Tag Archives: blogging

Markdown FTW

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Markdown is my new favorite tool.

It all started while looking for alternatives to LaTeX to write documents and booklets, because since the release of the iPad last year, I wanted to publish in PDF and in EPUB format at the same time, and LaTeX does not offer that option off the box.

And, besides, I really found that LaTeX was a great system, but reading LaTeX code was not always enjoyable. It’s a bit of a messy markup language.

So that’s how I learnt about Pandoc; it is an incredible tool written in Haskell that pretty much transforms any kind of markup into another: RTF, MediaWiki syntax, HTML, LaTeX, Textile, you name it. However, it extends and gives a special status to Markdown, as one of its primary formats, and it provides support to create PDF and EPUB files out of the box; bingo, that’s exactly what I needed. Even better, it uses LaTeX to generate PDF files, which means that I can reuse my LaTeX knowledge to generate beautiful documents.

But then, learning more about Markdown (the syntax is not very far away from Textile, which I knew better), I remembered that StackOverflow uses it; that GitHub uses it; and then I found an excellent Markdown plugin for WordPress and another great Markdown Redmine plugin. Then I updated Elements recently on my iPad (an excellent Dropbox-powered text editor for the iPad), and found out that it had native Markdown support. And of course, both MacVim and TextMate have an excellent Markdown support, including syntax highlighting and preview. And finally, even better, I discovered that MarsEdit supports Markdown natively.

So that’s it, I’m sold. I’m writing almost everything these days with Markdown. And it’s a simple, pure joy.

PS: I’m even considering buying Marked by Brett Terpstra, or even Macchiato (although this last one seems to me a bit pricey).

5 years

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Today it’s the 5th anniversary of the article that would eventually become the first post of this blog. I was leaving Buenos Aires, again, and I wrote that on my old G3 iBook in the airport of Ezeiza, right before boarding. That trip was very important, for many reasons that don’t fit on a single blog entry.

Since then, I met Claudia, we got married, I finished my master degree and started my own company. Even hernún came to Switzerland! I’ve moved from talking about .NET to giving interviews about the iPhone. I’ve published as much text and code as I could, but most importantly, I kept on creating things.

Thanks to all of you, for your comments, your support, your ideas, your code, your critics. I’ve really learnt a lot during these years, and I hope my ramblings will be useful to you in the future as well.

Cheers! Salud! Santé!

New RSS Feed URL

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A quick message to my subscribers: I’ve moved the URL of the RSS feed to FeedBurner, following the advice of my good friend Thierry Weber, so from now the new official RSS feed URL for Open Kosmaczewski is http://feeds.feedburner.com/kosmaczewski/feed.

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Thanks for your support! Your comments, support and fidelity are astounding: you are a great audience! I look forward to continue serving you with code, tips, nice reading, and powerful rants in the future.

Update, 2009-08-08: for those wandering how to configure their WordPress installation to use FeedBurner, just follow these instructions. It includes a link to the legendary FeedSmith plugin.

Steve Yegge on Apple APIs

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A comment at the bottom of his own lengthy but otherwise interesting article:

One more important point: I’m surprised that some people seem to think I’m implying some programming studliness from my little 3-day excursion. Not so: any first-year college student or intern, or heck, self-taught dude in his basement, could have done exactly what I did. I failed utterly to convey the right point here, by unfortunately being way too subtle about it. The recounting of total hours spent was a hats-off compliment to Apple for having written such great APIs, documentation, and tools. Let me be clearer about it, then: Apple’s development environment is nothing short of amazing, which I fully expected, knowing it derived originally from NeXTStep and has had fifteen or twenty years of innovations piled on. The APIs are _clean_. This is why I was able to narrow down the APIs I needed so quickly. The whole thing I got working was no more than 50 lines of code, most of it error-handling. That’s C code, so it’s impressive how much it accomplishes in so little space. The takeaway here is that more programmers ought to jump in and start playing with OS X. You get results faster than you’d think.

WordPress 2.5

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I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5 and so far I love it. The only glitch was an easy-to-fix UTF-8 problem but that’s it. Everything’s working.

By the way, I love its new media browser! It makes it easy to find old items I’ve published ages ago, like the image below :)

Update, 2008-03-31: There is a problem with comment moderation…

Update, 2008-03-31: I found the error with the comment moderation! Somehow the updater failed to create an index in the comment_date_gmt column of the wp_comments table! If you fail to manage your comments properly, go to your preferred MySQL interface (command line, or like in my case, phpMyAdmin) and add an index to that column, reload your comment management page, and you’re done!

6 blogs you should read… absolutely

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Maybe you don’t have the time or will to read those damn 6 books every year. And maybe that’s fine (for you). I will give you a list of 6 blogs that you can add to your RSS reader. If you care a little about software engineering, new technology trends, and enjoy reading well-written, usually lengthy articles (as I do), IMHO you should be checking these.

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No, mine isn’t in the list :) You can proceed without fear now. Continue reading →

My first Django project

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So here it is, my first Django project: the gazillionth blog engine on the planet!. As if there weren’t enough, right? :) Actually it was a practical and easy way to learn the Django project, and the result is pretty neat. Feel free to download it, play with it, and give me your feedback. Here’s a sample screenshot in Safari:

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Creating this project I have had a practical experience comparing both Django and, of course, Rails. The subject is not new in this blog; however, this time I could play with both frameworks and as such, I can bring my small amount of confusion in this big framework tar pit. Continue reading →

years; años; ans

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I’ve been blogging for three years today. Thanks to you for your 239 comments that make this blog so unique and special; I wish you a very Happy New Year 2008!

Hoy este blog cumple tres años. Gracias a todos ustedes por sus 239 comentarios que hacen tan único y especial a este blog; les deseo que tengan un hermoso año nuevo 2008!

Aujourd’hui ce blog fête trois ans! Merci à vous tous pour vos 239 commentaires qui font de ce blog quelque chose de très unique et spécial; et je vous souhaite une très belle nouvelle année 2008!

:)