I’ve been flirting with a plain-text to-do system again. The biggest problem for me is that a plain text system opens up so many possibilities for fiddling and scripting. I always end up fiddling more than working when I try it. I don’t see any reason this time would be different, but it’s Sunday and I have some extra time on my hands after being snowed in today. So I’m fiddling.
experiments, naturallanguage, ruby, textmate
This is a quick tip for anyone who may be searching for an answer to the question: “Is there any way to use XMLRPC to send custom post types to WordPress and attach custom taxonomy terms to them?” Yes, there is. It took me longer than it should have to find it, but I’ve successfully uploaded images, and attached them to a “howtos” post type with “level” and “topic” set under its custom taxonomies.
Wordpress, blogging, xmlrpc
nakajima/slidedown - GitHub Generate HTML slides with Markdown. I’ve been playing with this, surprised to note I haven’t bookmarked it before. It’s not S5, but it’s neat. atiw003/html5-slides-markdown - GitHub Another nice Markdown generator for deck-based presentations, this one in Python. I’m still trying to find the real Keynote Killer. Nothing against Keynote, but if I can Keynote in Markdown… adamzap/landslide - GitHub This is getting closer…
bookmarks
I love ScreenSteps, the app from Blue Mango which makes creating documentation for screen-based applications as fast and easy as making documentation can possibly be. It’s a little clunky sometimes, but the features outweigh the cons by far, at least for me.
macos, markdown, screensteps
It may come as a surprise to some (many), but I’ve never really made effective use of TextExpander on my iPad or iPhone (TextExpander touch). I don’t do a lot of the things on my iPad which I do on my desktop, and the things that are similar often don’t support TE. When I want to write some Markdown quickly, I use Nebulous Notes with my custom macros. Lastly, my shell scripts don’t work on iOS, and most of my favorite snippets are, as you’ve seen, shell scripts.
ios, markdown, snippet, textexpander
I was featured on MacSparky.com today. Well, the home screen of my iPhone was, anyway. He mentioned a project of mine that I haven’t actually had time to blog about yet, so here’s a quick introduction. It’s called MarkdownRules, and comes in two flavors: mild-mannered and salty. You can choose which you get from the main menu page at http://markdownrules.com.
markdown, markdownifier, marky
Reed-Kellogg Diagrammer It’s SilverLight, and it’s butt ugly, but it’s so awesome. It automatically diagrams any sentence you give it, it with rollovers to tell you what each branch is. I’m having way more fun with it than I did when I was in grade school. Plus, my lexicon of dirty words is bigger, so the sentences are far more interesting. readown - Project Hosting on Google Code Just stumbled on this. It shows a preview of your Markdown file, and watches the…
bookmarks
I know, I said I was done with the Lorem Ipsum generators. Then Dr. Drang responded with a brilliant solution which doesn’t require Internet access to generate some beautiful dummy text. I set it up and ran it myself, and loved the results. Then I found myself wanting to expand it to do more, such as multiple paragraphs, list items and other things I use regularly when making dummy layouts. The problem is that I’m only good for one-liners in Perl, and didn’t want to take take…
experiments, lipsum, ruby, textexpander
Ok, this is the last TextExpander Lipsum post, I promise (with my fingers crossed). I’m posting a full TextExpander group with all of the TextExpander random Lorem Ipsum generators I’ve posted so far (LoremIpsum.com, LoremIpscream), plus some new ones based on the Kwisatz Haderach1 generator. That one seemed to make a few people pretty happy (looking at MacSparky). It combines word lists from various “universes,” including Dune, Foundation, Ringworld, Harry Potter and Doctor Who (…
experiments, html, lipsum, snippet, textexpander
I put up a dummy replacement for the Winona Chiropractic site yesterday. I didn’t expect many people to see it, except hopefully the client. It’s gone viral on Twitter in the meantime, and I just wanted to verify that yes, it was real.
freelancing, personal, webdesign
I usually get up an hour or two before I start my work day and “play.” Playtime usually results in half-finished scripts and deleted git branches, but sometimes I do something simple and useful (to me). Wednesday was Bash fun, and here’s this morning’s project: LaunchBar actions to url encode and decode strings1. If you run them outside of LaunchBar, they’ll encode/decode your clipboard, replacing what’s in your clipboard with the result, so they have multiple…
applescript, experiments, launchbar
This is probably going to seem stupid, but every time I decide to do something in Bash that should only take me a minute, I end up losing an hour. I obsess over “better” ways to do everything. Not surprisingly, my motivation often wanes before I actually find the better, more elegant way, so these little projects end up lackluster. Fortunately, I end up learning all kinds of new, mostly unrelated things in the process, which is what happened this evening. It’s amazing to me that I use…
experiments, scripting, terminal
Backbone.js What’s not to love about key-value models, custom events, collections and enumeration, views with declarative event handling, and a RESTful JSON interface? … My doctor says I have an MVC deficiency, anyway. Duck Duck Go Zero-click Info API Duck Duck Go is my new default search engine. I love it to death. The API for topic summaries and categories is pretty cool, too. Also see the Zero Click jQuery plugin for example usage. Eight Ways to Combine Typefaces &…
bookmarks
It turns out it was me that was broken, not the Loremipscream API. That API can return just plain text, so the shell scripts are much more readable than trying to hack apart XML in Bash. You can get a list of “flavors” from the website, or just from the command line. That will also give you the slugs you need to use when calling them.
api, experiments, lipsum, scripting, snippet, textexpander
