{"id":62,"date":"2010-01-14T02:35:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-14T02:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=62"},"modified":"2010-01-14T02:35:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-14T02:35:00","slug":"making-blogging-easier-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/14\/making-blogging-easier-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Blogging Easier, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chihuly<\/a><\/p>\n

So I want to blog more, ideally approaching one a day.\u00a0 If I was just tossing up blog entries for filler, like I sometimes do, that wouldn’t be a problem; however, I’d like to put up more substantive<\/em> articles.\u00a0 But I find that putting up more substantive articles takes a lot of time – so keep up the pace I need to improve my process.<\/p>\n

I already have trained myself to use\u00a0Blogger<\/a> more efficiently, use tools like Qumana<\/a> to make it easier to access Blogger while offline, and am experimenting with AndroBlogger<\/a> in an attempt to make it easy to post while, well, anywhere I’ve got my Nexus One<\/a>.\u00a0 But there are still barriers to putting up entries.<\/p>\n

One barrier is my process.\u00a0 Note the last paragraph?\u00a0 It has four links.\u00a0 I like to put in links to topics I reference, so a certain amount of time is taken up finding appropriate web pages and linking them in.\u00a0 There isn’t much I can do about this except not go down the rabbit hole – ideally, I’d like to post a short paragraph about each link, but that’s too much detail.<\/p>\n

Another barrier are my goals.\u00a0 One of my friends, Jim Davies<\/a>, thinks that blog posts should have pictures – and I agree, though I can’t immediately find the blog post in which he said it – perhaps that means we discussed it aloud.\u00a0 So ANYWAY, there was another chunk of time wasted trying to find a link.\u00a0 Where was I?\u00a0 Ah.\u00a0 The barriers of my goals.<\/p>\n

If I want to blog an article with a picture, the picture needs to be on the web.\u00a0 But I try to avoid linked images for copyright\u00a0 reasons (and to prevent brittleness in case the target takes it down; for embedded Youtubes, which, well, there isn’t a good substitute for yet).\u00a0 So I need to upload the image to MY site, a chore I currently do with the Cyberduck<\/a> ftp client.<\/p>\n

And here the constraints get harder: in precisely the same way I don’t let iTunes tell me where to put songs, I choose not to use Blogger’s interface because I have scheme for posting images which predates Blogger and which I will continue to use after Blogger is gone: http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/images\/imagename.jpg<\/em>, which is simple and easy to remember.<\/p>\n

What’s worse, my cameras take images at huge resolutions, so I need to shrink and resize the images to fit in the width that fits on my website.\u00a0\u00a0 For a variety of reasons, I go with 800×600 or 600×800, in a standard block of HTML which shrinks the image, adds a link to the source of the image, and ads some alt text.<\/p>\n

So now I’ve put on myself a huge set of constraints which makes the simple task of putting up images on my website a chore – get the picture, resize it, start Cyberduck, upload it, write the two lines of HTML gloop necessary to display it, and then and only then see the preview so I can see I made a mistake.\u00a0 There has to be a better way.<\/p>\n

\"chihuly<\/a><\/p>\n

Enter UNIX shell scripting<\/a>, Python<\/a> and the ImageMagick<\/a> toolkit.<\/p>\n

The first thing that I did to make my life easier was to auto-generate the stanza of text that displays the image.\u00a0 I mean, it’s the same thing each time – an anchor tag pointing to the image, with alt text, then the img tag itself, with the same alt text, sizing and border information, like this:<\/p>\n

\n
 
 \"some
  src=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/images\/image.jpg\" \/><\/a>
<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So why write ALL of that every time?  Why not just write the changes and let the computer do it for you?  SO I wrote a piece of code in Python which does just that, produces that text for me:<\/p>\n
\n
#!\/usr\/bin\/python
import sys

TEXT= \"\"\"
\"%s\"<\/a>
\"\"\"
if len(sys.argv) < 3:
  print \"usage: %s image alt text\" % sys.argv[0]
else:
  image = \"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/images\/%s\" % sys.argv[1]
  alt = ' '.join(sys.argv[2:])
  print TEXT % (image, alt, image, alt)
<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I’m not going to turn this into a Python tutorial, so, briefly, all this does is check to make sure I specify a filename and some alt text, stuffs it into a template, and prints it out so I can cut and paste. Here’s an example of that in operation, turning chihuly.jpg<\/b> and “chihuly art at palo alto medical foundation” into a stanza of HTML (spaces added for readability):<\/p>\n
\n
centaur@Deliverance (Wed Jan 13, 22:48:25) [520] ~\/Development\/Workspace\/Webworks:
$ .\/imagelink.py chihuly.jpg chihuly art at palo alto medical foundation


 
  alt=\"chihuly art at palo alto medical foundation\"
  src=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/images\/chihuly.jpg\" \/><\/a>
<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
That saves me several minutes of typing each time. This is one of the great Programmer’s Virtues: laziness – making the computer do something you don’t want to do for yourself.\u00a0 The maybe thirty minutes I’ve spent tweaking that little script have paid off not just in the time that I saved typing, but in the extra blog posts that I’ve done because they were easier to do.<\/p>\n
In the next installment (or two, depending), I’ll write a tool to shrink the images to size with ImageMagick and upload them automatically with UNIX tools, and discuss some of the other tools and organization schemes I use which make it easier for me to collect the images and keep them organized – schemes that work even if you switch between operating systems.<\/p>\n
-the Centaur<\/p>\n
\u00a0\"chihuly<\/a><\/p>\n
The images are Chihuly<\/a> glass sculptures hanging in the Mountain View campus of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I want to blog more, ideally approaching one a day.\u00a0 If I was just tossing up blog entries for filler, like I sometimes do, that wouldn’t be a problem;…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-webworks","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}