as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

So, me and Andy are going on holiday tomorrow. To Wiltshire, to be exact, to look at stone circles and other examples of weirdness. Probably drink a couple of beers too.

Anyway, the canonical reference on ancient sites and folklore across the UK is Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian, which has a very useful associated website. In particular, the section on Avebury and the Marlborough Downs is just the guide we need. Now, sadly, I don't own a copy of TMA, but the website is all the reference guide we need. But we'll be in a caravan, in a field. No net connection (well, I can get to the net if I dial up on my mobile, but, yeek, it's horribly slow). So I wanted to take the relevant bits of the site with me, because it's so useful.

First we grab a local copy of the Avebury page and all the sites it points to:

wget --recursive --level=1 --no-host-directories --html-extension --convert-links --accept *browse.php* http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/browse.php?site_id=422

Then we convert that local copy into something browseable on my Zaurus. Since I have Opie-Reader, I can read Plucker-format documents. So, we build a Plucker document from our downloaded copy:

plucker-build --doc-file=tma-avebury --doc=name='Avebury and the Downs: The Modern Antiquarian' --home-url=file:browse.php\?site_id\=422.html --maxdepth=2 --noimages --pluckerdir=$HOME --stayonhost

And then transfer the file to my Zaurus (I used my ipkgput, but do it however you normally do). With my Zaurus and Andy's OS map we have all we need to find our way around prehistoric Wiltshire. Reports may be coming in a couple of weeks, assuming that we're not both sacrificed by druids or something.

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