Tools

There are 22 posts filed in Tools (this is page 2 of 3).

The urge to fiddle around

Every so often (well, at least once a week….), I read about different blogging tools and think “I would like to try that out…”. Then, I remember this picture, and think “My WordPress setup is just fine, I don’t need to look at other blogging tools” (he says as he types this post in Drummer to publish with Old School). But…I had some time this weekend (Memorial Day holiday), so I spent some time looking at two tools related to Drummer.

The first tool was drummerCMS (a shell for the Old School blogging tool to connect with Drummer). Some time ago, I saw that Scott Hansen wrote a post about running drummerCMS locally, and that it could generate a set of files from the OPML blog file. I set it up per his post a few weeks ago, but had a problem, and set it aside. This weekend, I reached out to Scott Hansen, and he said that his original post had an error in the build URL, and he had updated the post. I tried it again, and it did create a set of files, but not the finished product I was hoping for (a set of HTML files that I could upload to a hosting site). I did a little looking through Old School, and saw that the tool is tied into uploading to Amazon S3, and although parameters related to that could be changed, the tool seemed to do the final render as part of the S3 upload. Sigh…setting it aside again… 

The second tool was written by Antranig Vartanian, and was using an XSLT style sheet to style an OPML file from Drummer as a blog. I took a slightly out-of-date copy of my blog.opml from Drummer, copied it to a folder on my web hosting service, copied the XSLT style sheet, added a link to the style sheet within the OPML file, and was able to create this rendering of my Drummer posts. Fun!

I guess a batting average of 1 out of 2 is not too bad…must…stop…fiddling….

I am taking a Udemy training course on Node.js development, and trying out Visual Studio Code because the instructor uses it in the course. Today, I wanted to print something, and found to my dismay that there was no native print function, just like Sublime Text. Why did these people think that users didn’t need to print some text file? Why? I am definitely keeping a copy of Notepad++ around – they know how to print!

A first look at Bookdown for book publishing

I recently completed the first draft of a book using Google Docs (subject is how to create a social media presence through your own web site and newsletter), but when I saved a copy as a PDF, it did not look as good as I would like. I had been considering trying out Scribus (an open source desktop publishing tool), but had read about the Bookdown toolset when I was looking at some resources on the R programming language. This weekend, I decided to install the toolset and see how much effort that took and what the results looked like.

The creator of Bookdown has written a book on how to create books with Bookdown, so I thought I would start there with the Get Started page/section. I downloaded a repo from Github containing a demo book. Next, I downloaded and installed RStudio, which is supposed to be used to create the book. In the process of installation and startup, I found out that I needed to download and install R as well – ooops! Funny how this was not mentioned in the Get Started page….

The next step was to install the bookdown package using the R IDE. However, there was a popup asking if I wanted to set up a separate library. I clicked “No” and tried to install, but got the error message that the R library was not writable. After some searching, I found this Stack Exchange post that addressed this problem…again, interesting that this was not in the book.

Finally, I got the bookdown package installed, opened the demo book, and was able to build the book in HTML form. The console displaying info on the build process showed some errors in generating ePub and PDF versions of the book. The Get Started page indicated that another toolset (TinyTek) was needed for the PDF output. I used the Windows batch file to install Tiny Tek, and went ahead and restarted all the apps (R, RStudio). I then rebuilt the book, it took 1-2 minutes to generate the demo book in PDF form. It had a few pagination problems, but looked ok. Overall, I spent about an hour working through these steps. I will explore it some more, but will also check out Scribus as well. To me, I would have to go through some effort to convert my book draft to R Markdown. If Scribus could create a book with less work, I might head in that direction.

 

 

Talking about power tools of the culture

I follow the Twitter writings of Ken Smith, an English professor at Indiana University-South Bend. In early July, he had a thought about “power tools of the culture”:

School shouldn’t be so alienating. Young people are entitled to the power tools of the culture.

They like to hear a faculty member say that aloud in class. They like talking about what it entails.

Education:

1) Shouldn’t be so alienating.

2) Power tools of the culture.

Dave Winer referenced this in a podcast that day. I had some thoughts on this as well, so I have created a wiki page collecting items from Ken’s posting over the past month on this topic, as well as my ideas. If anyone has anything to contribute, respond in the comments!

Bookmarked Zoomit – Zooming tool for Windows (docs.microsoft.com)
ZoomIt is a screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs.

Bookmarked Open Source Tools From the Warren for President Tech Team (medium.com)

We are so grateful for the hundreds of thousands of Warren supporters who used our tools to help our grassroots movement: Thank you.

In our work, we leaned heavily on open source technology — and want to contribute back to that community. So today we’re taking the important step of open-sourcing some of the most important projects of the Elizabeth Warren campaign for anyone to use.

Our hope is that other Democratic candidates and progressive causes will use the ideas and code we developed to run stronger campaigns and help Democrats win.

Filezilla and Putty migration tips for Windows 10

I am in the process of migrating from a 10 year old Windows 7 laptop to a newer Windows 10 laptop. As part of that effort, I wanted to migrate my setup for the Filezilla FTP program and the Putty SSH/telnet client. I used the instructions from these two pages to migrate the setup.

The one additional thing I had to do was to copy the Keys folder from the Windows 7 laptop to the Windows 10 laptop, as some of the servers used a Putty PPK file. After I did that, everything worked great!

 

Owning your tools

In the engineering world, the phrase “make or buy” or “build or buy” is common. It represents a design choice/decision to purchase components/equipment/software for a project (buy) or create it yourself (make/build). Things that are considered include cost, ease of inclusion in the design, flexibility, and other attributes. For software users, a similar choice exists, which could be called “set up your own tools, or use services provided by others”. Things to consider are cost, ease of use, features, and portability and ownership of data, among other things.

I use River5 as a feed aggregator, and create single page apps to display combined feeds (Andy Sylvester’s Reading List). There is some friction to start (get a server if you don’t have one, install software, set up single page apps) and some friction for updates (have to FTP subscription list updates), but after the setup is complete, I have had almost no problems. I could have used some online service (Feedly, Flipboard, many others), but then I would be dependent on those services (could have outages, terms and conditions might change, other restrictions on the service might occur, the service could go out of business). Similarly, I use my own install of WordPress on the Bluehost hosting service. I control it, I decide when it gets upgrades, and I can keep backups and move it to another service if I want.

To me, the cost/inconvenience is worth it to own/control the tools I am using. Whatever you do, be mindful of the choices you make….