paul-graham's Introduction

Essays: Paul Graham

After I crawled all the essays, I have done the following works:

Design book cover
Convert webpage encoding from cp1252 to utf-8 to prevent garbled characters
Added three chapters: Favorite, Hackers and Painters, Latest
Group essays alphabetically
Add a few articles that are not original written by the author but are on the author's website(Richard Hamming, Donald E. Knuth...)
Correct several punctuation mistakes (dashes and quotation marks) in the essays
Delete 2 broken links, remove 1 obsolete essay with too short content
Fix some unmatched tags in web pages to prevent text overflow on Kindles

If you are familiar with python and html, then you can add or remove essays/chapters easily! First, editing calibre.recipe or index.html, then follow the following steps:

1. Clone this repo and start a local web server

git clone https://github.com/evmn/Paul-Graham.git
cd Paul-Graham
python -m http.server 8000

If you want to add new post:

First save that html page as `in.html`, then convert encode from `windows-1252` to `utf-8`

iconv -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 in.html -o out.html

Put the out.html to www.paulgraham.com/ folder, and add new entry in index.html:

<tr valign=top><td width=435><a href="out.html">Title of New Post</a><br>g</td></tr>

2. Test recipe

Debug your recipe with the following command:

ebook-convert calibre.recipe .mobi --test -vv --debug-pipeline debug

3. Generate Your E-Book

You can choose from Calibre and command line.

Calibre

Open Calibre, right click Fetch news, then choose Add or edit a custom news source, click New recipe, then Switch to advanced mode and paste your recipe there, then click Save and choose Download this recipe. It takes less than a minute to make a Kindle books with local server.

You can also refer to this demo video in Telegram.

Command Line

ebook-convert "calibre.recipe" .mobi \
        --authors="Paul Graham" \
        --title="Essays of Paul Graham" \
        --pubdate="2021-10-24" \
        --output-profile=kindle_pw3 \
        --mobi-file-type=new \
        -vv