Laptop Addicts

Archive for the ‘technical writing’ Category

This post has nothing to do with laptops as it explains something we did at work. For a long time we wanted to have an intranet for our students to add stories, photos, links to job offers, links to material for the courses etc.
After using Wordpress successfully as a publishing medium for this website and two other blogs I thought that it was time to use Wordpress for our intranet server, so I approched one of the IT technician students and asked if he could think of a way to install a server which has the following support: PHP(to run Wordpress), PHPMyAdmin (database admin), Apache (server) and MySQL (database).
James, the IT Technician student thought about this and did the research and installation.
The following account is his . . .

If you want to have an RSS feed on your blog or website a very handy tool can be found at RSS Wiz. This page explains clearly how it works. To generate the code which will feed the new content from any RSS website click on the link ‘Get the code’ and on that page fill out the URL of the website, the amount of posts you want generated etc.

Before clicking on the ‘Generate’ button at the bottom choose the language you want the code to genrate, you have the choice between ‘JavaScript, Perl or PHP’. I choose JavaScript.

Select and copy the code generated and paste it in a div or paragraph on your webpage and there you are! Voila!

Note: If you have an external style for your website the font will take on the properties and values specified in your stylesheet and not those designed by RSS Wiz.

Sore point: The HTML code of the RSS feed is designed in tables, OK, i can live with that but the very sore point is that it uses the obsolete ‘font’ element and gives it a ‘class’ ….arghhhhhh , this is not good practise … but until I find a tool that does the same and designs better code I will stick with this free one.

Thanks to RSS Wiz for creating and making this free tool available online.

It is Saturday morning around 8:30 and I have been up for awhile, I have some written work to look after before I do anything else; if I don’t write it down now it will continue to bother me while I do my usual week end chores around the house. I seem to be working all the time, my brain is given a taks to think something through and responds very easily with a solution when it comes to coding and organising material.
The material is quite important and needs to be 200% accurate so I will work at this text today, with Toshi, my laptop, at my side while I do more mundane work in the kitchen. The first step towards writing this text is to write the notes which have brewed and matured in my head since I read the brief on Thursday afternoon in a cafe on Nassau street opposite Trinity University in Dublin.
Time to prepare a coffee filter and pen down the notes.
The process of thinking and writing down the thoughts is an easy one for me but I have noticed that for some of my students it feels more like a enormeous hurdle rather then a pleasure, so I take great care in guiding them along the path of thought expression.
10:12 After breakfast & coffee and some household tasks
As planned, I wrote the notes by hand while I was sitting on the couch with a slice of toast with margarine and homemade jam (raspberries from Tadcan’s garden).
Next is planning the layout of the document, sorting out the title and header + footer, checking the original document layout for clues ….
——————
I made a very good beginning for the document, even ploughed into the second part; so I have typed out what I had in my mind now need to think some more..

If you have saved important bookmarks  or on your laptop and you want the very same ones at work or anywhere else you only need an excellent plugin from X Marks. Install it on both your laptop and your work pc, login to your account and save all your bookmarks. This addon is available for the following browsers: Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.

In Firefox it will be visible in ‘Tools/Add-ons, as well as on the bottom of your browser window to the right. Firefox will prompt you when it is updating X Marks.