michael’s thoughts

collected

Trying out MarsEdit

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Last week I wrote that I was trying out MacJournal as an authoring tool.  While I liked MacJournal for offline private journaling, it didn’t really work for updating this site.  I’ve downloaded MarsEdit version 3.0.3 to see if it fits my needs better.  So far it does.

The MarsEdit screen is automatically divided into a top and bottom section to compose items before and after the “cut”.  It reminds me of years ago when I used the Clarify CRM software which had a top/bottom split window for public and internal case comments.  It’s a good design.

I haven’t figured out a way to embed YouTube videos using the rich text editor but I can switch to the HTML edit view to post an embed tag.  I’d like a little more native support for such a popular video sharing support, but I can live with it.

MarsEdit does have good support for posting draft versions, categories, and tags.  I think it will work well for me as an offline composer.

Tags: , , ,
Categories: life | Comments

Trying MacJournal

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

The Internet at the local Starbucks has been unavailable for a few weeks which has motivated me to find uses for my computer when I’m offline. It’s amazing how much of the utility of my laptop is dependent upon having access to an Internet connection.

In the spirit of making my computer useful when disconnected from the network, I’ve downloaded MacJournal to test out offline blogging. I haven’t used an offline blog composer in years so I’m curious to see if they’ve gotten better. Too soon to tell.

Tags: ,
Categories: tech | Comments

Excluding Categories from The Loop with WordPress Template Tags

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

When I redesigned this site’s WordPress theme, I decided I wanted to show the most two recent posts at the top followed by the next 8 posts with just the title and a link to the post, so that the front page does not scroll forever.  That’s simple enough to do with the template tag query_posts(), but I ran into an unexpected problem with my initial approach and the Twitter Tools plugin.

(more…)

Tags: , , ,
Categories: tech, tutorial and how to | Comments

WordPress iPhone App Truncates Post

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

I wrote the last entry on my iPhone using the WordPress app.  Everything went fine until I inserted the WordPress post break to cause only the introduction to appear on the site index.  After I saved that change, it looked on the iPhone app as though the post were truncated to that point and the rest of my edits were lost.

I had saved it as a draft on the server, so I logged into the panel and checked and in fact everything was there, including the post break code.  I’m glad I didn’t lose any data, but it’s frustrating that the iPhone WordPress app doesn’t support breaking the page that way.  And it’s not a very reassuring way for it to fail when it shows the post as truncated.

I wasn’t too worried as I had saved it to the server and presumably could restore from a revision, but I don’t know what would have happened if it had been only a Local Draft.  Hopefully this will be addressed in the upcoming new release of the app.

Tags: , , ,
Categories: iPhone | Comments

Fix for wp-amazon in WordPress 2.3.1

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

I use the excellent wp-amazon WordPress plugin to insert Amazon associate links into this site. Unfortunately the version from the web site hasn’t been updated in a long time and it doesn’t work in the newer releases of WordPress. In looking at the support form I found a link to this patch.

I followed these instructions and lo and behold it worked. Posted as a public service to other WordPress users.

Tags: ,
Categories: tech, tutorial and how to | Comments

Upgraded Wordpress

Monday, October 8th, 2007

This site is now running Wordpress 2.3 which came out a couple weeks ago. I’m excited about the built in tags support. Not sure exactly how that works but since I have been tagging things by hand for ages I’m hoping this will automate that for me (yes, I am aware that tagging plugins have been available for years; I just never used them).

EDIT: If you look at the top of this post you will see that it is indeed tagged and that the feature does work.  The theme I use for this site is a modified version of Ocadia which apparently doesn’t support tagging out of the box.  I had to update it to put in the the_tags template tag code, but other than that the tagging works out of the box.

One change is that now instead of the tags linking to technorati’s tag search engine they link to this site’s tagging system.  That’s different behavior than I’m used to, but I think it may actually be better so I’m going to leave that alone for now.

Tags: ,
Categories: tech | Comments

michael’s thoughts is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).