... of making things easier on Qumana was to make things harder on Blogger.  Apparently the setting I turned off on Blogger to prevent the extra carriage returns in Qumana means that Blogger posts will come out all mooshed together.  Sigh.

Labels: Development, Webworks

So after my essay on intellect and will, Jim posted an interesting comment, to which I replied ... a long-ranging reply which could have been a blog post in its own right. SO I finished the reply, hit preview to check it out, and then hit view blog. Note that none of those steps involved "publish" ... so the whole essay disappeared.

AAARGH!

These browser based apps still leave something to be desired. Anyway, it was really witty and acknowledged all of Jim's good points while carefully highlighting my areas of difference in a subtle yet engaging way. You should have been there ... *sigh*. Will rewrite it (in Qumana so I don't lose it) and will post it as a new article shortly.

-the Centaur

Labels: Development, Webworks

As part of making my "Blog a day through May" and "Distract Myself From Writing This Paper" tasks easier, I hunted down this Blogger bookmarklet which which enables you to select some text on a page and then with a single click get a micro-Blogger window so you can edit and send a post (like this one):

What is BlogThis! ?: "BlogThis! is an easy way to make a blog post without visiting blogger.com ... Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis! ... just drag the link below to your browser's Link bar. Then, whenever the mood strikes, click BlogThis! to post to your blog:

This isn't the only bookmarklet out there. There's also one for Google Bookmarks, Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion has his own list of key bookmarklets, and Irregular Shed shows us how to make your own. I know these work in Firefox but I suspect you can get this to work in other browsers as well.

So check out these links, and if you find yourself doing any of these common tasks in less than a click and the associated commenting/typing time, add yourself a bookmarklet and save a few minutes of your life.

-the Centaur

Labels: Development, Webworks

Qumana is a great blog post editor, but it has an interesting property that makes its posts appear weird on my web site.

If you hit return, it wraps the whole paragraph in a HTML "p" tag <p>like so</p>.

Which is nice, in theory it's how you're supposed to use the "p" tag, but ...

It puts huge spaces between paragraphs in my blog.

I'm not sure why this is happening.  Some CSS error in my stylesheet?  Some translation ... WHOA!

I just did "view source" on the published blog, and found extra <br> tags after each paragraph in the published blog!  So THAT's what is happening... now, of course, the question is WHY, since they don't show up on Qumana's Source View.
Here's seeing if switching from "Enter Starts A New Paragraph" to "Enter Starts A New Line" does the trick.
9:56pm hit return.
-the Centaur

Labels: Development, Webworks

Google News has a new feature where searching for a politician's name will pull up recent quotes:

Consider this election season. All along the campaign trail we have heard candidates' thoughts on the future of health care, the war in Iraq, and even each other. These debates have generated untold pages of commentary, and it's only too easy to lose track of original quotations. Unlike much of the surrounding rhetoric, these quotations cited in news articles are not conjectures but facts - transcriptions of actual words and thoughts - be they campaign promises, arguments or opinions. Wouldn't it be great if they were easily searchable?

You can search for quotes right at the top of the Google News box; it apparently just shows news if it can't find quotes. At the time of this writing, searches on John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all turn up with news quotes:

Hillary Clinton: "I believe the potential for life begins at conception"



Barack Obama: "You go into those small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing's replaced them"



John McCain: "We need to make a clean break from the worst excesses of both political parties"

I have a policy of not directly talking about my employer on my blog, so I deny all knowledge of the hard work of my cubemates in making this happen. Check it out...
-Anthony

Labels: Development, Webworks

... moderation of comments is now ON, spamfiends.

-the Centaur

Labels: Webworks