While watching a video about blogging from TextMate, I went on further to discover this pretty awesome PHP version of Markdown. After then downloading PHP Markdown Extra and installing it on my site, this is my very first attempt at a blog written purely in Markdown syntax, with no HTML at all.
Hope it works!
EDIT: looks like it worked! Sweet :D
So. Whilst visiting imjustcreative.com I read this post about WordPress themes which lead me to this article—a list of some pretty cool minimalist/typographical designs.
I couldn’t go past this one: Wu Wei, by Jeff Ngan.
There’s just something about the gorgeous, chunky Helvetica (well, actually it’s Helvetica Neue—if you have a Mac you’ll be seeing what I’m seeing). I love the colour scheme too, with it’s subtle blue tinge, and the outstanding hyperlinks.
There are a few things that I’m not so sure about:
I’m going to dive in and do a bit of customising I think, but in general I am very inspired by this theme! I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it gives a bit of life to the blog.
Make note: one day I’ll develop my own theme for this blog, and it’s designs such as this one that really do inspire me. There’s a lot of power in typography.
—Sharpy
Came across this film in the CMI newsletter this morning, and it looks to be worth investigation. From the newsletter:
Expelled is a very entertaining yet thought-provoking film that will shock anyone who thinks all scientists are free to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. As you are well aware, evolution as the explanation of our origins ultimately undermines the foundational basis for the Christian faith, particularly among young people who are taught evolution / long ages as fact.
The film follows Ben Stein (lawyer, comedian, game show host, US presidential speech-writer and actor) as he travels the world in search of answers about the origin of life.
Check out the trailer:
And, of course, the website.
A little bit of investigation revealed that for those in my locality, there is a single screening in Geelong (Waurn Ponds) at Reading Cinemas on Thursday, November 19. If you’re interested in coming along to see it, register your interest in the comments below. I’ll keep you posted about details of session times.
—Sharpy
Note—that’s not a question. I daresay that if you are on Facebook (Twitter, YouTube et al.) you are addicted. Maybe you don’t agree. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re correct.
Now, don’t get me wrong. For those of you who know me (and also those who don’t), I’m not attacking you with this comment. Actually, if anything I’m trying to help you.
I recently mentioned that I am currently trialling TextMate, as a possible alternative to Bare Bones Software’s eminently capable BBEdit.
Here’s one of the issues I initially had with Markdown in Textmate, and how I solved it.
I’ve been a BBEdit user for around 6 months now, and I can tell you that I am very happy with it. There are probably many who would say my love of text editors and plain text is a little crazy, or at least odd.
I’d probably agree with them.
It must be an insatiable desire, because somehow I now find myself considering a new text editor which, like BBEdit, could not be considered cheap. That editor is TextMate.
So. Today, silly me decides to sit down and do some homework. Read this article if you want to find out just why that was a silly thing to do. That is, now that I have made the switch to Pages ‘09, I felt the need to redo my default template.
However, I ran into some trouble whilst editing the template. I found that I could no longer delete any of the in-built Heading styles, nor the Body style.
I won’t go into it much further (watch the video), except to say that more people think the changes aren’t so great and Apple won’t do anything about it unless we politely ask them to. Lots of us.
Video running time: 4:29
So, if you also think that Apple should fix this, please submit some feedback! I do hope that they listen to faithful Mac users. Also, feel free to leave a comment below if you’re feeling the same thing, or if you happen like the change.
Finally, please excuse the quality of the video—as you can see that”s my entire MacBook screen crammed into a teeny space. Best I could do with the new QuickTime X!
—Sharpy
Last week my body decided it didn’t like me very much any more. That made me sad.
Hey there all. Spent a little time browsing the WordPress.org plugin site the other day and now I have some shiny new additions to tell you about.
The major addition is the Subscribe2 plugin which has officially moved in at this site. Why do I care? you ask. Well, if you’re at all interested in keeping abreast of what I have to say (and I hope that you are), then you can now elect to do so.1
Hopefully this will provide a very easy way for those readers who may not be RSS-savvy (or just don’t like it), to hear about what’s going on without going through all the trouble of typing all that stuff into your address bar.
If you register as a user of the site, you can also elect to receive email updates.
If you comment (and I really hope you will—it’s great for my self-esteem), you will also see a lovely little button letting you receive email notifications whenever someone responds. Then, of course, you can keep the comments rolling.
Nothing like a bit of dialogue to brighten your day.
So here’s what you can do:
—Sharpy
Blogging from TextMate
And, by way of follow-up to my post yesterday, here is my very first post written entirely in TextMate, and entirely in Markdown. Pretty awesome stuff.
So here are a couple of links for you:
dateTimeerror that occurs while fetching posts.On a final note, and in response to this post I wrote a month or so back, TextMate is seriously awesome. I bought it. They gave me 15% off. (What will I do when I’m no longer a student?) And I cannot believe how seriously core this is becoming in my workflow. It’s nuts. Can this text editor do everything?
I’ve just added blogging to the list, along with coding and taking sermon notes, and journalling. Maybe I should write a journalling bundle? That would be pretty awesome. Just build in some native FTP support and I will be super happy! A project which is an FTP mirror of a website, with automatic uploading and all that…would seriously be cool.
So here’s to TextMate!
—Sharpy