Up Past Midnight

OCR (optical character recognition) is a powerful (although imperfect) tool for getting data out of scanned images and documents.

Well, not really.

A short time ago I needed to make a calendar in a spreadsheet in which all the months are situated vertically one after the other on the same sheet.

Maybe I’m just grumpy but I am sick and tired of seeing ads all over the place.

I wanted to write some sudoku tutorials in LaTeX, but had to figure out how to draw the grids first.

I use Git a lot.

One of the most annoying things I run into when using a computer is that I click in a box to start typing, and the cursor is blocking what I’m typing, so I can’t see it.

The great thing about using Linux is that you have a number of command line tools that can accomplish tasks and are generally faster than GUI-based alternatives.

I create a lot of booklets.

So I did a thing, and I posted it to Reddit: Most applications in Linux come with a man page—essentially, an online manual.

I scanned a rather longish document (241 pages), which resulted in a 101.7 MB document.

How to add aliases to your terminal to save time and keystrokes with your most used commands.

So…I bought a Chromebook.

The server migration is complete.

If you’re familiar with wiki software such as MediaWiki or DokuWiki, you’re probably aware that most wiki software keeps a copy of every single revision made to a wiki article.

In working with people who are new to web design and development, I have often found that backing up a website is one of the last things on their mind.

I was going through some old files and I found this video from a long time ago… http://cdn.kjodle.net/techblog/video/VIC20_ad.mp4 There is so much to talk about here I could go on for hours.

This site runs on WordPress, and like all WordPress sites, it attracts more than its fair share of comment spam.

Having problems changing a MediaWiki password?

I have recently updated my d12 Message Blocks plugin for WordPress.

Unlike some operating systems (*cough* “Windows” *cough*), Ubuntu is pretty good about letting you know that updates are available, and how large they are.

I use DreamObjects a lot: as low-cost online storage, as a CDN for large files (especially podcasts and image files), as a CDN for files I want to have access to from a lot of different locations, and as a place to store WordPress backups (using Ipstenu’s…

If you’re patient, installing software on your website via FTP isn’t a bad way to go, although it takes forever and depending on the quality of your internet connection, you may have connectivity issues causing the entire thing to hang.

I’ve been working with DokuWiki a lot lately, because I’m adapting it to use for internal communications and project management at work.

I recently started using WebFaction as my main webhost.

I recently migrated all of my sites to a new web host, which meant downloading all my files and databases from my old web host and uploading them to my new host.

For reasons that are too complicated to get into here, I have recently upgraded an old laptop to Ubuntu 14.04.

I often work with people who are completely new to WordPress, or to using a CMS in general.

I often work with people who are completely new to WordPress, or to using a CMS in general.

In many themes, a “default menu” of your pages will show up somewhere around the top of your website.

People are increasingly accessing the web on a mobile device.

There is a movement afoot to remove post formats from the WordPress core.

It took me longer than it should have to figure out the WordPress Settings API, largely because there are certain parameter names that must match if things are to work properly.

I’ve been with a number of hosts over the years, but I have been with DreamHost the longest.

One of the great things about WordPress is that it is so easily extensible my means of plugins.

Although I like Macs and I love Ubuntu, I spend most of my time in a Windows environment, because most of the people I work with use Windows.

I have just submitted a new plugin to the WordPress plugin repository.

One of the things I enjoyed about the Macintosh OS was that you could print the contents of a folder.* This was handy when I was editing a series of images or uploading files to a web site.

I answered a question on the Graphene Neo Mobile theme about WordPress plugins, which then made me think about math, which then made me do math.

In an earlier post on creating child themes for WordPress, I said that if you had already made changes to your theme, you could use a program like WinMerge to find the differences between a clean copy of your theme and the copy you’ve been editing.

This is a very basic introduction to Cascading Style Sheets.

In my earlier post about template parameters in MediaWiki, I lamented that WordPress doesn’t have a similar mechanism.

Earlier today, somebody in the Graphene Theme support forum asked about changing the location of the “Next Post” and “Previous Post” links: I’d like to put the pointers to prev/next posts below a post as well as at the top, preferably between the post and…

Creating a static front page in WordPress is easy, but I often encounter people who have trouble doing it.

Not many people realize how easy it is to control the appearance of selected images in WordPress by adding a CSS class to the image, but this is a very powerful tool to control the appearance of your website.

One of the strengths of MediaWiki is that you can use templates to include the same information across a wide number of pages.

WordPress is one of the most versatile CMS’s out there.

Child themes seem perplexing to a lot of people.

One of the nice things about WordPress is that it’s easily extensible though plugins.

Quite often, I see messages on a message board that something has “suddenly” happened with the poster’s WordPress blog.