# Making a Secular Solstice Songbook

After [this year's](https://www.jefftk.com/p/boston-solstice-2023-retrospective) secular solstice several people were saying they'd be interested in getting together to sing some of these songs casually. This is a big part of what we sang at the [post-EAG](https://www.jefftk.com/p/post-eag-music-party) music party, but one issue was logistical: how do you get everyone on the same words and chords?

I have slides ([2023](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1opDO8m-DvhW0nACIAP0GeisnMkqFSCZA3_wtWZrWAhY/edit#slide=id.g1b521cf3073_0_29), [2022](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14rTR4qWd6y8gMnn0nleH6L-fnGeS9KPQY9sxIW45CBU/edit#slide=id.g1b521cf3073_0_36), [2019](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1thtQmnf_pA7hToum0ojJoOJzsr8ERLchn9zungjoHRo/edit#slide=id.g4a173231e5_0_105), [2018](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1L_mH5FCnddw6U_cspLyWjoYyjbkUlQW46bwJgHJBAxI/edit)) with the chords and lyrics to the songs we've done at the past few events, but they have some issues:

*   They were intended only for my use, so they're a bit hard to make sense of.
    
*   The text is too small for phones.
    
*   They horizontally oriented, when for a phone you want something vertical.
    
*   There's no index.
    
*   Google docs is slow on phones.
    

Another option is Daniel Speyer's [list](https://secularsolstice.github.io/lists/gen/All_Songs.html) from his secular solstice resources, but this includes a lot of songs we've never done in Boston and doesn't have the chords easily accessible.

Instead I put together a web page: [jefftk.com/solsong](https://www.jefftk.com/solsong/). It's intentionally one long page, trying to mimic the experience of a paper songbook where you can flip through looking for interesting things. \[1\] I went through the sides copying lyrics over, and then added a few other songs I like from earlier years.

I've planned a singing party for Saturday 2024-02-17, 7pm at our house ([fb](https://www.facebook.com/events/1088537959237336/)). Let me know if you'd like to come!

  
\[1\] At a technical level the page is just HTML, as is my [authoring preference](https://www.jefftk.com/p/i-want-xmp-but-i-know-why-i-cant-have-it). Since line breaks aren't significant in HTML but are in lyrics, I used a little command line trick in copying them over:

pbpaste | sed 's/$/<br>/' | pbcopy

I would copy the lyrics, run that command to transform my clipboard, and then paste into the editor.

EDIT: on Daniel's suggestion I've switched to `white-space: pre-line;`, which means I don't need this. It's a little fussy needing to think about my line breaks in what looks like plain html, but not too bad.

To include an index without needing to duplicate titles I have a little progressive-enhancement JS:

<ul id=toc></ul>
...
<script>
for (const h2 of document.getElementsByTagName("h2")) {
  const li = document.createElement("li");
  const a = document.createElement("a");
  a.innerText = h2.innerText;
  a.href = "#";
  a.onclick = function() {
    h2.scrollIntoView(/\*alignToTop=\*/true);
    return false;
  };
  li.appendChild(a);
  toc.appendChild(li);
}
</script>

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