CUNY Academic Commons

User Matthew Knip (knipm) reports the following on Zendesk:
"We are rapidly approaching the completion of the initial transcription of our project and we are well over 200,000 words on the single page of the diary https://vanbuskirk.commons.gc.cuny.edu/the-diary-of-philip-c-van-buskirk/. Our work so far has been done in MS Word, and I've cut and pasted the text onto the web page. Editing, however, has become increasingly slow and difficult as the page has grown.

We need to start a new phase, and that means editing the text. We face a problem, however, because every time I have edited the text it takes forever to load, typing text is slowed with consistent stalling and freezing up, and the site takes a good amount of time to update. There is simply no way we can do this work with the slow response from the system."

Scott suggested:
"I just wanted to ask about your concept of the diary, and how maybe WordPress basic functionality might help. You can create a post and assign it a date in the past. So you could have a lot of entries in the diary that each could be tagged and categorized for discovery. They could be displayed in order in your blogroll. It might make it easier (and faster) to update smaller chunks of your content.

If this doesn't appeal or is too much work at this late stage of your project, maybe you might want to consider creating a pdf of your final version, and embed it into your site. Marilyn and I can help with this, if you want. It would lessen your constant posting a large amount of text to our database, and the lag time it takes for update."

Matthew replied:
"I really want to have one page, one document. I know how to generate posts, and we use those for project updates, but the diary should be one document, if possible. I've never worked with editing a .pdf file—how easy is that? I'd prefer if we had a Word document to work with. Is that possible? "

He added me as an admin so I could try it out. Here's my reply:
I'm trying this from my home PC, and I already see your concern. When I'm on the Project Description page, I have no difficulties. But when I click Edit Page on The Diary, it takes over 1 minute to load. (Once chrome even gave me a screen unresponsive warning). Would you mind if I added Boone Gorges (our dev guy) as an admin? I also second Scott's suggestion of either PDFs or doing something else to break up the entries. The problem does seem to be the length of the text."

He replied:
"I don't want to edit in .pdf. Can it be exported as a Word doc?"

Now he would like your take as well, Boone. I'm adding you as an admin. Thanks in advance.