Argiope is a system to manage translations of poems. It is based on Margaret, a posting system / web forum in the kind of slashdot together with a web blog system written by a friend who prefers not to be mentioned. I'll plan to use the web forum for comments on translations. Margaret was a good starting point, as an existing frame to which I could add Argiope as a "module". In the meantime the number of lines of code is more than quintupled compared with the version of Margaret I started with.

Margaret (and also Argiope, of course) is built on top of Araneida, a web server written by Daniel Barlow. It has its own homepage that you can find here. The CLiki is a more widely known example of a work that is built on top of Araneida.

All of these programs are written in Common Lisp.

Hitherto Argiope uses a SQL database (i.e. Postgresql) as storage for all poems, versions, poets, etc. but I intend to change Argiope to use Prevalence instead. All that object-to-relational transformation is quite ugly and adds significant complexity.

If you are interested in the source code just drop a line. In fact, the only reason why I have not yet released it is that I dither between the GPL and the (revised) BSD licence...

I've written Argiope for my father. He has translated quite a lot of poems into the international language Esperanto. Perhaps he will also add some introductive sentences later.

Last modified: Thu Jan 29 19:24:42 CET 2004 by Max-Gerd Retzlaff

Notation: - to do, x done

x poet list, edit, deletion
x list of poems of a poet
x add a language field
x link plain text export on the version list
x latex export
x latex export should run without the external definition of the my-verse environment
x better description on the "About agriope"-page
- (draw a SQL diagram for the sake of variety on the "About Agriope"-page ;) )
x reorder list of Margaret modules on the link list as Argiope is the central module on my father's Argiope page
x replace 'poetry' by 'Argiope' in the code / filenames
x rollback the SQL transaction if a constraint is violated
x give a hint that a necessary field (title, author, or language) is not entered/selected
  when a submit is not possible

-> Milestone: release of my father's Argiope page

x handler for downloading a backup of the database
x latex to DVI/PS/PDF converting
x do not show all export formats by default
- link from poem, version and poet list to fora threads of Margaret Threads
x on the fly localisation switching (to Esperanto, German and perhaps other languages)!
- on/the/fly content-type recoding of the plain text export
- ... of Argiope at all
- user / poster editing, deletion
x sorting
- (usable more column plain text mode)
- update plain text mode
- language list, edit, deletion
- localization of language names via web interface
- localization of language names in poetry lists etc.
x user / poster as mailto-links
x new welcome page about the content and not the program (that is Argiope)
- versions should have a "originally posted by poster xy" field

Most important: Get rid of the SQL database and use Prevalence instead.