"Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay." — The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
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It is not, I confess, without some hesitation that I set down an account of this undertaking, for the matter is technical where my own gifts run more naturally to narrative. And yet the case — if I may so style it — is a simple one at its heart: to gather the whole of the canon, four novels and fifty-six tales, into a single library; to arrange them as a reader might wish to walk through them, whether in the order the world received them or in the order the stories themselves occurred; and to do this cleanly, quietly, and without ornament for its own sake.
What follows is the record of how it was built, offered in the hope that whoever next takes up the case will find the trail well marked.
Live:Sherlockian
This is a Hugo static site presenting the complete Sherlock Holmes canon — the four novels and five short-story collections Arthur Conan Doyle set down between 1887 and 1927, as a single, readable library. Its distinguishing habit is that it does not insist on one reading order: a visitor may walk the canon chronologically, as it was published, or novels-first-then-stories, and the site remembers which they preferred.
.
├── config/_default/hugo.yaml # site config, params (favicons, description, ...)
├── content/
│ ├── novels/ # the four novels, one folder each
│ │ └── <slug>/
│ │ ├── _index.md # work_type: 'novel', title, year
│ │ └── chapter-01.md # chapter: N, subtitle, year
│ └── stories/ # the five short-story collections
│ └── <slug>/
│ ├── _index.md # work_type: 'collection', title, year
│ └── <story-slug>.md # release_order: N, year
├── data/
│ └── canon.yaml # the single source of reading order — see below
├── layouts/
│ ├── _default/
│ │ ├── baseof.html # shared <head>, meta tags, favicons
│ │ ├── list.html # renders a novel's chapters / a collection's stories
│ │ └── single.html # renders one chapter or one story
│ ├── index.html # home page (hero + the canon ledger)
│ └── partials/
│ └── canon.html # the sortable ledger of all nine works
└── static/
├── css/main.css
└── images/
Every content file carries a small, deliberate set of fields, nothing is inferred that isn't stated plainly, in the manner Holmes himself would insist upon.
A work's _index.md (one per novel, one per collection):
---
title: 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'year: '1892'work_type: 'collection'# or 'novel'layout: 'list'
---A novel's chapter:
---
title: 'A Study in Scarlet'# the novel's title, not the chapter'schapter: 1year: '1887'subtitle: 'Mr. Sherlock Holmes'# optionallayout: 'single'
---A collection's story:
---
title: 'A Scandal in Bohemia'release_order: 1year: '1892'layout: 'single'
---Chapters are ordered by chapter; stories by release_order. Neither
requires the files themselves to sit in any particular order on disk,
the number put upon the front matter is the only authority.
data/canon.yaml is the single ledger from which every ordering on the
site is drawn. It holds two lists, each a plain
sequence of <section>/<slug> paths:
chronological:
- novels/study-in-scarlet
- novels/sign-of-four
- stories/adventures...grouped:
- novels/study-in-scarlet
- novels/sign-of-four
- novels/hound-of-the-baskervilles
- novels/valley-of-fear
- stories/adventures...git clone <your-repo-url>cd<project>
hugo server -DThe site will be available at http://localhost:1313. -D includes any
draft content — useful while a chapter is still being transcribed.
To produce a production build:
hugo --minifyThe text of the canon itself belongs to no one, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works are now in the public domain. The code that presents them here is offered under the humble MIT License; do with it what you will, though a note of thanks would not go amiss.
I am aware that a README is no place for sentiment, and Holmes' cold and analytical mind would no doubt call this preamble a waste of ink better spent on the particulars of the code. But there is, I think, something quite satisfying in seeing the whole of the canon, which was my introduction to the singular personality of Mr. Holmes, gathered under one roof at he begins to work the case himself.
— with apologies to chief chronicler Dr. Watson