Kevin's Watch

This past year I reread the first Covenant trilogy before reading "Runes." While I read, I kept a long list of the unusual vocabulary words that Donaldson uses. I've spent many hours putting together an Excel document with these words and their corresponding defintions.

It'll probably be a couple weeks before I have a nice, clean copy of the document ready, but I've noticed the "Covenant Lists" section of this site and wonder if my list would be of any interest to the site's owner(s). I'd be glad to take suggestions and submissions for words that should be added to the list (I've got about 600 words and defintions at the moment). Is the site capable of displaying a (very large) Excel document?

Adam
adamwalter.blogspot.com/

Man I am with you in your lexicon.

May I just mention that the use of Micro$oft Office documents on websites is often frowned upon, mainly because they would only then be viewable by those users running Windows. Perhaps the information could be transferred into a more internet-friendly format once complete?

Lately Microsoft seems to be trying to force their products to pull away from any kind of standard formats that the real world uses...Recently I tried to save a Word Document as a regular old-fashioned .txt, but they seem to have removed that option (at least in the regular save option in the version I use). When trying to save it as .html...it spews ungodly amounts of stupidity all over the html. It's absurd. They're trying to make their products completely incompatible anything else, so I doubt if it would be easy to convert the excel spreadsheet into anything viewable by the real world. This, of course, depends on the version of Office he's using...

EDIT: Actually, about not being unable to save as a plain .txt, turns out that's just an odd problem I'm having and not (or so they say) something they did intentionally. Still doesn't invalidate the point that Microsoft hates normal formats.

If you could send me a copy that would be appreciated. I am a avid collector of Donaldsons vocab. As you see we have a list. Maybe I can help you convert it into a word doc. As a resource for this site it would be invaluable. As I have argued time and time again.

Thanks for all the responses! I'll spend a couple weeks fixing up the file and adding some final words, then offer it to the site owner(s).

Adam

That would be awesome.

Regards

Hey there. Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. People are always curious about some of the words Donaldson uses, heh. It could make a good SAT prep list, heh.

Anyway, why is it an Excel file? If it's just definitions of words, couldn't it just be a simple word document or text file? Because those would be a lot smaller, and lot easier to read on a website. At least I would think.-jay

It'd be cool if there was a way to set up a web page that people could keep adding to it.

Something like PostNuke/PhpNuke would allow easy management of content and can be set to allow people to submit content (which must be accepted by an admin before it is viewable on the site) - however, it would involve a complete overhaul of the kevinswatch main site to set up, so may be more trouble than it's worth.

I take submissions from other people to this word list, though it has no affiliation with KevinsWatch, and people couldn't add anything to it directly themselves.

www.naples.net/~dsaddison/srdamd

OTOH, is it possible for the Official Obscure Words thread on this board to be re-posted under a different log-in and the password to that log-in posted in the words thread, so anyone wanting to add to edit it could do so? Though of course that depends on no one abusing the thread.

kevinswatch wrote: Anyway, why is it an Excel file? If it's just definitions of words, couldn't it just be a simple word document or text file? Because those would be a lot smaller, and lot easier to read on a website. At least I would think.-jay

Well, I'll admit I'm not a big techie. However, I like the way the Excel table looks with a nice column of words on the left, then the p.o.s. (part of speech--noun, verb, etc.), then the definition.

Adam

Wow, my long-abandoned lists. Glad somebody picking up after my slacking self!