02.27.03
Posted in Software, HTML/XML/CSS at 8:56 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
With the demise of BBEdit Lite, I’m looking for other free or under $20.00 basic HTML editors I can use with students. Taco HTML, from Taco Software is a free OS X HTML Editor. It has syntax coloring, an attractive, fairly self explanatory interface (a good thing, since there’s no built in Help). The basic HTML tags (paragraph, link, bold, italic, rules,line breaks, super and sub scipt, strikethrough) are available from a pop down “Quick Insert” menu. It supports syntax coloring, and new files open with the basic HTML tags required for any page already in place.
The Insert menu gives you access to more sophisticated tags, including Font, Image, Image Map, Table, List (ordered and unordered, but not definition), and Meta. The Insert menu also includes an Advanced Tag Insert command, which presents you with a clickable list of pretty much all the other standard HTML tags (it includes a “close tag” check box to automatically add the close tag where appropriate).
More sophisticated features include syntax coloring, a powerful multi-file Find, Code clips, which allow you to save bits of HTML (or text) and add them to a menu for convenient insertion. It also includes syntax checking, and Unicode support. There’s a nifty Color wizard in the Insert menu that either offers the hex code for a color, or lets you enter the hex code to see what color it describes. There’s also an Image Map wizard, with support for circle, polygon and rectangle slices.
Preferences, and a customizeable toolbar allow you to adjust Taco HTML to suit your person preferences, including support in the Preview command for a wide variety of browsers, and an ability to add others.
It’s an attractive, rather elegant little editor; I plan on using it for a while, but I think I can recommend it to students or others learning HTML on OS X, or those who want a good editor that’s affordable and not bloated. I wish it the developer had included spell checking (perhaps implementing the spell check so that it ignored any text between angles brackets).
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02.26.03
Posted in Pointy-Haired Bosses at 10:12 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Without adding to it with statements like this, from Dave Weiner:
I’m not pro-war, but all the estimates of what it would cost to win the war I’ve heard are missing one thing. We can pay for reconstructing Iraq by pumping oil. We can also pay ourselves back for the cost of the war.
This is astonishingly half-witted, particularly coming from someone who appears rational much of the time.
How much oil do we pump to “pay back” the woman in Kansas whose son is killed? How much for his children, who have lost their father? What about the Iraqui women who will lose their children (they’ve already lost their sons and husbands)? What about the fact that Iraq lies in the heart of the fertile crescent, the richest and almost completely unexcavated archaeological treasure trove (that is, assuming it hasn’t already been destroyed by constant bombing)? Keeping in mind of course that at least 42% of the population is under 14.
And for what?
To quote Adam Engst:
I’m angry because it looks as though the United States is about to wage war on Iraq without direct provocation, without clear evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, without strong international support, and without even having shown indisputable ties between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network.
I’m angry because the cynic on my shoulder keeps whispering that it’s all about oil, that it’s aimed at distracting from an inability to hunt down Osama bin Laden, and that it’s happening right now so it won’t turn into an election-year issue in 2004.
Go read the rest of what Adam has to say, and then be sure to read the remarks of Senator Robert Byrd, who rightly accuses us as a nation of “standing passively silent.”
In other words, we’re going to war for the sake of oil, macho posturing, and because, God help us, George W. Bush is bored with his Game Boy.
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02.25.03
Posted in HTML/XML/CSS at 10:18 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Bare Bones software, makers of excellent Mac software, have retired the free BBedit Lite text editor. I initially learned to create HTML files using BBedit Lite, which was a truly “bare bones” text editor, with no HTML tools per se but excellent tools for working with ASCII files. I’ve long since upgraded to BBEdit, now at version 7.0.2 with all sorts of nifty tools for HTML and CSS, and Perl and just about everything else you’d want, as well as great ASCII and Unicode tools.
BBEdit lite was retired today in deference to Bare Bone’s latest product, TextWrangler, which features a reduced feature compared to BBEdit , and a reduced price, at $49.00. I’ve not looked at it yet (I will) but I’m very disappointed in Bare Bones’ decision to drop BBEdit Lite. I am sure TextWrangler is nifty, but it’s too much money for me to ask students to pay while they learn to write HTML. BBEdit lite was perfect for that, and better than than SimpleText. BBedit “Pro” as it used to be called is fabulous, but not really affordable or appropriate for my students. I’ll look around for something else since I wanted to use BBEdit Lite next quarter.
Arachnophilia, my preferred free tool for writing HTML on Windows is now a Java app; I’ll keep on eye on it to see when it starts being Mac friendly. And the excellent Dorie Smith has a list of “Budget Web Software” here, though it’s a bit out of date, it’s still useful. Then there was a long discussion of HTML editors for beginners a while ago up at MacInTouch. But BBedit Lite really was perfect, and I’m seriously dissappointed at Bare Bones decision to drop it.
Update: here
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02.17.03
Posted in Blogging, Software at 1:59 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Read step by step instructions here. I’m about to go try it out myself.
Later: worked like a charm, and took roughly a half hour. There’s an ongoing progress report, which is a useful feature. I, as a backup fanatic, immediately compressed the “Backup” directory that was created in the Radio directory, and added it to the list of files to be uploaded to my offsite backup drive. This is of course something that I should automate via AppleScript. I’m hoping this is a sign of actual interest in the product from Userland.
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02.16.03
Posted in Blogging at 7:34 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Well, at least it’s not AOL. Yes, it’s true, Google bought Pyra labs, makers of Blogger. Dan Gillmore got the scoop.
This might be OK; it sounds like Ev is still going to be around, and Google has been quite reasonable about the UseNet archive DejaNews, now known as Google Groups. They’ve enhanced the search interface, and allowed users to control the archive status of their own UseNet posts, or prohibit archiving of their posts. I’ve been worried that AOL would buy Blogger, and run it into the ground. Google might just be the kind of cash influx Blogger has been in need of.
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02.09.03
Posted in Blogging, Tutorial at 7:13 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
I’ve performed the requisite alchemical incantations in my Blogger Pro blog to create an.rss feed. If you want to do this yourself in Blogger Pro:
- Create the rss subdirectory in your blog directory using an FTP client.
- Log on to your Blogger Pro blog, and go to Settings, then click the Formatting tab.
- Set the Show Title Field to Yes. The URL field is optional. Click Save to save the Settings.
- You will need to modify your Blogger Template to use the Title tags, since the post “Title” data is required by .rss. Click Template.
- Copy your current Template code to an empty text file, just in case.
- Look for the <Blogger> tag that marks the start of the formatting for individual blog posts. Add
<BlogItemTitle>
<$BlogItemTitle$>
</BlogItemTitle>
somewhere in that section, before the <Blogger/> tag that marks the end of the post formatting tags. Click Save. Be prepared to experiment a bit with placement.
The next time you post you’ll notice the Post form has a new Title field. Be sure to put something in the Title field if you want a post to show in your .rss feed; without a title, the post will be left blank in the feed.
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Posted in Blogging, Software at 5:19 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
I’ve posted about news aggregators before, including NetNewsWire, the “lite” sibling of NetNewsWire Pro, currently in beta. While the “lite” version is primarilly a news reading front end for various Mac sites, NetNewsWire Pro from Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software is a full featured Mas OS X 10.2.3 news aggreator and web blog editor. Subscribing to an .rss based news feed couldn’t be simpler; either you select them from the generous (and multilingual) collection included in the Sites Drawer, or you can copy the .rss URL from a site, click the Subscribe icon, and paste the URL into a simple dialog. Reading is simpler still, with easily understandable naviagation commends and menu options (though I think “Mark Others Read” would be a useful addition).
NetNewsWIre Pro also lets you post to web logs, principally Blogger, Userland Radio, Bloxom, MoveableType and Manilla blogs, among others. The tools you’d want are all there—including autmatically generating a post from a news item, Post and Preview (the Live Preview is a nifty feature), and you needn’t know HTML. There are simple tools for creating links and setting text style, and if you do know HTML, there’s even a configurable pop-down menu for custom tags. Best of all though (at least to my way of thinking) is you can spell check your posts. There’s even a convenient Notepad for copying bits of text to turn into a post, complete with basic but very functional outlining tools (the Notepad very cleverly saves automatically).
It’s still beta, but already I’m doing almost all my web blog reading in NetNewsWire Pro, and I’m going to keep trying it for posting as well. I’ve two blogs, this one built with Radio Userland, and this one built with Blogger. This post was made using NetNewsWire Pro. NNW really is an elegant example of a good Mac OS X Cocoa-based tool. It makes excellent use of the underlying frameworks to provide niceties like spell check and interface elements, and Simmons has even made some of his code available to other developers.
This is one of those applications that seems deceptively simple, but that actually does rather a lot. It has enormous potential for teaching; I hope I have an opportunity to use it with a class.
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