I generally use Wikipedia to look up pub dates for books I am reading and to keep track of series orders etc. Imagine my surprise when I looked up Blake Charlton — who has three books published by Tor — and there was no entry. While I have occasionally edited a Wikipedia article, I have never attempted to write one from scratch so this looked like a good opportunity.

I did a brief bit of research and outlined a brief entry (see below). Then I submitted it without creating an ID. This puts it into a hold queue waiting for review from more senior Wikipedians (Wikipediaites?) to review, approve or reject.

The interface is surprisingly easy to maneuver at first but it becomes increasingly more complex and arcane as you get down to details. Which is as it should be I suppose.

The queued entry can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Blake_Charlton

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Blake Charlton

Blake Charlton (1979-) is an American science fiction author. He is the author of the Spellbreaker series published by Tor books and currently a cardiology fellow at the University of California San Francisco. As boy Charlton had to deal with severe dyslexia but has he managed to overcome his condition and learned to read fluently by the age of 13.

Blake’s non-fiction has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine, The British Medical Journal, and The New York Times. and his science fiction short stories have appeared in the Seeds of Change and the Unfettered anthologies.

Charlton graduated summa cum laude from Yale University studying English Language and Literature and went on to graduate from Stanford Medical School.

The Spellwright trilogy is set in a world where languages for the basis for magic. Nicodemus Weal is a cacographer (similar to Charlton’s own dyslexia), who nonetheless is talented in magical languages. But his disability that causes misspelling in any text he touches.

Bibliography

Series fiction

Spellwright

• Spellwright (2010, Tor Books, ISBN 0-7653-8856-8)
• Spellbound (2011, Tor Books, ISBN 0-7653-5659-8)
• Spellbreaker (2016, Tor Books, ISBN 0-7653-1729-2)

References

1. http://dyslexia.yale.edu/charlton.html
2. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Charlton
3. http://www.blakecharlton.com
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/opinion/defining-my-own-dyslexia.html

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This entry created and uploaded as a part of the Ulysses testing process.

A writing program

Ulysses is a writing program that I putzed with for about 5 minutes during NaNoWriMo but didn’t look at again. Then it turned out they were offering a few free copies of the software to lucky contestants in a draw. I entered. I won. So now I have my own fully functional copy of Ulysses to play with.

It features iCloud syncing, sheets that can be merged etc, export styles, and attachments. Ulysses is designed to make writing easier. I have generally used IA Writer Classic in the past because I have old version that work on my old first gen iPad. I am not sure yet if I will switch but that’s what this exercise is for.

Markdown

Ulysses uses Markdown XL for formatting functions. I have previously dabbled in Markdown on the blog but this has a few more bells and whistles. The full list of available definitions is accessible via ?9 or the toolbar’s A| button.

I am writing these all down again as a reminder to myself and to practice getting used to the language.

Heads (preceded by pound symbols — one for each level)

quote: preceded by greater than (>) symbol

emphasis is ?I or a bracketed by single asterisks (*)

Bold is ?B or a bracketed by double asterisks (**)

A divider is 4 dashes

——

Lists

• unordered lists
• are preceded
• by a dash
• and a space

1. ordered lists
2. are preceded by
3. the numeral,
4. a period
5. and the space

Add highlighted text (bracketed by double colons ::) or deletions (bracketed by double vertical bars ||)

Comments are bracketed by double plus symbols ++you can see this comment only because I overrode the code++

…or are paragraphs preceded by double percent signs

%% This is a comment paragraph, again visible 
because I used code to override

Text Objects

A Footnote¹ Type (fn), enter your footnote text and hit Cmd-return

To add a link, type square brackets [ ] around a word or phrase (or use the ?K shortcut).

To add an annotation type curly brackets { } around a phrase, It is basically a note added to that phrase. I don’t think it exports.

<a href="sample code> is done by bracketing with the tick mark (found under the tilde). Entire paragraphs can be done by preceding with double single quote marks

code code code code etc

Executable code that won’t show in a pdf but will in a html doc can be made by using Raw Source: bracketing with double tildes or paragraphs preceded by double tildes.

So this ~~<a href="http://www.neverforever.ca">A link to neverforever.ca done manually in html</a>~~ appears as this:

A link to neverforever.ca done manually in html
And finally, here’s a link to a pdf which seems to upload the file but not link properly to it when exported direct to WordPress. (Here’s the link since it did upload the pdf: A Test-drive of a Ulysses)

And that’s it for the Markdown portion of Ulysses. More to come…

1. This is a footnote (it appears at the bottom with an automatic link) ?

When I started up neverforever.ca I had intended it for a broader audience than my personal blog so that meant making some attempt at promotion was called for. Besides sharing links for each post on Facebook and Twitter, I also answered a call from threesheetsnw.com to provide content for their site aggregator. They would repost the first couple of paragraphs and or images from a post that they thought was appropriate for their readership and then link to my site for the balance. They didn’t pick up every post I made but did contribute significantly to the traffic overall.

But not so long ago I was looking at the site stats and noticed that a whole bunch of viewers —hundreds! — of my post about my trip down to LA had come from the same site — which was actually someone’s e-newsletter. Seems Cruising Compass had picked up the story and republished an excerpt and link in their weekly newsletter and of course also on their home site, BWSailing.com, under the heading Website of the Week (A West Coast Journey: Not So Offshore).

Now I in no way mind that they did this, but I do wonder at the lack of permission seeking or even notification. I would never had known about it if I hadn’t investigated the spike in traffic. I originally had thought it was due to my latest post , but quickly realized that it was for a post that was over a month old. That led to discovering the above. But, as they say, any publicity is good publicity…

Guess who got a new action camera? I picked up a SJ4000 from 6mega for only $120. I decided to go for it after watching a review of different underwater cameras by Gone with the Wynns. It comes with an underwater housing and a bunch of mounts. And hey, for 120 bucks how can you go wrong?

Seriously though, I am hoping it will make getting some good sailing footage much easier. Now I just have to wait for sailing season…

 

 

My ride home from buying microSD cards. It’s always something…

In a long-line of new cameras I now present…

My New Camera!

A Nikon L830

My first digital camera was a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ1. It died on our trip west in 2007 so I was forced to borrow my Mom’s Canon. I replaced it with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ7 because I had been happy with the first one up until it died. One of the things I confirmed was that when travelling I like using regular batteries. Hanging out in campground bathrooms waiting for a battery to charge was not “on.” So when my trusty Panasonic died at the end of our last sailing trip it was time to go shopping again.

But cameras that run on AA batteries are few and far between. I finally landed on the L830 because I figured on the boat that compact was not the biggest concern and the  30X zoom would finally allow me to take a picture of a whale or dolphin that wasn’t just a speck. It takes 4 AAs instead of 2 but the battery life is supposed to be pretty good (another thing I don’t like about the rechargeables).

So I guess we will see; I havent had any opportunity to try it out yet. I got some stunning images with the old Panasonic and I will miss it but that’s what happens in this fast-paced world of ours.

Some favourites from the old camera:

About 15 minutes after I wrote the below post my dissatisfaction with that plugin and Jetpack’s Publicize (which posts to social media like Facebook and Twitter) sent me looking for an all-in-one solution. The most popular plugin seemed to be SNAP (Social Networks Auto Poster), so I gave it a try. It does require you to create an app in both Facebook’s and Twitter’s developer pages but the step-by-step instructions were detailed and flawless.

As a result I now am using the plugin on neverforever.ca and it auto-posts all new content to all three (and more if I want) sites.

Slick-er

I have been neglecting this blog after a great start to the year… sigh. It was mostly a conflation of an issue of the magazine, buying a boat and then setting up another blog for the boat. I have read a lot of boat blogs leading up to our decision and thought I would document our ‘journey’ for the edification of others.

Anyway one of the things I wanted to set up to help alleviate the problem was a way to post to both blogs at once. When we get going it is unlikely I will have the time or bandwidth to maintain both blogs. My initial attempt is using a plugin called feedwordpress. What it does is allow this blog (macblaze.ca) to monitor the RSS feed from neverforever.ca and then, when a new post appears, syndicate (repost) it here.

It’s not the simplest interface I have come across and so far the bells and whistles don’t seem to functioning as advertised but the basic premise is ok. The big issue was I couldn’t get it to do it automatically without digging through the wiki. It seems I needed to set up a cronjob on my web server. Now I am pretty lucky and my server has a great interface. I just went to the crontab button and added the command:

 */10 * * * * /usr/bin/curl --silent http://macblaze.ca/?update_feedwordpress=1

And then I added a test post and voila! What this does is tells the server to go to the url “macblaze.ca/?update_feedwordpress=1” every 10 minutes. By doing that the plugin does an update on the RSS feed and then posts anything new.

Slick.

The issues comes with the options to control the post categories and post authors. To date I haven’t been able to make those options work. But I’ll keep trying. And I will have to remember to remove the cron job if I dump this particular plugin.

 

I am so a visual person. Most times if I am trying to explain something I will grope around for a paper and pen to try and sketch it out even if it has nothing to do with a visual concept. Hell, you should see my notes from writing papers in University—tree diagrams and thought bubbles…

Anyway I came across this cool tool today while reading an online argument about pulleys and mechanical advantage. One that I would never have been able to follow without the many sketches involved. It’s an online whiteboard (free) that allows you to quickly sketch something out and then share it. Like this:

Above is a hot link to the image on their site. I don’t know how long it will be hosted there but you can just as easily download the image and host it yourself:

But even if the hot link doesn’t last for ever, this is a totally, totally awesome tool for communicating remotely. https://awwapp.com/

 

I can’t believe I don’t have blog post about this. But I went looking for it today to make some adjustments to my new boating blog and there are absolutely no instances of me blogging about it. So without further ado…

Reversing Blog Post Order

One of the things you often come across is a blog or online journal that traces someone’s journey. For me lately this has been blogs of boaters or people who have set out on a grand adventure to sail away from their land-based lives. Naturally you want to read these from the beginning to the end. I was/am astounded the number of blogs that don’t allow this. But its not really surprising given the hoops one has to jump through in order to change how a blog is designed to be used. This is my solution for WordPress but there must be one out there for Blogger or other common blogs.

Since this blog uses a theme I designed myself from ground up, I figured it should be pretty easy too solve the issue and this turned out to be pretty true. For a couple of years now people have been able to read my Trip Reports in chronological order simply by reading them by category. With a bit of file editing, this was a snap to do.

Duplicate the category.php page ( /wp-content/themes/[your theme])and rename it category-(insert category ID).php. For example all the posts in my Broughton trip are in category with the ID of 89, so I created category-89.php file in my Theme’s folder. WordPress automatically uses that file when asked to display all the posts in the Broughtons category. Finding the category ID might take a bit of trial and error.

The Loop

Most category pages will have a thing called The Loop, which essentially calls all the entries from the database while certain conditions are true. WordPress’s default is to call the posts in descending order. This is the basic loop:

<?php 
if ( have_posts() ) {
    while ( have_posts() ) {
        the_post(); 
        //
        // Post Content here
        //
    } // end while
} // end if
?>

To change the order I edit that file’s php adding <?php query_posts($query_string.”&orderby=date&order=ASC”); ?> after the initial if ( have_posts() ) call. That way the loop calls the individual posts in ascending order. Since this is done in the custom category php file it only effects that specific category. Other categories will still display posts in the traditional descending order.

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : ?><?php query_posts($query_string."&orderby=date&order=ASC"); ?>

Good Code

Now I am admittedly not much of a coder and since I wanted to have all Trip Reports viewable in ascending order, this method has resulted in a score of category-x.php files littering up my theme. But it worked for me and I haven’t been motivated to change it.

But now that I have started to work on a boat blog and I wanted to use someone else’s more elegant theme, my simple solution didn’t work. For one thing the theme I chose didn’t have a loop in the category page, but simply a Function that called the loop based on a parameter of ‘category’. Then when I investigated the function.php file, I found this theme doesn’t use a simple and easily parsed Loop and, since it’s a Function not a direct php call, the code is subtly different.

The theme’s function used one main loop to do calls for all the various scenarios: list by category, list by author, list on front page, list on blog page, etc. What I needed to do was find the appropriate IF statement and embed query_posts (array( ‘orderby’ => ‘date’, ‘order’ => ‘ASC’)); within the appropriate <?php statement. A bit of trial and error resulted in a limited success. Always remember to have backups you can revert to! Now if you select anything but the default post view i.e. a category page, all posts will now be displayed in ascending order.

If I want to display only certain categories or posts by certain authors I am going to have to figure out both how and where to insert a custom IF statement in the Function or easier yet add a new Function by duplicating the existing one, adding the change and renaming it. Then I can call it from my typical custom Category page. I haven’t decided which is a more elegant yet simple solution…

 

Postscript

So after all that I still updated the Fruitful theme and still lost my custom code, and this babling above was still not enough to make it an easy fix. Sigh.

So what I needed to do was insert the code below in the functions.php file at around line 1670.

/* CUSTOM REVERSE ORDER ON CATEGORIES ETC */
query_posts (array( 'orderby' => 'date', 'order' => 'ASC'));
/*END CUSTOM*/

This is the section that starts if ( ! function_exists( ‘fruitful_get_content_with_custom_sidebar’ ) ) and comes right after the

< ?php if ( have_posts() ) : ?>

somewhere around line 1735

< ?php 
/* CUSTOM REVERSE ORDER ON CATEGORIES ETC */ query_posts (array( 'orderby' => 'date', 'order' => 'ASC'));
/*END CUSTOM*/
            if ( is_category() )

I have been having trouble using the WordPress app with my site. It  gives me an error (NSXMLParserErrorDomain Error 111) and then locks me out of the site. So I have been unable to post using the WordPress app at all. After much Googling and a few go-rounds with my hosting provider, I had a solution that involved disabling ModSecurity but even that failed to be a long term fix. I mean, who wants to disable anything that has Security in it?

So for the 10 millionth time I stretched out pleading arms to Google and voila! This Topic turned up on the ios.forums.wordpress.org site. Using all the right words the OP asks the right questions an get the right answers.

Hello,
I’m having some troubles with the XMLRPC requestes that the iOS app generates. I manage a WordPress 4.1.1 set as a Network install.

My hosting company has the ModSecurity activated and, for that reason, it blocks every time the users that have the App:
Message: Access denied with code 403, [Rule: ‘user:bf_block’ ‘@gt 0’] [id “117”] [msg “IP address blocked for 5 minutes. More than 2 XMLRPC POST requests within 60 seconds.”] [severity “WARNING”] [MatchedString “1”]

My question is: is it possible to limit the amount of XMLRPC requests if someone only open the stats page (and not, for example, the Post or Comments page)?
Or, better, limit the XMLRPC requests only if the user opens the Post, Page or Comments pages?

Thank you in advance,
Gabriele

****

After browsing some other topics, I figure out that the issue comes from the latest App version that makes too many XML-RPC requests that are interpreted as a potential attack and blocked.

The block works at IP level and that’s the reason why if you use WiFi for example, you won’t be able to connect to your website anymore (you see 403 or 406 errors).

At the moment the only possible solutions are uninstalling the App or temporary disabling the ModSecurity, waiting for a solution for the App developers.

****

Hi Gabriele

More than 2 XMLRPC POST requests within 60 seconds.

That is a ridiculously low limit. Who is your hosting company?

You might also try the steps in this FAQ to rename your xmlrpc.php file and avoid triggering the block.

Right there, in the FAQ, that I couldn’t find in any of my previous attempts is the answer:

1. My Host Blocks XML-RPC Access! How do I fix that?
   1. Rename your xmlrpc.php file to something different, but only change it after the ‘xmlrpc’. Ex: xmlrpc_wp.php.
   2. Install this plugin. (Rename XMLRPC By Jorge Bernal)
   3. Read the installation instructions and activate it.
   4. Remove your blog from the app and add it back again.

And now, for now, all is golden. I guess even in this age of the internet and instant info, the maxim of “Try, try again…” is still in force.