of effort into finding out who the heck Joe Frim is (since “16th Century English educator” or “20th Century German general” provide different context for what Joe had to say). Now I’m going through and, for those quotes that don’t have such info, I’m trying to identify the work (and date) it first appeared in.

Not a trivial task, by any means. And since I don’t plan on taking the next few years off, sitting in research libraries, I’m doing the next best thing: using Google.

See, lots of what’s in the database is literary, and a lot of those works are on-line by name (plus there are usually some literary types who have actually bothered to give citations for these things). Ditto for historical personages.

Foreign folks, and ancient sources (Aristotle, Athansius) are a bit more difficult, since the wording of the quotation may change depending on who’s doing the translating.

I’m not sweating it too much when I can’t find a given cite. But where I can, it feels like another puzzle piece plunked into place, another blank field filled in.

But there’s something interesting about the Internet. There’s a lot of information out there. And there’s a lot of crap in that information. Crap that is carefully preserved on-line, and, when spotted by others, carefully copied and propagated.

You can see this in a number of places. Common misquotations. Common misspellings of peoples’ names (Clement Atlee vs. Clement Attlee). And so forth. You just know that they’ve been passed, bucket-brigade style, from one site to the next.

Usually there’s a way to sift through the noise to get to real signal. Some sources are more reliable than others (Bartleby. Xrefer. Even Snopes). Usually more complete sites are more reliable than those with just the speaker/writer’s misspelled name as the cite.

Failing that, you can sometimes get enough clues from what the majority says to figure out how to further pin it down. If everyone (who mentions it) says that Joe Frim uttered those immortal words in The Idiot’s Guide to Making Babies, and there’s one site out there that says it was Blooms of Amaranth, it’s probable that the majority is right (though not always, and if you look more closely, you might find that Joe’s only quoted in TIGtMB, and the real cite actually is BoA).

And then there’s Auerbach.

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

Was that said by Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882), a German writer? Or was it uttered by Red Auerbach, a US basketball coach.

Certainly, on first blush, Berthold seems the man. It’s a very literary quote, the sort you would imagine a German writer saying. Not that basketball coaches are all illiterate dummies, but, still.

So do a Google search on it. Go ahead.

It’s a pretty popular quote, particularly on music-oriented sites (duh). Nobody cites the source other than the author. And about half of the sites say it’s Berthold, and half say it’s Red.

I’m pretty certain the two of them are not the same person. I suspect strongly that somewhere, someone saw the quote attributed to “Auerbach” and said, “Oh, Red Auerbach, the famous basketball coach. Huh. Didn’t know he liked music that much,” and then made the citation more “complete” — and that this misattribution has spread through the Net like kudzu, competing quite sucessfully with the Berthold citations.

Or maybe someone saw the quote, said, “No way that was said by a basketball coach,” found the Berthold name, and decided that was the right one. There’s no way for me to easily tell without a lot more research. And with 4500-odd quotes, I’m not that obsessive.

So I’ll leave it as Berthold, but I’ll add a note that it’s sometimes attributed to Red. And that’s that.

Lots of garbage out there. But if you are just a little discriminating, there’s a lot of good stuff, too.

I have a quotations database which I call WIST (Wish I’d Said That). I keep it online here. It’s a pride and a joy and a pain in the ass to maintain, because it all resides offline in an Access database which then takes a major effort to translate into the dumb, static (but oh-so-lovely) pages I have.

Knowing that there are enterprising web folk out there who read this, I am curious as to what it would take (cost) for one of you to actually create an online database with both data entry/edit capability (for me) and online query and display capability (for viewers), along with an export capacity.

I’m looking for the basic functionality here. I can mess up all the purty stuff all by myself, and I can probably maintain what someone else has put together for me without too much trouble. My hosting plan has access to a MySQL database engine; I don’t know if that’s the proper route to go.

I’d love to make updating WIST an ongoing effort, rather than a once-a-year multi-month grind.

Feel free to ask questions or inquire for more specifics. I’m looking for a ballpark here, just to see if it would be a relatively cheap and easy project or a wildly expensive Bataan Death March.

I’ve finally (and successfully, and non-destructively) moved my WIST (“Wish I’d Said That”) quotations site to its new home (hence the hilarity from last night), on its own domain, wist.info. Enjoy.