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Posts concerning reStructuredText

Hiatus

17:39 27 Oct 2013

I’ve been blogging regularly since 01 August 2006: every day for that first year, five times per week for four years after that, and at least once per week since 01 August 2011. Now it’s time for a break.
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What I want from Blogging Software

23:03 06 Oct 2013

I’ve grown increasingly unhappy with WordPress, despite the fact that it’s served me fairly faithfully for over seven years. The main reason is performance—this blog is now just too slow to load. There are definitely things I could do to tackle that, but having to do so is a sign that it’s not the right platform. The other reason is philosophical—I no longer think that a web application backed by a database is the best approach for a blog.

I’ve been thinking about writing my own—of course[1]. So first I should establish the requirements.
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Tools for Writing reStructuredText in Vim

22:43 07 Oct 2012. Updated: 21:55 25 Oct 2012

I switched to writing in reStructuredText in mid-2009, and to writing in Vim in early 2010. Since then I’ve made a lot of tweaks to improve editing efficiency, and eventually collected these in a Vim plugin (and a Python script). The following discussion of that plugin might be of interest to anyone concerned with writing efficiency and/or editor customization.
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Text Advocacy

14:11 09 Sep 2012

I use plain text formats for all of my writing, and you should at least consider doing the same.

By “plain text” I mean not only a text (as opposed to binary) file format, but also something that is plainly readable when simply listing the contents of the file—that is, a format you don’t necessarily need a specific tool to read. Such formats are more flexible, more robust, more malleable, and more future-proof than more complicated alternatives.
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New Laptop Setup Steps

23:54 12 Aug 2012

I haven’t written about how I configure a new machine since mid-2007, so this will be both about the new setup and about how it compares to that one.

The new machine is a Mac laptop running Mountain Lion, as opposed to the Windows desktop I set up five years ago[1].
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Blog Features I Want

22:44 11 Mar 2012

A discussion of common and custom blog features, and candidate applications that might provide them.
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Fun with pandoc, Vim, and email

23:52 21 Jan 2011. Updated: 01:35 22 Jan 2011

I’ve mentioned pandoc once before, and it’s again proved rather useful. I’ve been looking for more ways to use it, as I love its core principle (although I naturally wish that it focused on reStructuredText rather than Markdown) of being a comprehensive text format converter. It might at one point be the answer for getting from reST to PDF—something that the current reST tools don’t help me with because I insist on using Unicode, and XeTeX isn’t yet supported. But today pandoc helped with a different task: going from reST to plain text.
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sabbatical.close()

23:36 16 May 2010

After a highly enjoyable, productive, and extended period, it’s time for me to return to the world of paid work.

I’m quite happy with the things I’ve done during my time off. Many of them are important only to me, but then, it’s been my time off.
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@: A Triumph of Design

20:50 22 Mar 2010

The New York Museum of Modern Art has added the @ symbol to its architecture and design collection. Originating perhaps as a Latin abbreviation for “toward”, it showed up on one of the early Underwood typewriters (possibly the Underwood 1; it was definitely on the Underwood No. 5) and was used for “at the rate of”, which usage still survives.
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2009 Goals Review

17:43 29 Dec 2009

I had eight goals for 2009, and all of them that I’m going to get done I’ve already completed. Time to review.
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RTF/Word–reStructuredText Toolchain

12:05 24 Sep 2009. Updated: 14:19 06 Oct 2009

It took me a while to get there, but I now have a working toolchain to automate going from an RTF file (or a Word document) to reStructuredText. The final link took the longest to find, and turned out to have been right there all along (no, I’m not going to turn this into a retelling of The Alchemist). But if you’re interested in how to get from Word to a sane format (like reStructuredText), this post will interest you.
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Better reST–WordPress Pipeline

23:15 28 Jul 2009

Last week I posted about my setup for going from reStructuredText to WordPress. It involved a shell script, some Python scripts, and the pbpaste and pbcopy commands. It worked, but it was a little on the convoluted side.

Now I have a slightly better process, and one that I will have used to publish this post.
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Blog Workflow with reStructuredText

22:57 14 Jul 2009. Updated: 23:13 28 Jul 2009

I wrote about moving my writing over to reStructuredText on Sunday, and since then I’ve moved both my morning pages and my blog writing to it. The latter proved more complicated, primarily because I wanted to make the process almost as easy as writing pseudo-HTML (which is more or less WordPress’ native format, and kind of mine, too, for the last several years). With some hacky wrangling, I’ve managed to set that up.
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Moving From Word Processors to reStructuredText

23:54 12 Jul 2009. Updated: 17:17 28 Dec 2009

I’ve written before about my wish for semantic word processing tools, and two years on I still haven’t found something that suits me. I think that WYMeditor has definite promise, but unfortunately the authors are aiming that at browser-to-server functionality, rather than in-browser standalone functionality. This isn’t such a major obstacle for me, but it is one of the reasons why I’m hesitant to move over to using a project that hasn’t reached version 0.5 yet.
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Some Minor Software Projects

14:37 27 Jan 2008. Updated: 23:14 28 Jul 2009

I already have a buch of plans for larger projects, including finishing the sfmagic.org rewrite, but I think it makes sense to have some smaller projects to work on as well, things that I can switch to and make significant progress on in a relatively short amount of time.
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reStructuredText

23:30 11 Oct 2007. Updated: 23:13 28 Jul 2009

A colleague gave a presentation at work today on Pylons, a web framework for python. I was curious about the slides he was using, because they looked like they could be in S5, which I like. So afterwards I asked him, and he said that he wrote them in “rest”, which confused me at first because I thought of the REST approach to Web architecture. He was in fact talking about reStructuredText, a plaintext markup system that I’d never encountered before.
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