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.

Astronomy software gadgets

NGC 1333

Those of you who like astronomy might be happy to read about two nice offerings I bumped into last week:

• Google Sky – a web based offering from Google obviously, allowing you to explore the sky. It works similar to Google Maps: you can zoom in and out, move around, view the sky with different filters like infrared or microwave, and you can actually share URLs, like this one here of NGC 1333, a reflection nebula in the constellation “Perseus”, a chaotic star birth area 1.000 light-years away from earth, with a very young ( only 10.000 years old ) star, IRAS 4B, where with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope a lot of water has been discovered, according also to an article in the latest issue of “bild der wissenschaft” I have been reading recently.
• Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, a nice looking virtual telescope on your desktop after you have downloaded and installed  it ( after you have checked the pre-requisites ! ). This allows very smooth navigation through the sky, searching for objects and retrieving additional information, discovering constellations and then traveling into the deep space to lots of objects of interest ( NGC 1333 is in there as well ). You can also view our planets, zoom closer, turn them and you even can zoom down to our blue planet and discover it like you can do with Google Earth by using different types of maps ( streets, hybrid etc … ).

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 [...]

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  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.