⚡ October 28, 2014
Stockpiles and Treasures 🎁
We’re having a calm autumn, and I am very grateful for that. Instead of a devastating ice storm or pretty bad hurricane, this October has been peaceful. The big maple behind the house is still standing and its leaves are now half-yellow and half-green; she is tall and regal and fanning herself as the days shiver into sweater weather.
I am working all the time now in Sublime, which is an amazing text-entry program. It is also sublime and cuddly, sturdy and customizable and dependable. If you enjoy writing or coding or any kind of linear text-inputting, you may fall in love with this program, especially if you are a demanding nit-picker who also likes pretty things.
I take all my notes, however, in a different program called nvALT, another critical tool in my toolkit, as well as TextExpander. I hope this list of trusty products will help any web-weary traveler who might stumble here in the middle of the night. I found my way through the thickets this very same way – by admiring other people’s toolkits, following links, and trying things out.
For now, I want to see how I can better integrate Softcover and Jekyll. Both of these collections of tools or perhaps full-fledged frameworks are written in Ruby, which I began researching a couple of years ago for a paused novel. I am still trying to learn Ruby, of course, but so far I haven’t really needed it. It seems to operate as a sort of play-and-plug system of building blocks that work smoothly if you follow a few simple steps, so I’m content in letting wizards create and curate the code that I depend on.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to find the right tagging instructions for Markdown and all its pretenders so that I can make finally achieve the golden dream of creating just one file for all the various ebook and eweb and e-whatever else comes along. The goal here is to make a new book/magazine product that will be just like my Sublime experience: something cuddly, sturdy, customizable, and dependable.
Postscript November 5, 2014
I just figured out that if I use Sublime for my writing instead of Scrivener, and if I set the raw text file to the Ruby pulldown syntex-coloring engine that you can choose for yourself from a user-submitted library that never stops expanding, well, I can sort of learn the Ruby protocals as I write. Try it, if you know what I’m talking about. It’s fun! 🐔