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Category Archives for "Dave Tucker"

Adding Markdown support to your WordPress Blog

Continuning on this week's theme of Markdown, I'll be explaining how to add Markdown to your blog in 3 easy steps.

Step 1 - Install the WP-Markdown plugin

From your Wordpress dashboard, head over to the Plugins tab and click Add New. Search for "WP-Markdown" and install

Step 2 - Enable Markdown for specific pages

Once your plugin has been installed, head on down to Settings > Writing and scroll to the Markdown section pictured below.

Enable Markdown

Enable Markdown wherever you like, but I'd recommend pages and posts

WARNING: Enabling Markdown will affect your existing posts/pages. I noticed that while my posts didn't look any different on the outside, behind the scenes they were a mess and required a little trying up.

Step 3 - Try it out

Create a new post or page and practice your Markdown-Fu. Not sure where to start? Here's an example

# This is a first level heading

Here is some body text

## Second level of heading here
### And a Third
#### And so on and so forth

- Now some bullets
- Hopefully you are getting the hang of this now
- It's pretty easy

> Blockquotes are easy with Markdown  Continue reading

Why I switched from MultiMarkdown to Pandoc

For the last 6 months I've been using Markdown where I can. Since embarking on the path towards a more Agile approach to writing, it has been necessary to use Markdown more and more. This has led me towards using Pandoc Markdown rather than MultMarkdown as my dialect of choice and I hope to explain why.

So what's so good about Markdown?

If you haven't used Markdown already, you might be wondering what the fuss is about. Basically it is a way of writing markup in an easy-to-read, easy-to-write fashion. It decouples the act of writing from formatting/layout so the same source text can be used to produce multiple formats.

Barriers to Markdown adoption

So what are the barriers to Markdown adoption? Personally I have found only two.

While I use Markdown, the rest of the company uses Microsoft Word - All of our corporate templates are in MS Word format - Neither Markdown or MultiMarkdown reliably export to MS Word format (yes MMD does ODF, but it doesn't handle images well)

The next issue is that Markdown to PDF conversion uses LaTeX. Unfortunately I neither have the time nor inclination to learn LaTeX. While it can be a powerful Continue reading

Using Pandoc with Marked app

I recently changed from MultiMarkdown to Pandoc. But I still wanted to use Marked app to preview my work…

Thankfully the author of Marked allowed for such an eventuality with the "Custom Processor" option.

Pandoc in Marked

To use this tick the box, put in your fully qualified path to pandoc and add your arguments and bob is your proverbial uncle. The quickest way to find out where pandoc is installed on your Mac is to type the following from the terminal.

which pandoc

@dave_tucker

Agile Writing – Week 1 – Getting Started with JIRA, GreenHopper and Markdown

I finished reading The Phoenix Project at the beginning of May and it has had a profound affect on my outlook towards work. Not only was this a great read, but while I was reading I kept getting ideas on how I could implement the three ways at work. This diary documents the transition to an Agile Writing workflow.

Why bother?

Before I start covering the how, I thought I would spend a little time on the why. Agile is something that is usually associated with Software Development and you might be thinking "What has this got to do with writing?". I write technical documentation for a living, but I've been a long time have-a-go programmer and I recently had the pleasure of working on a professional software project. One of the things that amazed me was how Agile mad them so much more efficient.

  • Scope creep was eliminated through issue and requirements management
  • Many application releases gets product in the customer's hands sooner
  • Team maintains a constant velocity and is always striving to be more efficient
  • Everything that can be automated, is.

It is actually quite easy to draw parallels between application development and writing technical documentation. A Continue reading

Arduino: Using my MelodyUtils library for R2-D2 style chirps

As part of a small robotics project I've been working on this weekend (affectionately called CoBe1, there will be a follow up blog on that soon) I decided to give by robot some personality in the form a a voice, and uploaded some of my code to GitHub.

While Arduino is capable of playing music and sounds from an SD Card I wanted something a little more authentic… something similar to R2-D2's chirps from Star Wars. I had a mini 8Ohm speaker lying around and following the tutorials here it was easy to get it hooked up to my Arduino Uno and start making sounds. By adjusting the default melody and timings I got part way to achieving my R2-D2 style attitude, but notes on their own just didn't cut it. What I needed was some articulations. I got coding and whipped up a library that makes it easy to use glissando and tremolo. Want to give it a try? Grab the code on GitHub Here's a simple example sketch:

#include <pitches.h>;

void setup()
{
MelodyUtils mel(8);
mel.Glis(NOTE_C3, NOTE_C4, 5);
delay(1000);
mel.Trem(NOTE_C3,  Continue reading

Install Raspbmc without a Keyboard or Mouse

Once I had got my iTunes library downgraded to 10.7 and liberated some of my DRM'd media I thought it would be awesome to use my Raspberry Pi as an Airplay Receiver...

Head over to http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ and follow the instructions to download and install Raspbmc. Once you've prepped your SD card, popped it in your Pi hole and got it booted it should start the installation… at this point you can grab a coffee

In older versions of Raspbmc you had to SSH in and enable the web server in /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml

In the latest version this was already enabled, so I just picked up my phone, downloaded the official XBMC remote app from the Android marketplace (or iTunes store if you are that way inclined).

A couple of points of note when adding your host in the XBMC remote app. If you don't know your IP address and your Pi is not automatically found you can find this from your local router. The HTTP port is 80 by default in Raspbmc (not 8080) and the password is blank, although I configured username xbmc and password xbmc and this works just fine!

Once set up it Continue reading

Downgrading from iTunes 11 to 10.7 on OSX

I decided to downgrade my iTunes from 11 to 10.7 for a number of reasons, top most was the fact the the new UI drives me barmy!

I followed the great instructions at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/how-to-downgrade-from-itunes-11-to-version-10-7-on-your-mac/ and found that I couldn't open my iTunes library after the upgrade.

Since I didn't make a library backup before the iTunes 11 upgrade I thought I would be stuck, but to my surprise I found a Previous iTunes Libraries folder in my ~/Music/iTunes

Restoring was as easy as taking my swapping iTunes Library.itl with the file in the Previous iTunes Libraries folder from December and everything worked fine...

One thing I noticed was that my new iTunes purchases didn't show, but this was a minor inconvenience. Now I have the old iTunes back and I'm happy… for now...

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