An excellent summary of how to run a meeting (see also Greg Wilson talk at CarpentryCon2020)
September 2020
Don’t dismiss the spreadsheet. It not only brought programming to the masses, but was an early entry into rapid application development, functional programming and an easy and natural approach to parallel programming, reactive programming and cellular automata.
Written by Michael Metcalf, John Reid and Malcolm Cohen, all leading experts in the field, two of whom have actively contributed to Fortran 2018, this is a complete and authoritative description of Fortran in its latest form.
Some things just keep on movin’….
Welcome…to the wonderful world of letterpress printing! To start you on your way in this exciting, challenging, rewarding and anachronistic avocation, what follows is an introduction, freshly prepared for the start of the new millennium and updated to 2005, to the people, places, and online resources that will save you a great deal of time as you embark upon your letterpress activities. At the end of the document are links to dozens of other sites, many of which themselves contain links to hundreds of additional sites related to letterpress printing.
A terrific example of a resource page packed with links and information!
These 16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence. The Sound Effects are BBC copyright, but they may be used for personal, educational or research purposes, as detailed in the license.
Might want to use this someday….
What, again? Yes, again. Today I’m working on creating and saving a reusable Docker image of gRSShopper. I have the benefit of some previous work on this set-up, and so it might work today, so I’m documenting my process.
I am planning to install this sometime….
This is a story of how I started a podcast, in 3 hours (apart from waiting for iTunes verification), with a total cost of $5/month. And that included my own domain name! I share detailed instructions on launching a brand new podcast on WordPress, and later promoting it on iTunes and Spotify (longer version of previous post)
It took three hours, with a total cost of $5/month, including our own domain name. In this post, I’ll share my journey of launching a brand-new podcast on WordPress.com, and later promoting it on iTunes and Spotify.
As the world continues to work from home, podcasts are serving as a helpful diversion to listen to when we’re washing dishes or walking the dog.
They’re fairly easy to produce from home, too.
Many of the conversations we’ve featured on the Distributed podcast have taken place over Zoom, wi…
Choosing a mailing list tool for WordPress besides MailChimp
I started a news site for covering the protests in Portland (https://portlandprotestnews.com/), and I wanted to offer a way for people to subscribe to an email newsletter containing the daily posts. My first thought was to set up a MailChimp newsletter, since I already had one set up for another site (https://OrgModeForBeginners.com). However, I quickly realized the first limitation of a free account on MailChimp – only one mailing list allowed – darn! I was not interested in starting to pay $10/month to MailChimp, and it would only bump up to 3 mailing lists. So, I started looking for other free alternatives.
My first step was to find another service like MailChimp. After a little searching, I decided to try out Sendinblue (https://www.sendinblue.com/). However, the email it sent out was not impressive (I selected a RSS publish, and it did not show any links except to the main posts), and the subscription form had some problems in sizing, so I resumed my search.
My next experiment was to look at the mailing list feature provided by my web hosting service (based on GNU Mailman (https://list.org/)). I spent about 4 hours over 2 days poring through setup instructions and managed to get a mailing list set up that seemed to work the way I wanted. I then needed to create a signup form, and tried using WPForms (https://wpforms.com/), which was available as a free plugin within my WordPress install. I got a form set up, but then had problems getting the form to send an email to the email address for the mailing list to add a new subscriber. At that point, I decided to try another tack – looking for a WordPress plugin that could handle everything.
The first plugin I tried was WP-Subscribe (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-subscribe/), but it only worked with MailChimp, Aweber, and Feedburner (could not use any other email delivery provider, I was thinking I could reuse the Mailman list I set up, but no go). The grand prize winner was The Newsletter Plugin (https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/), which had a free version that supported signing up subscribers, creating a newsletter, and sending it out to the list. After about an hour of testing, I sent out my first newsletter, and it looked good! I ended up deciding to copy the text from the daily weblog post to the HTML email newsletter form, and adding custom embed code for Twitter posts.
Overall, I learned a lot about setting up mailing lists and figuring out what I wanted from a mailing list tool. My top features were price and ease of use. If I could have created another MailChimp list, I would have done it in a second (since I had an account). Since I did not want to spend anything just yet on a new mailing list provider, ease of use was the next criteria. It was a shame that it took the better part of two days to weed through the contenders, but I think I found a solution that will at least get me started.