I've recently put up images of issues 215, 216, and 217. I hate that part. It's tedious. It's boring. It makes me cry tears that, strangely enough, taste like sadness and old pennies. There are 12 more issues to bring online, and I don't look forward to the mindnumbing process that is that effort. Let me explain:

I have scans saved as .tif files of every page from every issue of Household Words that contains Hard Times. These scans have extra white space (heretofore known as "crap") around the edges. So for every page, I must open the image file in Adobe Photoshop, cut out the crap, resize the image (because the originals are HUGE) and resave the image as a .jpg file so you can see it with your web browser. When I open more than a couple of these ginormous files in Photoshop, my computer cries and decides to punish me for a few minutes by refusing to do anything.

Once the images are converted to crap-free .jpg files, I copy one issue's worth up to the web server to begin the stupendafabulous process of putting the issues together so you can "flip through" them, so to speak. This is the part I hate the most, and the part that I hope to automate for the remaining 12 issues. Right now, I change every link by hand. There are 20 issues, with 24 pages each. Each page has 6 links to modify, and one picture to resize. That means that there are potentially 3,360 ways for me to screw up, lose my place and wish to run repetedly into a wall.

I'm just beginning to work on the automated process and hopefully within the next couple of weeks I will have built a better mousetrap. Doing this will let me focus on transcription, and commentary, and looking for and finding connections between the novel and the magazine, which is the real point of all of this anyway.