Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Recently I trialled using iA Writer as my word processor of choice for writing. Previously I would use Google Docs, which has been very good. It has all the features you would expect from a word processor and automatically generates a navigation structure on the left hand side so you can quickly jump around the document.

iA Writer is very different in that it is a pure text editor. It uses the Markdown syntax, so instead of a WYSIWYG editor, you get text on one side, that you have to use markup in, and a preview pane on the other. The big advantage for me, over Google Docs, is that it can handle large files. Google Docs works great, but as you start getting up to 50,000+ plus it starts to really struggle.

iA Writer handles these large files fine, but the rest is a mixed bag.

It looks really nice

The idea behind iA Writer is to allow you to concentrate on the words. This is does very nicely. You get a simple interface that you can take full screen to remove all distractions, and the layout and style are well thought out. You can enable typewriter mode so the current line is always centred on the screen, though this feels a bit like a gimmick so far.

The image support is not great/strong>

Preview panel scrolls independently

This is one of the most annoying features: the text panel and the preview panel are not properly synced. As I scroll down one, the other one scrolls, but at a slightly different speed. Therefore the text and preview panel are always out of sync. You cannot see what you are working on, and if you scroll to that point in the preview panel, you lose your place where you are writing.

There is no navigation

Google Docs automatically generates a navigation bar on the left, based on all of your chapter titles and sub-headings. iA Writer does not do this, so the only way to navigate around a large document is to remember all of your headings and use the text search to locate them again.

This comes up a lot because you have to put references in the bottom of the document, so I am constantly scrolling down to the bottom, adding a reference, then trying to find where I was writing so that I can insert the appropriate footnote marker and continue working.

Summary

iA Writer is a nice piece of software. However, it feels like nobody has put a really large document in there and thought “is this usable?” Given it is specifically targeted at writers, I am not sure how they imagined it would be used, or maybe did not think through the use-cases beyond somebody writing fiction linearly.

Interesting documentary about technology in Leeds. I was already familiar with the history of our tech scene, but it is always nice for a refresher. Many people may be surprised with just how involved we were with the early internet.

If you are inside a Vagrant box and want to SSH to the host machine, you will need to get the default gateway. Or, maybe you just need the default gateway for a completely different reason. Either way, the following command should do it.

netstat -rn | grep "^0.0.0.0 " | cut -d " " -f10

This is really useful if you don’t have ifconfig installed.

I was recently clearing space on my laptop hard drive when I noticed Google Chrome was taking 20gb of space. You read that correctly: 20gb.

After some searching, people suggested it could be old versions of Chrome. You can see into the package by right-clicking on it and clicking “Show Package Contents”. Inside I did indeed find dozens of old versions of Chrome and deleted them all. However, this only brought the size down to 19gb.

I wondered if the cache might be stored inside the app. I wouldn’t expect it to be, as typically it is stored in the user directory. However, when I went to clear out the cache, it only had 400mb in it away, so that ruled out that as a problem.

Next, I went through all the files in Finder to see if I could spot any large files. I could not. This made me suspicious, so I opened up terminal and checked it from there.

cd /Applications
du -sch ./* | grep Chrome
195M	./Google Chrome.app

Google Chrome isn’t actually using the space: Finder is just reporting it incorrectly. However, it clearly showed up on Daisy Disk before, and disappeared after I cleared out all of the old versions. So whether they were contributing or not I’m not sure.

Travis CI is a cloud-based continuous integration tool. Notably, it is also free for open source projects. They do paid subscriptions as well if there is a private repo you want to test. If you just want to test a public GitHub project though, it’s free and really easy to set up.

You can log in with your GitHub account. Once you have done this, you are given a list of your projects and you can turn on Travis CI for each one individually. Using the GitHub hook, you can configure Travis CI to automatically run a build every time code is pushed to the repo.

It supports an array of different languages and platforms. To get up-and-running, you need to add a config file into your repo. This is pretty simple. Here one I am using for a PHP project:

language: php

php:
– ‘5.5’
– ‘5.6’
– ‘7.0’

install: composer install

This configures it to run it on three different versions of PHP, and install the dependencies before starting the test. It comes with many of the common PHP extensions already enabled, and an additional list of ones you can enable if you need them.

This is a super-interesting speech if you are interested in technology, business, and the short-term future of our society. In it, Galloway discusses how the “big four”: Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, are basically claiming all of the growth and all of the talent that the world is producing; redefining industries while at the same time concentrating wealth into even smaller pools.

Since I’ve started spending money with Google Adwords again, they have been emailing me asking to give them a call for a free optimisation consultation. I was a bit sceptical. However, it turned out to be quite useful.

You can match your keywords based on broad matches (any keyword) or phrase (all keywords). For example, if you’re bidding on “pizza delivery”, on broad you would be showing up on “pizza recipes” and “furniture delivery”, which isn’t that useful.

You can use site extensions, adding deep links, phone numbers, location, etc. This isn’t that relevant to me, but useful stuff to know.

You can see what search terms people are using from inside the campaign data, rather than having to go to Analytics. Some of them I never imagined people would be searching for, and can be used for the basis of campaigns.

Back in the day, Facebook supported RSS feeds. You could put your RSS feed into the site and it could automatically crawl it and post your new blog posts into the Notes app. Facebook later discontinued this as they wanted people to post in content rather than use Notes. RSS Graffiti arrived in it’s place, automatically posting blog posts onto your Newsfeed. This perished too as it was unable to make any money.

Here are some alternatives.

IFTTT

IFTTT has been around for a while and I have been using it since RSS Graffiti disappeared. It is free but has some limitations. For example, you seem to have to include a title, so I have the title in the link and a comment above it saying the same thing. Also, there is no description.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media manager that also supports RSS feeds. It does not check as often as IFTTT does, but it can be set down to once per hour. This is fine for a personal blog. You have no control over how the RSS post is displayed, though it does a pretty good job by default.

Zapier

Zapier is a recipe site, like IFTTT. They have a free tier that gives you a few recipes. This is enough for my personal blog, though you might need a paid tier if you were running a lot of social media. Like IFTTT it checks every 15 minutes and gives you control over how the post appears.

Conclusion

I have settled on using Zapier for now. It is free and allows me to customise how the posts will display. However, any of the solutions gets the job done.

Myth is a CSS preprocessor that allows you to write easier-to-manage CSS, similar to LESS and SASS. The difference with Myth though is that you are writing “pure CSS” while still using features that will be available in the future (such as variables and maths). It then acts as a polyfill for browsers that do not support it.

You can see the full spec on the Myth website.

Should you use it instead of LESS and SASS? In my opinion, no. Not yet anyway. While it does offer some of the features, it does not offer the really useful ones yet. Nested roles and mixins are the big winners for me. Myth does not have these. Nor does it support includes.

It’s one advantage is that it does fill in prefixes. So if you are using flexbox, you can just have a flexbox entry, rather than the endless series of browser-targetted prefixed flexbox commands you currently have to use. You can do this using mixins in LESS and SASS, but it is messier than the way Myth implements it, where you just type the standardised CSS property.

While possibly not that useful right now, Myth is one to watch for the future.

You may find that all the images you commit to a git repo are corrupting. This is especially true if you are using Windows and then pushing to a Linux origin.

One possible fix is to ensure the images are being treated as binary files. Of course everything is a binary file when it comes down to it, but this differentiates it from text. To do this, add the following lines to a .gitattributes file in the root of the repo.

*.jpg binary
*.png binary
*.gif binary

If you have images in there already, you will probably need to remove them and then re-commit them.