So you wanna print out your blog ?

Or you need a table of contents ? Or just part of your blog  or a table of contents for some posts in your blog for a particular series of blog posts you have been writing ? And you want that table of contents or printout sorted by date ascending ( oldest entry first ) instead of descending which is the default for all blog engines ?

Blog engines like Blogger or WordPress make it very convenient to blog and provide lots of useful functions, but when it comes to create a printout of your blog – or let’s say a pdf file – or present blog articles in a chronological order instead of reverse chronological as it is the default with all blog engines ( latest entry on top ) then you have to use some workarounds or manual work to achieve this. Printing usually gets messy due to the frame work the blog provider has put around your content,  the left and right side bars appear somewhere in your printout and get in your way.

I have developed a tool currently hosted on Hostcell allowing to import a blog export file from either your WordPress or Blogger blog to easily get a table of contents or blog printout or pdf file.

In my wordpress blog here I have a series of blog posts about my trip through the Northwest of the USA in 2006. Creating a chronological table of contents or pdf version of all these articles now is a piece of cake with the help of my tool “Axel’s Blogs Export XML Parser”. Here it is.

How to use it ?

First of all an export file has to be created from a WordPress or Blogger blog. In WordPress this can be done by going to the dashboard, then selecting Tools – Export. A XML file will be produced and stored on your computer.

Now head to my tool and first click on “Browse…” to specify the location of this XML file on your computer, then click on “Process” to upload the file. The file will be kept only temporarily on my server, after 24 hours latest it will be deleted. A list of all blog entry titles will be shown in the sequence as they appear in your blog.

Now you can re-sort or filter as you wish:

• Check on “Sort by date ?” to sort blog articles by date.
• Check on “Sort by title ?” to sort blog articles by title.
• Check on “Sort descending ?” to do any of  both sorts descending.
• Specify a search term in “Search Title:” to filter your blog posts by post title.
• Alternatively or in addition select one or more tags in the listbox below. Use the radio button “any” or “all” to decide whether any of the tags selected or all need to be assigned to the blog posts you want to filter out.
• Once you have made your choices click on “Process” again.

If you are satisfied with your selection you now have a list of titles with underlying links to these blog posts in front of you in the right frame of the tool. If you view the source code of this frame ( In Friefox do a right-click, then select This Frame –> View Frame Source ) you get the HTML code for your table of contents.

To produce the full output including all the posts content check on the “Full Content ?” check box and click “Process” again. A full print out of your blog posts will appear in the right frame. You can now either print it or use a tool like FreePDF to create your pdf file of these articles.

My favorite flickr CC photo of the week: about clouds, birds and a sea lion

This week with four shots from my favorite flickr photographers publishing under a CC license, simply because I could not make up my mind which one is the best.

"Bruant Hudsonien / Américan Tree Sparrow" by Eric Bégin.	"Space Invaders" by nickpix2009.
"There’s a pool party at sunset – everyone mark your chair with a towel" by Stuck in Customs.	"Old Blue Eyes" by Thomas Hawk.

My favorite quote of the week: about what we actually do with technology

Every week I publish a “My favorites of the week …” blog posting in my company internal blog where I feature my favorite comic strip of the week, my favorite video, favorite photo(s) published on flickr under a Creative Commons license, my favorite quote I found that week and my favorite blog posting. Sometimes I also add my favorite bookmark, my favorite piece of surprising information – I call it “my favorite ‘I did’nt know that’ – or my favorite IT hint or tip.

Today I decided to “re-use” some of that stuff in my external blog. So, here we go with my favorite quote of this week I found on “The Quotations Page”:

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Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it..

Max Frisch ~

If you think about it: Max Frisch is so right with this quote. Think about cars or airplanes: they allow us to get from one location to another within some hours, may be one day to get to the other side on the globe. We get there without actually experiencing what real traveling means, without experiencing the distance between places and all the places between our departure point and destination. When traveling we stare at our mobile computer and plug in our earphones without grasping what is going on in the world we are traveling through. People drive by car everywhere, even shortest distances. They don’t know anymore what it means to walk with their own legs and breath some fresh air. To experience walking they visit gyms and use some machines there to help them making that experience,

Even when we work in our cubicle office landscape we are isolated from all the other people next to us as we communicate via our computer only.

Think about steam engines and machines: they allowed us to move heavy parts without letting our muscles feel what it means to move those weights or to produce a particular amount of energy. Think about the industrial revolution: it allowed us to get much work done and produce many goods without actually working hard. Information technology allows us to communicate with people without actually interacting with them as human beings. Virtual worlds allow us to totally escape reality and live and work somewhere else, while our body is just parked on a seat in front of a computer. It allows us to change our appearance and even gender with a mouse click. Computer games allow to be a hero and fight for the good ( or the bad ) without the need to experience any pain or fear. Modern medical technology even allows us to breath or eat when our body already gave up in doing this.

Look at that WordPress dashboard !

WordPress is doing such an excellent job with their blogging service and provides such an excellent service to their user that I need to share this with you here.

Look at the dashboard they provide for their users. Awesome. It contains everything you need to know about your blog and in my case actually more than I expected.

Let’s look into this a bit deeper:

Screenshot above is from my current WordPress dashboard. It shows:

1. Number of posts I have, number of comments, number of tags I used and number of categories. ( OK, they distinguish between categories and tags which always confuses me a bit. I forgot again what the real difference is ). Number of comments is broken down into number approved, number pending and number of spam comments. They have a system to automatically figure out what is spam and users of course can either approve a comment or mark it as spam.
2. A list of recent comments made to my blog postings
3. Incoming links. This is amazing: they show links to comments I have made on lifehacker and also capture links I have made from my German blog.
4. “Your stuff” which is kind of any activity I have been involved with: comments I left on someone else’s blog, comments arriving in my blog, pingbacks ( someone including myself linking to one of my blog articles ) and postings I have created.
5. “Quick Press” is a tiny little editor in the upper right corner allowing me to quickly blog off right away. Below is a list of my recent drafts.
6. The statistics. Awesome ! A line diagram shows number of visits per day. Below is a list of my top posts with number of views and my most active posts with number of views. I believe the first is the overall total, the second focuses on a most recent time frame, 7 days I guess. Very insightful: the “Top searches” showing how people found my blog posts. In my case currently: kinds of humor,  magic bus, alaska,  virtualbox audio cpu vista,  kinds of humour,  win95 under xp. A link leads to a more detailed page with all sorts of interesting information where you can also get that line chart by day, week or month:
   
   Such kind of a chart gives you an idea to what extent your blog is gaining momentum and can be a great motivator to keep you going.

I am impressed — and it is hard to impress me.

Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

Windows Live Writer (WLW), the first external blog editor supporting the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), now is out of beta and available for download as version 2008 since a couple of weeks already. I grabed it right away and can tell you: I am impressed.  It comes with an excellent user interface and like most other Microsoft products is a solid peace of very useful software.

I have been very impressed how easy and convenient it is to tag blog postings, to edit them once they are out on a blog and to maintain multiple blogs.

My satisfaction definitely has been increased by discovering the fact that WLW can be further extended through plug-ins and that actually 70 plug-ins – some of them very useful – are already available !

To find and install a plug-in simply click on the “Add a Plug-in…” link. As you see in the screen shot below I already installed a few plug-ins which turned out to be real useful.

• The “Insert Space Emoticon” plug-in allows you to easily enrich your blog posts with some emoticons from Windows Live Spaces.
• “Insert Quote Of The Day” allows you to pick a quote from a list of recent quotes and insert it into your blog posting as a quote for the day: Quote of the day:
  When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not. – Mark Twain
• “Insert Amazon Link” lets you create a nice reference to a book from Amazon in your blog posting. In order to do this you first need to find your book in Amazon of course, then invoke that plug-in. Grab the first number appearing in the URL to that book in Amazon and fill it in as “Affiliate Id” and “ASIN”, then also specify the country extension of your Amazon site ( like DE for Germany ) – and you get something inserted into your blog posting as seen below.  Yesterday night I finsihed reading this book:

  Amazon.de: Luther. Buch zum Film. ISBN: 3746620007 ISBN-13: 9783746620008

• “Insert Acronyms” is another very useful plug-in. It allows you to find the meaning of acronyms and actually make those descriptions appear in your blog post. You have several options how and with what HTML tags this will be done. See the abbreviation I used in the first paragraph of this blog article ? Just hover over this one with the mouse and you’ll learn what APP means. ( This one actually was not resolved by the acronym search, but fortunately the plug-in allowed me to type in my own description )
• Like to reference to a particular posting in any RSS feed ? Use the “Insert Form Feed” plug-in to insert a link to that article including the first so many words ( configurable). Let’s see what I have been blogging about last time here in my blog:
  From San Francisco to Seattle in 30 days – Day 19+20
  

  September 22nd (Day 19): Skyline Trail Marmot at Nisqually Glacier at Mt. Rainier, getting ready for the winter The nicest birthday present I could possibly get for today was this gorgeous weather with blue skies and sunshine. After a hearty breakfast at Copper Creek Restaurant we again drove through the park and then we saw the mighty [...]

•  
  
  How to use the Template plug-in…

  Invoke menu options Insert -> Template…, define a new template or re-use a template you already defined before.

• “Templates Plugin” is a powerful tool to manage your favorite HTML code snippets to enrich your blog postings even further. For instance if you have a code snippet to create a text box on the right you can store and re-use it easily through this plug in. It becomes available through the menu item Insert -> Template …
• Inserting code snippets into blog postings on BlogCentral always has been a pain. Let’s see what the “Insert Code Snippet” plug-in can do for us:

     1: <br>

     2: <div style="width: 30%; float: right; margin-left: 10px; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 221); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10px;">

     3: <div style="background-color: rgb(51, 102, 119); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 5px; padding-top: 2px;">

     4: How to use the Template plug-in...

     5: </div> 

     6: Invoke menu options Insert -> Template..., define a new template or re-use a template you already defined before.

     7: </div>

     8: <br>

  Note the syntax highlighting and line numbering ? How cool is that ! Here you see the HTML code I have used for this template mentioned above.

• Inserting images you host on flickr or picasa becomes easy now with the help of the “Insert Flickr Image” and “Picasa Link” plug-ins.

  

    

This is excellent stuff, isn’t it ?! There are more plug-ins out there to explore and I have the strong feeling that blogging in the near future becomes twice as much fun as it always has been already.

About Marco Polo, innovation from China and the passion to write

Marco Polo was a great traveler. He was born in 1254 and died in 1324, thus became 70 years old and spent 24 of those years with traveling. At an age of 17 he accompanied his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo for their second trip to China to the court of Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan. Kublai Khan seemed to like him, thus Marco decided to stay there for a while and actually started again to travel for Kublai Khan now on diplomatic missions and to explore his kingdom. A passionate globetrotter, I must say.

I was watching a TV-movie about his trip recently with Ian Somerhalder starring as Marco Polo. Images below are taken from that movie.

As they entered China they had been astonished and surprised by all the innovative things they discovered there and had not seen before:

gunpowder and fireworks	a compass	charcoal	ice cream	paper money

In these times the world had not been explored entirely yet, thus it was possible to reveal innovation by simply bumping into new cultures isolated from the rest of the world.
Nowadays we won’t have that luxury anymore to reveal innovative things like this by simply traveling around, since there might not be any undiscovered civilization anymore on this planet. In order to obtain some breakthru innovation like Marco Polo did we would have to travel to extraterrestrial places which itself would require some huge amount of innovation to overcome todays limitations of physics preventing us to get there where other intelligent life might exist. Or of course they might show up on our planet some time and bring us some breakthru technology – or the end of our civilization.
Thus the easy way to obtain innovation could be also the most risky one. Traveling a distance like Marco Polo and his friends did through many unknown countries actually has been a risky endeavor as well in these times.

Marco Polo also was a passionate writer. What a pitty that blogging had not been invented yet. There is a scene in that movie where they rest in the desert and Marco is taking notes into his diary.

His father: “What is this ?”
Marco Polo: “My diary. I document our experiences and our route to China.”
His father: “We are trader. Would be better if you spent your time on arithmetics.”

His uncle Maffeo (angered, trying to take the diary away from Marco) : “And what if someone else finds this and uses our route and will become rich instead of us ? How would you like that ? Knowledge is power, and power leads to prosperity. That’s why we are here, Marco, so that the family Polo controls the gate to the plentifulness of China.”
His father: “Books belong to the most dangerous things in the world, Marco.”
His father asks him to hand the book to him, but Marco refuses to do so and leaves.
His uncle shouting: “Who ever would actually ever read this writing ? Those who find your bones ?”

Somehow this reminded me of the discussion about blogging ( simply replace “book” or “diary” with “blog” in the dialog above ): What is this good for ? Shouldn’t we spend our time on something more important ? And: isn’t it dangerous to actually reveal your own knowledge ? And if not: who would read that anyway ?

I wonder how many people have traveled this route to China before, discovering all these amazing things without letting the rest of the world know about ? Marco Polo might not have been the first one, but he was probably the first one who was passionate about writing things down and sharing them with the rest of the world.