In the first quarter of 2023 I published vergil.co.uk, an online reader for Vergil's Eclogues (aka his Bucolics).

The project is little more than a minimum viable product: only the first poem is available and the interactive data is meagre. Still, readers are welcome to potter about and leave any gainful feedback.

The inspiration for the project largely came from the Greek Learner Texts Project which has sought to serve learners of Greek rather than the professional academic.

Existing resources for reading ancient texts too often fell into the traps of supplying far more information than is necessary. Perseus (4.0 at least) attempted to be all things to all men and display all of its wonders to all of its readers.

Moreover, the reading experience online has been, as a general rule, uninspiring. Classics is rich with well-designed books pleasing to the eye, hand and mind. It should be our aim to create web commentaries and readers that are just as delightful to read and study.

So the Eclogues was intended to be a study in how the experience might be improved.

There was a secondary objective for the project, which was for me to teach myself the necessary technical skills to create this kind of website. The small and slow progress of the site is on account of my relative inexperience.

Still, I have returned to the project after about a year and intend to use write something of a devlog here as a means of tracking and encouraging progress.