This is to announce that results to text searches on this site now feature Googlesque contextual sampling. Whatever did we do before regular expressions.
I’ve been trying to write down something I saw on Saturday, something unsettling, in the sweltering heat of a mall concourse as waves of olive-complected men and women surged through and past to flex the muscle of high credit in one shop – then the next, then the next – but I can’t seem to do it; I can’t seem to do it right.
So I shall drop it, and offer instead the following, which I saw someplace, possibly recently.
Have you ever seen boy scouts sleeping?
It’s in tents.
One. Refer has been updated to version 1.1. Lots of problems fixed and redundancies removed. Also, referrers can now be viewed in RSS form by tacking ?format=rss to the end of the Refer URL. This will appeal to precisely twelve people.
Two. Much excellent feedback over the weekend, for which I am very grateful, has resulted in improvements to Textile. It continues to evolve. Once stable, I plan to release it as a chunk of code that can be used on any page anywhere.
Three. Beet and Fennel Salad. Make it well in advance: it wants to marinate for a while in the fridge. Roast or boil peeled beets until tender, then cool under the tap. Slice in a pleasing fashion (sort of like fries, let’s say). Rinse some fennel (just the bulb) and slice it up too. Marinate it all in olive oil and lemon juice, with a little salt and pepper. That’s it. It’s really good.
Four. A web journal written by an American working to promote an independent press in Uzbekistan.
Five. I just received the one hundredth email asking if I was aware how much the photo on this site’s About the Author page looks like Bush the Younger. The answer is yes. I don’t look anything like that. I look like this.
For years I’ve been trying to imagine a bulletproof web-based plaintext-to-HTML system, one that respects typographic standards and the correct presentation of non-standard characters, as well as structured markup, without the writer having to think (or having to have learned) very much about it. Ideally such a system would mimic the functions in the web writing Applescripts available from this site, which were created with the same ideal in mind; those scripts make writing text for the web a snap, but only for those working on the Mac platform, and, as the scripts require a standalone application to run, they impose what feels like an unnecessary third step in between writing and publishing. Ideally, one should be able to write, hit send, and be done.
Of course many current content management systems allow you to do just that – write, format and publish in one place – but none offer a complete and unfussy way to ensure the typographic and structural standards mentioned above, nor do any all offer easy methods to produce textual niceties (such as, say, numbered and bulleted lists or block-quoted paragraphs) available in word processors to those who don’t want (or don’t know how) to type out a lot of HTML tags. [Revised: I was ignorant of this and this, both of which integrate with specific CMSs]
So I’ve come up with Textile, a humane web text generator.
You can try it out with some preloaded sample text, or type in whatever you like to see how it works. Go ahead, format some text. Go on. Let me know where it lets you down.
What it’s supposed to do:
It’s part of Textpattern. Which will be ready some day.
And yours? [175]
To those presently trying without success to reach the web site of my most best beloved alpha biatch chicky-chicky, Gail Armstrong (who just recently put thereon, alongside other good things, a lovely story about manifestations of the Upper Canada caste system at a garage sale): its DNS record is in the process of moving from one dead service to a living one; such information must be propagated to the four corners. A bivouac is here.
[It’s back now]
Oh and hey: my thanks to all who’ve been sending in bug reports and sample problem files since the Word HTML Cleaner meltdown upgrade (see below). I’ll respond directly to everyone who has done so once it’s a-hummin’ and free of its own gunk.
This is an epsilon: ε
I recommend you read typographer.com because it is a good and informative site on the world-wide web, on which you will find all sorts of things to read about typography, outrage over the crimes carried out by the design industry, and mockery of Microsoft.
Also because after my vague grumblings about the availability of cheddar cheese here in the land of infinite cheese variety, typographer.com’s publisher, David John Earls, wrote from London to say he was going to send some. Which he then did, by Fedex. A massive wedge of blade-sharp cheddar that is reallyreallyreally good. I just had some. With an apple.
I’ve rewritten the Word HTML Cleaner from the ground up. It should run faster, accept larger files, and retain a wider range of structure tags.
I’m at something of a disadvantage as far as testing goes, though, as the French version of Office X I’m running will only produce proper Unicode entities for dodgy characters when generating UTF-8 web pages, which would be fine if all the other code in those pages didn’t fail in browsers produced by, uh, Microsoft. Anyone finding strange results, please pipe up.
The Silver Spade is awesome!
The dog has been staring for a good hour, something he commences every day at 7:14 AM and works hard at, an inch or two from my face, until my eyes remain open and I roll out of bed to take him down the ladder, into a collar, and out in the world to unclench.
On this morning I also need to unclench with some urgency. It’s not as bad as some days – when you wake up from fever dreams of speedboating across clear lakewaters with a terry towel in your mouth and a boiling vat of kerosene in your lap – no, it’s not as bad as it can be, but as I say there is some urgency. I groan and creak and it’s on with the clothes, the socks and shoes, down the steps and past the kitchen. Every day at this exact point there’s a debate: put coffee on the stove now so it’ll be ready upon return, or deal with the bodily functions and fuss over breakfast later. I put on the coffee.
There’s an entranceway. About four metres square, just a sort of anteroom between the living room and the outside world. On two of its walls are hung coats and hats and collars and leashes; on the third is the big, heavy front door; on the fourth is the door to the toilet, right beside the door to the living room, which is the only thing that lays between all of these and a very bouncy eager dog and a groggy man who has to pee with, as I say, some urgency.
I try the door handle and, instead of the usual resistance one gets after turning it 45° or so, indicating the latch has cleared and the door can be opened, it just keeps going. I turn it the other direction, a full three sixty. The lock, which had been acting flaky, is now quite broken; the door is essentially deadbolted from within.
Pause. Stare. Try again. Pause. Oh man. Options.
Kicking it goes nowhere. Screwdrivers, then. Off comes the doorhandle – all right Oliver just a minute – and I hear the handle on the other side clank to the floor. No access to the mechanism of the lock, not that I’d know what to do with such access. Probing and digging with screwdrivers and pliers goes nowhere. Just a fucking second Oliver. No amount of hammer violence will loosen the hinge pins. On the stove, the milk boils over.
I have visions of smashing through frosted glass, of axes splintering wood, of befouled houseplants and inappropriate use of the kitchen sink. I’m actually standing bent at the waist with half-crossed legs. Like in the movies.
At last, at the bottom of the toolbox, I find a couple of wood chisels. I decide without conviction that such a door will be easy to repair, just a matter of patching on some laminate really (this sounds good at the time). I apply the tip of the chisel where I estimate the top of the lock mechanism to be and whack it with a hammer. A chunk of laminate the size of my palm comes flying off and click the lock opens and the door swings gently open. A flurry of activity ensues.
Later in the day I’m trying to convey my needs to a hardware clerk, who has no problem selling me a new lock mechanism but can’t quite grasp why chisels and hammers were involved: all I needed to do was slip a credit card between the door and the frame. Like in the movies.
There have been rumblings about me old mucker Joe Clark’s new book over at a site called Slashdot, which is apparently quite popular. The upshot was that the server run by the serene Luke Tymowski (which hosts Joe’s many sites as well as those of mine, Herself and others) went kablooie for a while. Visitors presented with cryptic messages or empty pages in the last few hours may know this to be why.
Kind of sweet that discussion of a book called Building Accessible Websites would render a bunch of websites inaccessible, no?
YOU ARE HERE
AUTHOR
Dean Allen
OCCUPATION
Worker
LOCATION
Pompignan, France
PHOTOGRAPHS
An index thereof
TOOLS
Google Hilite
Highlight search terms for those who arrive via Google
Refer
When who came from where to see what
Textile
A humane web text generator
Web Writing Applescripts
For producing well-formed web text
Word HTML Cleaner
Strip the gunk from MSWord HTML
TUTORIALS
Hunting Caps
Finding needles in a text haystack with Regular Expressions
Pattern Matching
Search, replace and rearrange text with Grep
RESOURCES
Annotated Maunifesto
Work the metaphor
Evolution of Writing
In Western Europe, that is
Fibonacci Series
In egregious Flash
Golden Section
Derived from the square
Twenty Faces
A survey of available text typefaces
Daily Oliver
