Are you on top of things?
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. ” —Donald Knuth, Computer Science Professor Emeritus at Stanford University
I didn’t think so!
HTML Basics
What is the easiest way to teach someone some basic HTML?
An increasing number of people are becoming interested in activities that requires some basic knowledge of HTML, like blogging, forum posting and email writing. If someone comes to you asking for help learning HTML, you can suggest the following steps:
- Download and Install an HTML editor (like HTML-kit, Nvu, Bluefish)
- Create a blank HTML document
- Try stuff. Press buttons.
- Insert the folowing examples into the body of the document (that is directly after you see the following tag:
<body>
Sample code
Link to Google<a href="http://www.google.com">Google.com</a>
Let people Email you
<a href="mailto:jowensbysandifer@gmail.com">Email me</a>
Insert an Image
<img src="location/of/file.bmp" alt="description of photo" width="200" style="border: none;"/>
New Line Break
<br />
Horizontal Line Break Like this:
<hr />
Bold Type
<b>Bold Type</b>
Italics
<i>Italics</i>
<h1>Heading1</h1>
<h2>Heading2</h2>
A New Paragraph
<p style="font: 12px; text-align: center">A New Paragraph</p>
- Item 1
- Item 2
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ul>
<div style="float:left;">
Text you want to style or place in a particular part of the page
</div>
Change the background color of the page
<Body Bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
Mephisto
I was looking for the instructions to upgrade to Typo 4.0 (for my other blog). And my search for “upgrade typo” resulted in a link to Mephisto, which I have been wanting to try. So, I installed Mephisto on my local machine. Here are my first impressions:
- I liked that when you log out of Mephisto you are sent straight to your blog instead of some weird “Where would you like to go?” page. I am guessing that you could change this in Typo fairly easily.
- I didn’t like that tags have to be separated with commas
- I was left wondering, “What was so wrong about Typo that would make you write something like Mephisto? I mean from a UI design perspective Mephisto isn’t that much better than Typo 4.0.”
- But I am sure the Mephisto people are working on new features as I type this. So, I am considering upgrading my other blog to Mephisto and keeping this one on Typo. But which one should I try to write plugins/additions for?
- Theme uploading and editing
- You can subscribe to your own Overview feed, which includes upcoming as well as already published posts
- Mephisto has sections rather than categories, which I think will help users think of ways of using Mephisto to manage sites that aren’t blogs
- A Save As Draft Option
- A Bucket to use as a temporary place to toss some assets while browsing in the asset manager
If you know of any cool Mephisto features that I haven’t listed here, please post them.
Variations on a Typo Theme
Simple, simple, simple. I really can’t say how much I enjoy simple design. Maybe too simple sometimes.
The mycology theme is a very simple variation of Scribbish for typo. It is available here.
Google Sets + Sed = Quick Keywords for Meta Tags
I know there is alot of talk about search engine optimization. Additionally, I have no idea whether or not keywords in the meta tag do anything to help people find your site. With that said, I want to share how to quickly generate and format keywords for the meta tag.
To generate keywords for a website, go to Google Sets. Enter some small group of keywords that describes your site. For example, if I were maintaining a site on machine learning, I might enter the following terms: machine learning & artificial intelligence. This search returns 40 to 50 keywords related to machine learning.
Copy these keywords into a text file and delete any that aren’t relevant or that are misleading.
Now, if you were to simply cut and paste this list of keywords into your HTML document, your document would be UGLY (eew!) and difficult to read. Who wants to read a file with that many carriage returns?
The solution is to replace all end of line characters with commas (except the last EOL), so that things look relatively nice and neat in an html or rhtml or whatnot file.
To replace the end of line characters with commas, use the following two linux commands:
- sed ’/$/,/’ file1 > file2
- paste -sd ’\0’ – file2 > file3
You don’t have to create two extra files, but I do because often I have compiled keywords from several searches and wouldn’t want to repeat the process if I messed up the sed and paste commands. Besides after I have inserted the keywords into my html, I simply delete the files.
After getting all of the keywords on one line, paste them into the ”<META name=”keyword” content=””> statement.
UPDATE
For Windows users, there are two things I can recommend you do if you would like to use these commands.
-
First, if you are running a website that is on a server running linux, you can ssh into the server, upload the text file you would like to convert (file1 in my example), and then run sed and paste on that text file.
Second, you can try to run GNU Bash shell on Windows or install Cygwin. I haven’t tried either of these options because both my Windows laptop and desktop died (RIP my sweet babies) a few months ago.
Simple, but Useful Things to do with Del.icio.us
My favorite thing about del.icio.us is that there are lots of things to do with the app without downloading an extension or spending an hour or hundred ;-) with the API writing code. These are my list of very simple things you can do with del.icio.us without needing extra del.icio.us tools.
- Add del.icio.us to your rss feed. If you have a site or blog on a particular topic, a great way to find ideas for new articles or posts is to go through all of the posts tagged as your topic everyday. Do it quickly, though. Depending on the keyword(s), there may be too many sites to go through easily.
- Create a Fashion LookBook, like this one by tagging flickr photos as “lookbook” or “to_try”.
- If you keep up with you favorite bands using del.icio.us, you are going to be suprised at the music you discover by voyering someone else’s music. Use the FtF rule (ahem, the find the first rule). Come on, you know you do it! Find the First del.icio.us user to tag a site/band/artist you like and see what kind of crazy music links they are savin’!
- Take some time to actually go back through and review all of your del.icio.us bookmarks. Which bookmarks have been the most useful to you? Are they particular articles or posts or links to home pages or large site?
- Share links with study buddies, students, coworkers, family… you know, like people you know in real life. For example, here are my math links. If I were in a math class right now, I might share this page with group project members or someone I was tutoring.
- Tag sites that you use in creating a presentation with a single tag (e.g. “some_presentation”). With that tag, you now have an instant resource for remembering how you pulled the presenation together and a bibliography.
- Make your own del.icio.us vocabulary. Don’t want the world to know you think some site totally sucks? Mark it as “~g” or whatever. Pick some characters and make them mean something.
- Find things quickly away from home. Need your favorite pumpkin pie recipe when baking at your mother’s house? If you have bookmarked on del.icio.us, you don’t have to google pumpkin pie and then search through all of the recipes to find the one that uses brown sugar. And no, this particular recipe does not show up on the first page when you google pumpkin pie brown sugar.
- Did you leave your ipod at home? Look for music that has been bookmarked.
- Tag Liberally… it feels good. As you might have guessed, I tag liberally (as in at least 5 tags per post) because you never know what weird kinds of things you are going to be looking for in the future. For me, as well, it is a way of being more articulate about the reasons I am marking the site.
- Bring you obsessions into your consciousness. What tags are you using the most? Are you surpised? You can find out which tags you are using the most by selecting sort by freq. in the tag options on your main del.cio.us account page. Ok, so what you bookmark doesn’t capture what you put your time into, but they do give you a general idea of the sites you think you will need in the future.
Sample lists, comments and tasks on del.icio.us
Keep a variety of Lists:- Tag sites you are using in your business plan as “business_plan”
- name_of_your_project
- good_writing
- funny
- weird
- gross
- f’‘ed_up
- competition
- to_do
- to_read
- to_blog
- to_research
- put_on_adgenda
- email_to_phil (because he is so uncool and doesn’t have a del.icio.us account—I do not want to imply that people who do not have del.icio.us accounts are uncool, rather I am just trying to get Phil to get an account!)
- don’t_forget
10 Things I wish someone would have told me before I started using GIMP 2
In this interview, Steve Yegge said that,
“I find the GIMP invaluable, and also maddeningly unintuitive. I’ve been using it for years and can still barely do anything with it. But I couldn’t live without it, ironically enough.”
GIMP isn’t very intuitive; I think that this is partly because there are three different windows that pop up when you first open a document up. Aaaah! Three windows! What the hell am I supposed to do?
Breathe in, Breathe out… The Windows will not hurt you. I am not going to explain the features of every window—that is where I as a newbie got lost.
The Layers Window
(aka the window that you, as a newbie to GIMP, won’t use alot. Skip this window for now, and invest your time getting the basic functions down.)
The Image Window
(aka the window with the most kinship to every other graphics program you’ve used previously, like ms paint and iPhoto. So, no sweat you probably already know this part.)
The Main Window
(aka the window that you should be using without making visible: oooooh, what does that mean?! See 10 things below.)
The 10 things...
- Make sure the image window that you want to work in is selected. Since there are three windows, we aware that if some command isn’t working and you think it should, you might not have the correct window selected.
- 1: Press 1 when the image window is selected to view the opened photo at 100% zoom.
- r: Press r to start selecting a Rectangular region.
- shift + o: Press shift + o to start selecting a region by color.
- T: Press T to insert text.
- shift + e: ...to get the eraser.
- Image/Scale Image: Select “Scale Image” from the Image menu to resize the entire image.
- Image/Crop Image: Select the region you want to crop. Right click. Select the Image menu. Click Crop Image.
- Image/Mode/Gray Scale: Select the Image menu & then ‘Mode’. Click Gray Scale.
- Try shit. Use Control + Z alot. See what you can do.
Maybe I will be able to do something with GIMP one day! I have to wonder if the counterintuitiveness of GIMP is due more to my complete lack of graphics concepts and techniques. Any thoughts, oh ye knowledgeable GIMP users?
Blanche
I made the dress Blanche is wearing in this picture. My favorite thing about this pic, though, are her multi-colored pupils.
My Favorite Ubuntu 'Features'
Ok, so not all of these so-called features are particular to Ubuntu (most are Gnome features), but having switched from XP, these are the little things that I am enjoying about running Ubuntu on my machine:
Rollover Music: Place mouse over mp3 file icon and the file begins to play… magically!
All of the Programs that are easy to install & free:
Synaptic Package Manager or sudo apt-get are simple and straight forward. Installing new software doesn’t mean a two day detour for a newbie like myself, as it might with another linux distribution. My favorites are Gimp (which runs better on linux than XP), Vi, OpenOffice Math and Text Editor (with tabbed browsing). And there are more out there to try!
File Preview:
Previewing files in Ubuntu is much easier than in XP. Text, PowerPoint and pdf file icons show you what the first couple of lines or first slide or first page.
Yep that’s it.
Anyone have any other cool Ubuntu-isms?
UPDATED: Oh, yeah I forgot because it is so intuitive… breadcrumb file navigation. In the file explorer, your location is listed and each folder name in the list is a link to that folder. Very nice.
How to Post to Two Separate Del.icio.us Accounts Easily 12
If you maintain two separate del.icio.us accounts (one personal account and one for a business or web site), you know how difficult del.icio.us can be to use if you are having to switch usernames all of the time. Essentially, everytime you want to post a site to the other del.icio.us account you have to logoff, and enter your other username and password.
I know what you are thinking:But you aren’t supposed to use del.icio.us like that. Just create one account and tag personal stuff as personal and business/site stuff as business.
I think there are some good reasons for having separate del.icio.us accounts. For example, if your del.icio.us links are recommendations to your users/readers, you might not want them to think you are endorsing all of the crazy sites you post to your personal account. No matter whether or not your reasons for having two del.icio.us accounts are ‘good’ reasons, maintaining two accounts is cumbersome if you don’t have some good tools. To overcome the nuisance of re-logging into del.icio.us all of the time, I have devised this simple “hack” (if you will). Ok, so it’s not really a hack, but let’s just pretend.
There are multiple firefox extensions for del.icio.us, and if you have two del.icio.us extensions installed you can set them to post to different accounts. So, simply install:- del.icio.us buttons provided by del.icio.us
- del.icio.us complete extension from the Firefox Addons page
The idea is that you will remain logged in under one user, so that you can post to that account with the browser buttons provided by del.icio.us. The browser buttons provided by del.icio.us will always post to the account you are currently logged in under. So, if you log out of the del.icio.us account that you have set up with the del.icio.us browser buttons provided by del.icio.us, you need to log back in in order to post sites to that account.
Using the Options…/ Accounts tab in del.icio.us complete, set the second button to post to your other account. Voila!
Del.icio.us complete does allow users to select which account they post a link to. I’ve stuck with the two separate browser buttons because I don’t have to select which account to post to; I just click the right del.icio.us brower button. Works for me.