My thesis was “finished” last month, which is to say that it arrived at a point where I felt I could show it to people without leaving the room. It was accepted, and last Friday I walked onstage at LUME and received my MA certificate.

After I talked with Christina Ferner this morning, I decided to publish the thesis on Scribd, even though their reader has readability problems! It is online now and you can see it at this page. From here you can grab code snippets to embed it wherever you like.

I have also placed it at Zoho, where I have made it public. You can view that version here.

Finally I have made embedded pages on this site, to demonstrate the partially successful nature of distributed publishing, which I have written about before.

Zoho

You can see the complete thesis here, published from Zoho as a (very long) single page document. I need to tinker some more with the html at Zoho to get this to work as I would like. At the moment the formatting is not entirely correct, because the file was copied and pasted from OpenOffice.

Scribd

You can see the complete thesis here, published from Scribd as a flashpaper document that is almost-but-not-quite nicely readable. It is paginated correctly and the formatting seems correct, but the actual letters are not as crisp as they might be. This was imported as a pdf file.

Distributed publishing

Neither solution is anywhere near perfect yet.

The Zoho version needs pagination. At the moment the WordPress tags are not processed, presumably because the text from Zoho arrives too late in the processing. I shall look into this. In addition, the need to tidy up the html is a drag if you try to do it in the small window Zoho provide, as I did to begin with. It becomes considerably easier if you copy and paste the html into an editor like jEdit, which is what I will do tomorrow when I have time!

The Scribd version needs to be considerably more readable – which is something that they are apparently working on right now.

Downloading

I have added two versions to my Public Box, from where you can download them. One version is the current pdf file and the other version is the odt document; that is, the document in OpenOffice odt format.