Bookish. it's like redactle but for books. beta testing / bugs etc

threw this together over the LONG jubilee weekend and it's now mainly working but some people trying it and spotting bugs would be useful.

http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/bookish/

it's very much 1999 javascript, the only kind i know.

for instance, are there any more simple words that have to go in the list? this is an easy way of tweaking the difficulty.

A way to scroll to the words that have hits would be useful.

Also automatically clearing the previous guess from the text box.

Yay, this is a fun addition to the word game canon. I'm very much a sightseer (which is why I never put my redactle scores up) so it took me a lot of guesses, but still felt nice and simple to get.

My only big criticism is that the blank size and the word size don't seem to fit - I don't do letter-counting but it still seems a bit odd to have what looks like a big blank and then reveal that it was "is" all along. Might be a case of tweaking fonts or something? And I guess a minor thing would be to add some more words like "is" to the auto-fill, as you suggested. I don't mind having to put them in, tbh, but I bet other people would appreciate it a lot.

yeah, the standard full block character is wide so it tends to look larger. i'm trying to think of a way to make the blocks uncountable, maybe by making them images and maybe by making them word length +/- 1

i was worried it'd be too easy, '#### ####' = moby dick, but i'm not sure it doesn't tend itself more to strolling than gold

redactle common word list is here: https://www.redactle.com/commonWords.js but i don't like it. mine is currently 'a', 'and', 'in', 'be', 'are', 'so', 'the', 'this', 'that', 'then', which is ridiculous the other way perhaps.

> Also automatically clearing the previous guess from the text box

should be there now - https://github.com/acdean/bookish/commit/717bad2e24bcfe3674436ca0490bf771aea6c956

scrolling to words is less easy, because there are multiple hits. you can scroll to a tagged element, i think, but there may be many tagged elements. i can make it scroll to the first one, will have to think about the rest. (it is one of the redactle features i like)

i've been adding a few more texts for the future but i keep coming across things i've not thought about - foreign letters, poems, hex-encoded entities.

Got bookish #1 (I think?) in 3!

oh, the one thing i forgot is to say which game was being played...

(the files are dated, games/20220605.js etc and it injects the relevant one which in turn sets 3 variables. gets around CORS and works with local files and servers)

if you look at http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/bookish/games.html you can play older games.

need to look into zipping those files, they are about 10x bigger than i was expecting.

I'm much more likely to play this than Redactle - good fun, even though it took me lots of guesses!

have added a game indicator.

given that this is all flat files, i wonder if i can get it to run from github pages, would save me having to ftp to my personal site.

This was fun - thanks and well made!

I felt totally at sea trying to guess the words, to be honest - I was picking away at common words but still not forming any idea of themes or useful avenues to take further guesses in. I got there from a lucky bolt of inspiration regarding the lengths of what looked like (and was) the author's name, so removing/fudging the lengths would have totally screwed me, which is possibly fair but might also leave me totally without a way in, so I'm not sure how I feel about that!

Seconding Leee's suggestion that the way you can click on a successfully guessed word in Redactle and be taken to successive occurrences of it is very useful. No, I have no idea how that works; sorry if it's a lot of work...

looked excitedly just now to see if it's changed over automatically but it's not gone midnight UTC so it's still the same puzzle

can think of several ways of doing the redacting, some of which make counting impossible, some of which make it easier (in fact looking just now on the phone you can see the individual blocks). maybe have this as a choice.

there's a scrollintoview method on html now which will make highlighting easier, i think. just need to give each highlight a separate id...

and the game files are ~20k each or 50 to a megabyte so I'm not sure why I'm worried. will probably run out of books before space

apostrophes, how are they? currently you have to guess them, so you have to type "don't" or it won't match. one of the puzzles has one in the title. the alternative is ?????'? everywhere and having to guess s or t or ve separately which was worse. Gutenberg uses rsquo (right single quote) for them all which i have to change to ' manually, which is a pain (especially when there are proper lsquo / rsquo pairs in the file too)

i didn't get yesterday's (the secret garden), i've read it at least twice but nearly 40 years ago! i guess the author names was probably a big hint but i couldn't think of any to match. struggling with today's too! i wonder what a good strategy is, i'm just typing in loads of common words...

yeah, the standard full block character is wide so it tends to look larger. i'm trying to think of a way to make the blocks uncountable, maybe by making them images and maybe by making them word length +/- 1

don't obfuscate word length, it's a helpful tactic! does redactle use smaller blocks? it's definitely confusing when a huge looking word turns out to be four letters long.

just got today's in 79 - saw what looked like a two letter character name and entered the first that came into my head, which was enough to give it away.

> in 79

it does seem harder, except when the titles and authors are obvious - #### #### = moby dick, obv. maybe a middle way would be to obfuscate the titles, leave the rest alone.

i checked the block width and 20 blocks was as long as
123456780123456789012345
so 25% wider. i think i can change the letter spacing or use black on black letters rather than blocks.

just got bitten by the apostrophe as separate & redacted character for 20220601 - also it hasn't given me the win after guessing the full title.

20220602 was quite fun, working out the style of narration and getting it from there - still took about 70.

plans for storing state? i've lost progress a couple of times by accidentally pressing 'back'.

Couple of thoughts. Be able to click on words you’ve successfully guessed rather than having to scroll through the page.

Secondly don’t know what I did but it cleared and reset my guesses. Fairly sure I didn’t hit back.

I didn’t solve it, but is it just the title or title and author?

> plans for storing state?

save points are for wimps. (i will try and add a warning about navigating away, that might be easiest. cookies probably require sending something and currrently it just updates the current page, doesn't re-request anything)

dan, jump to highlights is tonight's coding task, i think i have a way.

yeah, just the title. but i may've messed up and included a reserved word in the title which it won't let you guess and if you can't guess it it then you can't win, as ledge has pointed out. (but i thought i'd tested all the games?)

ha, yes, 20220601, it's not the apostrophe, it's the 'in'. i have plans to sort that (and save myself having to specify the title separately from the text - by parsing the h1 contents)

have fixed 20220601, although getting your browser to pick up the new file is surprisingly hard

Got this one in two - the two it took to type in the title. Mainly because of guessing the author's name - a three-letter middle name isn't that common, so Louisa May Alcott came to mind right away, and then it was just a matter of counting letters.

oops sorry

was obviously supposed to be spoiler tagged, sorry about that

it's now mostly scrolling to highlight.

it needs to highlight both the current highlight and the related guess but that's harder than it sounds - because it means de-highlighting the previous value.

also realised that you can guess empty strings... 8(

0610 has 'façade' in it. do i dumb it down? would be unguessable otherwise, unless you type in the cedilla...

Fixed your spoiler tags, LD.

- stopped the empty guesses.
- changed the redacted squares.
- now warns when you try and navigate away.
- title is now calculated from the contents of the h1 tag, which saves me a job and lessens the mistakes.
- added ghost text in input box
- introduced new harder-to-fix problems...

I didn't get today's despite getting about half the words including the first word of the title. I like the numbering redacted squares on highlight though!

pure accident. i was hoping they wouldn't show (they are less clear on mac firefox i noticed)

yes, hard one today, not something i've read myself. and not one of the author's best known works. (or maybe it is, it's in the PG top 75 downloads at least.)

i noticed that there's no ?s in the text...

ok, not so much time tonight but... some changes:

entering 'answer please' as a guess will reveal the answer

now scrolls to the top when you win (whereas it used to scroll to the first instance of the new guess which was always the title, cutting off the WINNER message) ((i need to turn that off generally, it's not correct))

sets focus to textbox on load

#20220608 in 4, my first perfect :)

Are the guesses case sensitive? I assume so as title only accepted it when capitalised.

not for me.

no, everything goes through tolowercase before matching to catch words in titles and at the starts of lines

btw yesterday's was The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde which is a short story - that was the entire thing iirc

not so obvious today. and again something i haven't read.

spent yesterday evening trying to get the layout better but despite my efforts it's still about 105% the size of the screen and things move about in bad ways. i wonder if it's whitespace after the divs?

also fixed ampersands and converted a couple more books into games. getting to the point where it needs a refactor though.

#20220609 372 guesses! The era and location were pretty clear long before that so if I'd given more thought to possible authors I might have got it a lot sooner.

it's kinda of annoying that i don't get to try and solve them myself.

maybe when i've added a few more i'll be able to go back and do random backissues and not remember them.

more damage today. oh well.

did a noddy, dynamic Previous page, which should update daily - http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/bookish/previous.html

surprisingly it wasn't much code because the data class is clever enough to know that date - 10 is the previous month (although date - 0 is yesterday, somehow). uses a *string* compare to make sure it doesn't go back beyond 20220601, which is lol.

Fun one today, got it in 70.

Got it in the end, 217 guesses. Unlike Redactle, where you can try topics (book, country, animal etc) finding it a lot more difficult to narrow these down. Would like to see a lot of the two letter words (it, to, by….) filled in already.

yeah my first 20 or more guesses are usually pretty much the same - all two letter words, pronouns, is/can/have & conjugations, there, then, say, said, why where who etc...

i was worried they would make the titles too obvious too often. but i could easily add some more. might do some analysis this weekend. (plan is to define enough games to fill out the rest of the month and then i can use that set as input)

227 today, cheated in the end when I got a half completed sentence. Would never have got it otherwise as I didn’t know the book or the author.

these are all still from the top 75 downloads at project Gutenberg. yes, one i haven't read, but, oddly it was mentioned in the podcast i was listening to this morning.

I got the authors name straight away, struggling to remember the title.

The text could be generated once for each insertion count offered in the dropdown. The words selected could be randomized or not. If not, another option would be most frequently occurring after stopword removal. It's just that it is hard to guess from stopwords.

I've been having remarkable success recently guessing sea, boat, ship, sails, etc. Though it hasn't worked so well today, lots of hits and I've eventually got the author but I guess I'm not familiar enough with his work.

it's an earlier novel (n fact his only novel), and not his usual genre. this was from the observer / guardian 1000 book list, so probably not as 'popular' as those from the top downloads list. i read it a couple of years ago. it goes a bit lovecraft in the last few chapters iirc

i should hope it does!

i'm consistently amazed at the nautical knowledge expected of pre 20th c readers. "At length I summoned up the resolution of despair, and rushing to the mainsail let it go by the run. As might have been expected, it flew over the bows" - of course!

Well, I managed to get the author, but as the entire text is in French I'm not sure I can get the correct title without cheating. (Assuming it's even one of his better-known works that I theoretically could get!)

happy bastile day!

unfortunately, due to terrible planning on my part, i'd already posted A Tale Of Two Cities and Les Miserables or i'd've made this the relevant sections of one of those. i went with this instead, which is well known in english, at least, but is a bit of a bastard because of the apostrophe in the title that you can't see but must enter

I thought it was something very experimental and Oulipo when only two of the top 30 words had any results, but on noticing they were "on" and "a" and spotting some suspicious hyphens scattered around before question marks I managed to work out what was going on and quite enjoyed typing words from my mostly forgotten GCSE French into it. (Eventually got the author purely by name length and then the title from the prepositions therein rather than any half-deciphered content, though!)

(Those elided clitic pronouns make French a bit annoying to guess - j'ai, l'ai, j'en, m'en, n'en, etc, are all separate single "words". Feels like good, fun exercise for one's language skills but it's already hard enough to piece together enough context to guess in English without resorting to title/author length a lot of the time and limited language skills definitely don't help there.)

PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too

> PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too

yeah, nobody said it was always going to be chapter 1! i think there's one soon / recently that's chapter 3 because the first two are preamble that are imo unguessable. i've also skipped some prefaces at times.

the numbering of the d'Artagnan Romances, of which this is part, is a book in itself. it was three or four volumes depending on the edition and modern copies split the 3rd (or 4th?) part into 3 parts themselves. but the chapter numbers aren't reset - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicomte_of_Bragelonne:_Ten_Years_Later . specifically this chapter was chosen as it was the one that mentioned the prisoner's history in the bastille

Aha! Thank you, koogs! I thought it was a bug but I should not have doubted you; good to hear the explanation!

hidden tag more to assuage my paranoia than because of Bookish spoilers: I work in a library as a data/helpdesk monkey and some of the multi-volume works of this era have very nutty numbering, where things end up with three different numbering systems and flit between which one they feel like displaying on the title page, and then someone emails me to ask if there's a scan for an apparently undigitised volume, or that the scans don't match the right volumes, and it turns into a bit of a nightmare going through them all filling in an Excel spreadsheet of every number you might conceivably refer to them by and trying to label them on the system in a way which will make sense to readers...

btw, this'll be the first and last time i do this even though it went smoother than expected (people did try, did complete it even, no insults were hurled)

i do have vague plans for theme weeks though, mainly to give myself ideas of books to include. sci fi week, say, or grouped by decade. I'm about a fifth of the way through having a year's worth.

(i can do repeats, i guess, of i choose other chapters)

um, maybe a week of final chapters...

Today's is a game of guess the title even when you've guessed the title.

Well ok it wasn't that hard.

yeah, again made harder by hidden punctuation (c/f redactle unlimited where often 's' is a word because it splits on apostrophes). damned if you do, damned if you don't, really

and this way i can maybe use the later books as more games. or are they too obscure?

2.1 Volume One: Swann's Way
2.2 Volume Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
2.3 Volume Three: The Guermantes Way
2.4 Volume Four: Sodom and Gomorrah
2.5 Volume Five: The Prisoner
2.6 Volume Six: The Fugitive
2.7 Volume Seven: Time Regained

not gonna happen...

yeah I only got it because of the famous opening line.

tbh, it is the only part i've downloaded. and three years later i haven't started it...

I never knew that book had that subtitle (or was written like that) so I didn't get today's. Though I've just realised the first word is one of the words I usually always guess, and didn't today. Is it children's book week or something? Two E Nesbitts then this.

children's book 12-days iirc, in honour of school holidays (and because it gives me ideas of books to convert - after 2.5 months i'm struggling to think of suitably well-known things). pity about the nesbitts though, i'd've spread them out a bit if i'd noticed

i think there's some leeway on sub-titles because wikipedia has an even longer one

wait... autobiography? that'd need a large keyboard...

quill pen stuck in hoof surely

the first editon cover page on wikipedia included another revelation that didn't make it into the PG version

new theme starts today. there's a curious part of project gutenberg that is a bit more contemporary and so this is taken from those.

i think that's > 100 i've done now and i'm really struggling for new ideas. that said, i can always revisit the old ones and choose different excerpts.

it also looks like i missed an hr tag 8(

How do you put possessive nouns in e.g. David's struggling to work out how to do that.

Haven't played in a while, holidays etc. Never heard of todays, nevertheless had no clue after 400 guesses that is wasSF.

> David's

apostrophe's were a problem because where they are used 'for quoted speech' they should appear unredacted but if i do that for "they're" or "david's" or whatever then it would split the word into two, meaning that "re" and "s" would be words. (redactle-unlimited does this, i don't like it)

the compromise was to use smart quotes, 6s / 9s, lsquo / rsquo, ‘ / ’ for quotes that i wanted in the text, straight quotes for the others. meaning you need to include the ' in your guess for things like "David's" and "they're"

but this is something that i have to do manually and i make mistakes. is there a specific example you are struggling with?

re the theme yeah, there seems to be a copyright loophole in that a lot of short stories previous published in Astounding or other pulpy mags from the 40s and 50s are public domain, wheras normally you'd see nothing after 1924. search for SF in gutenberg and you see *lots* of these, incl some very big names, alongside the hg wells and stuff. i've basically picked the most obvious of these for 10 or so authors, avoiding stuff that had unguessable stuff in the title, like "Thuvia, Maid of Mars"

It was the one a few days ago, got the title but couldn't input it. Forgotten what it was called.

https://acdean.github.io/bookish/index.html?0902 has an apostrophe in the title and seems to work ok. it's lady audley's secret

That's the one I couldn't complete, odd.

text seems small today. i don't know why

Haven't got any of these batch, have scarcely heard of them let alone read them. Wonder if I'll have some luck with today's after revealing 12 Rocket ____! ___ __ Rocket _____! Rocket ________! Rocket ____! Rocket ________ for the ____-___! Rocket, Rocket, Rocket! ___!”

https://www.ebooknetworking.net/books_detail-084873646X.html

(^ jokes)

turns out it's not the one in martian chronicles, just shares a name with it

(^ spoiler)

i've read a few of these. i think the first thing i did when i got the kobo was to look for free SF on PG

I cheated. And then read it - not one for the ages.

first non-gutenberg book tomorrow. am surprised they didn't have a copy, but i found one somewhere else.

prompted me to make some more changes to index.html - minimal instructions.

I’ve got the title today I think, The Death of Ivan Ilyich but won’t take the last word. Any idea what I’m doing wrong.

i did notice variations in the spelling when i was trying to find a copy, mine has an extra t in it (the letter count would be a clue)

That makes sense, I did wonder if the spelling was wrong. Interestingly Wikipedia doesn’t suggest an alternative spelling.

it's the public domain translation from 1900 or so by Constance Barnett so it might be that. it's all over archive.org (albeit as scans)

got todays in three, (typed the title as one word instead of two), very memorable opening line.

i was surprised but that's how it is.

https://github.com/acdean/all_the_year_round/blob/master/atyr_1866_mugby_junction/1866_mugby_junction.txt

line 3109... that said, the toc has it as one word

oh, that's more spoiler-y than i imagined

Comes up as "something's gone wrong" for me today.

um, you might've run out. I've been putting them up only a few days in advance and whilst the laptop does have 1008 on it i may not have uploaded it.

yeah, was exactly that. pushed now...

Ah cool! I got it straight away but I think it might be one of those ones where the punctuation messes with it realising that you completed the title.

No worries if this is a project you don't want to be tied to forever, but I will say that I play daily and enjoy it a lot.

oh, you are right

i've typed in all the words in the title and it's still saying i have the following left to type:

Array [ "", "" ]

so, yes, a genuine bug (and i should've checked that). i do wonder if the other bug report from above is apple converting an input ' to the curly version, because i couldn't reproduce. but this isn't that.

october's theme has helped with any ennui i may've had given that i have more ideas than i have days. but, yeah, that's 130 i've done now...

bug fixed - the opening and ending quotes confused it. the fix is to not add empty words to the title words list.

rats, i thought i'd done up to the end of the month but there's a hole on the 28th -31st.

i've added one for today and 1101 - 1103, will try fill the gap appropriately later. (all october was horror stories of some stripe or other, including an entire week of vampire stories)