Tag: howto

Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books. First Edition cover, 1991. The very nature of this book—20 essays about writing by the best SFF authors—makes it hard to review as a whole. I think a better strategy is to look at each chapter in detail. See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.

Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books. First Edition cover, 1991. The very nature of this book—20 essays about writing by the best SFF authors—makes it hard to review as a whole. I think a better strategy is to look at each chapter in detail. See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.

Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books.1 First Edition cover, 1991. The very nature of this book—20 essays about writing by the best SFF authors—makes it hard to review as a whole. I think a better strategy is to look at each chapter in detail. See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.

Managing receipts is a necessary evil for anyone that needs to track tax deductions. I wanted a way to keep my receipts in one place on my computer, and have an easy way to mark the ones that are deductible. Keeping track of emailed and downloaded receipts is usually much easier than having to file paper copies. Usually. The one advantage of paper is that it can be glanced at. A folder full of PDFs isn’t something that be looked through with a quick riffle of the thumb.

sed is a useful command-line program with a horrible syntax. It is a stream editor. This means it operates on text flowing through it. Words are poured into one end, sed does its thing and the edited text spills out the other. It’s most useful inside shell scripts when text needs to be changed, but there’s no file to open. The stream of text can be from the output of other programs.

One nice feature to have in a blog is post-by-email. It’s mostly overlooked, and even not activated by default. What I like most is that I can write in my usual app, then use email to ship it off. There are several dedicated blog postings apps available. Desk.pm and MarsEdit are the first that come to mind. I’ve not tried either, and that might change in the future. For now, I’m writing everything in Ulysses and it’s easier to keep it all together in one place.

Every blogging platform has “sharp corners.” The little edges that stick out and poke you every now and then. Sometimes the little things are the ones that catch you the most. Bump into the same sharp corner enough times, and it feels like it’s going to draw blood. Yesterday I wrote a post about how to use WordPress shortcodes. The writing part was easy enough. I documented how I built my review index page.

WordPress has a lot of “hidden gem” features. Shortcodes are one of them. Simply put, shortcodes are little snippets of text that the WordPress engine uses as instructions for embedding content. There are shortcodes to insert anything from Spotify playlists to YouTube videos. Shortcodes can also make indexing your WordPress blog easier. One feature I wanted was an index page for reviews I’ve written or will write. I started out by creating a new page, and deciding on which headings to use.