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Time to Cleanup My TextExpander Snippets

I ran across a terrific blog post by Thomas Borowski discussing his TextExpander snippet for Pelican blog posts. I have my own snippet for such purposes, but love his solution for Slug creation.

TextExpander is one of those small pieces of software I use every single day and can’t imaging doing without. The premise is simple, a short bit of text expands and turns into a large amount of text. For example, I use dates a lot in my day job, so I have several simple snippets that dump dates in the right format. Number one on the list is ,ds which expands into 2014-03-22.

Sublime Pelican Plugin

Wow. If you, like me, are a Sublime convert, and a Pelican blogger, then this wonderful plugin is a must.

The plugin adds several Pelican commands to the command palette creating shortcuts for article creation and adding tags.

The best, and for me, the most useful part is the tag insert feature. It pulls all the tags from the site content and makes an easy to search and use list.

Jealous Car

Yes, I’ve mentioned it before, I love my Prius. It’s a great car and I’m not ashamed to say it. I love the cool technology and the pleasant ride, and I love the great mileage. It is a terrific car.

But, I do love, lust after, and dream of the Porsche 911. Yes, it’s Porsche, like Portia.

What a lovely car.

Sublime Text 2

I wanted to see what all the buzz is about, so I downloaded the evaluation of Sublime Text 2, and bought a copy a few minutes later. What a terrific editor. It’s clean, easy to work with large projects, intuitive, and powerful.

My favorite part so far, and keep in mind I’ve only been using it for a few hours, is the Find and Replace with regular expressions. Many editors will do this, but this is the first editor where I’ve very easily been able to find a pattern, select all the locations at once, and make a chance in all the locations with ease.

Catchup

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything. Some fun stuff going on, so here are some updates.

I finished NaNoWriMo 2013 as a winner! What a fun challenge. Everyone should give it a try. If you have ever thought of writing a novel, start thinking about it now for the 2014 NaNoWriMo. Start roughing out an outline.

NaNoWriMo Continues

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Writing is going well this year. I’ve got some truck-sized plot holes to deal with, but I’m tweaking the outline as I go and plugging away at the word count.

Last weekend’s NaNoThon activities helped me catch up and make some solid progress.

It’s funny how the mind works. I can easily ignore the environment around me, but when I sit down to write all I can think about is how dusty the tv is, and I notice how long it’s been since I vacuumed or loaded the dishwasher.

Calm River

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The river is very calm this morning. It’s chilly (down right cold for Florida!), and the wind is still, the sky clear. It’s a beautiful morning.

Work and life have been on the stressful side lately, and the calm river is a good reminder this morning to bring the calm inside.

Like other moods or emotions, calm is infectious. Be the source of calm in your life.

Maciej Cegłowski Discusses

Check out Maciej Cegłowski’s great talk from XOXO 2013. He is the creator behind Pinboard. it’s a fun and inspiring talk.

Enjoy!

Looking At a Python Pelican

I really like the static version of the site. It’s so much easier to support and configure. I can tweak to my hearts content. Jekyll is a wonderful platform, and Octopress is a great framework on Jekyll. However, ruby isn’t my strength. I’ve fiddled with ruby in the past, but I don’t love it. It is a great language, just not for me.

If I’m perfectly honest, I love perl. Perl was an early first love, and is still a terrific language, but the static site generators in perl are limited. I did take a look at Blosxom, but there isn’t a large number of active users. I did find one site with current posts built using Blosxom, so it’s still out there.

Catbird Is An Actual Bird

Catbird is an actual bird!

“The catbird seat” is an idiomatic phrase used to describe an enviable position, often in terms of having the upper hand or greater advantage in all types of dealings among parties.
According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymological Dictionary, the phrase refers to the Gray Catbird and was used in the 19th century in the American South.
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