TextExpander from Smile Software is a nifty piece of software for Mac OS X and iOS 4.x that allows you to type special abbreviation codes, and then the software, hovering in the background, expands the abbreviation to whatever snippet of text you’ve associated with that particular abbreviation. TextExpander will also correct common typos and misspelled…
As part of my determination to come up with a cleaner less keystroke-intensive workflow for all my writing, I’m taking a hard look at Markdown. I first heard about Markdown back in 2004. I’d been blogging for a few years, and and hand-coding HTML. I came to HTML with surface familiarity with SGML in a library…
Given the release of Yosemite for OS X and iOS 8, I’m taking the opportunity to re-examine and revise my writing workflow. I write a great deal, not only books and articles for publishers, but blog posts and email. I am an Admin for a number of large Websites. Two of the Websites include not…
In 2007 Joe Kissell, an able an adept technical writer about all things Macintosh with a serious interest in preparing and consuming good food, turned his geekly technical writing skills to documenting the creation of Thanksgiving dinner. Take Control of Thanksgiving, a guide to planning, shopping, and preparing Thanksgiving dinner is the book I wish I’d…
I’ve written about VDM (Verlag Dr. Mueller), an exploitive academic/scholarly mill before. Writer Beware writer advocate and writer Victoria Strauss notes that VDM has a new wrinkle: . . . a company called Bloggingbooks that wants to publish your blog in book form Read Writer Beware’s warning about Bloggingbooks. Run away; you can do this…
I like social networking sites for bibliophiles. I’ve tried most of them. The recent idiocies surrounding Goodreads has had me re-thinking my participation for quite a while. The latest Goodreads faux pas has Goodreads deleting reviews and user’s shelves based on arbitrary criteria about shelf labels referring to authors. There’s a certain irony in that…