Tag: blogging

Bootstrapping a Jekyll Blog using Gitlab

This is one of those odd posts that came about because I starting playing with one idea and something else came about all-together. It started with me considering blogging options besides WordPress. There’s lots of platforms out there, and some of them are quite good. I’m also looking for something that I can run for free. Right now my WordPress.com premium account is paid for until almost the end of the year.

Blog-a-day Summary, May 2016

feature-img This was my own little experiment on how posting every (week)day for the month of May would go. I didn’t say anything about it before starting because I honestly didn’t know if I could keep up the pace. If you look back over May’s post, you might notice they’re all either technical with screenshots or photo-themed with multiple images, and all had featured images attached. Putting in the time to prepare each post took a significant chunk out of each day.

Site Refresh

I’ve been mulling over making a few changes to the blog since Christmas. In the last few days I’ve got around to it. The biggest and most visible change is the new theme. I previewed the Twenty Sixteen theme a few times but didn’t install it. After digging into some of the customizations, I finally clicked apply. Overall, it’s a clean theme and I like how the sidebar looks. The mobile responsive view is espectially nice.

Category feature for Ulysses-Post-to-WP

After a recent feature request I decided to look into adding category support for my Ulysses-Post-to-WP script. In the end it was actually easy. It involved changing one variable from post-tag to category. The hard part was finding out that was the needed change. The documentation isn’t very clear, and I had to pull a post out via XML-RPC to see the format. The testing and writing up the changes took more time than the actual change.

Posting Vacation

This has been one of those periods where I haven’t been focusing on the blog. I’ve set a goal for myself to have my Ruby book out by June 1st. Along the way, I’ve managed to start adapting a short story into a comic and also started the preliminary work on a novel. So I’ve been neglecting posting regularly. But even with the other projects, there’s still some gaps in my schedule.

Word Count — Week 12

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. This week started out strong, but I was hit with intense shoulder pain that sidelined me for the weekend.

The Apple Spring Forward Event

I watched the Apple event this morning so you wounldn’t have to. Tim Cook covered a lot ground in the 90 minuite event. The last half-hour was devoted the Apple Watch. Apple TV HBO GO coming to Apple on April 12th, for $14.99/mo. Apple TV price cut to $69. Miscellanious Apple Pay coming to Coke vending machines. CarPlay has every major car maker committed to using it. 40 new car models with CarPlay coming in 2015/2016.

Word Count — Week 10

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. I was shooting for more, but a bug in the Pogo software left me spending my time troubleshooting instead of writing.

The Scalzi Generator

In an wonderful post, the author John Scalzi produced twelve standard responses to online stupidity. The list seems complete and covers most cases. The list: I don’t care what you think. I didn’t ask you. No doubt you thought that was terribly clever. You’ve attempted logic. Not all attempts succeed. One should not have that many errors in that few characters. Either your educators have failed you, or you have failed them.

Word Count — Week 8

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. I spent the first part of the week learning about how to make eBooks.