Journler – Back from the Almost Dead

Journler (yes, that is the correct spelling) is intriguing software that I used for a while some years back. The developer, Phillip Dow, stopped development in 2009, but he posted a couple of days ago that he is open sourcing the application and introducing a new application called Per Se.
Journler – Blog:

I’ve finally decide to open source Journler 100%. Some of Journler has already been open sourced but the aim over the next few months is to release all of the code into the public domain. If you’re interested in helping with this effort, see the Sprouted Developers page.
I do this reluctantly. Quite frankly the code is a mess, and it’s a personal embarrassment to make that work available to scrutinizing developers more capable than myself three years ago. Nevertheless, I believe it’s the best decision and the best opportunity for closure. In a sense I am freeing Journler from myself and releasing it to anyone who’d like it. It also paves the way for future development.

Per Se is journaling software. It will incorporate some of Journler’s capabilities such as embedding multimedia and photos while mimicking the paper journal. Frankly, that kills the deal for me. I’m not a fan of anthropomorphic applications that mimic real world objects. When I want to write in a physical journal, I’ll get a nice pen and do so. Typing in a pseudo journal (or calendar, or photo album) doesn’t do it for me.
That said, some people love that sort of thing and I’m sure that Phil will deliver the goods if it is anywhere near the high caliber of Journler.
Also note that Phil is closing down the existing site and forums and launching Sprouted Software to maintain Journler and Per Se. It’s certainly worth following and I’m excited to see where the open source community takes Journler.
(Via Phil Dow’s Journler Blog)

Good Journalism is *Hard*

In my previous post I alluded to my background as a writer for local newspapers. Those publications served rural northwest Georgia. One of my editors shared some advice years ago that stuck with me; that reporters should write everything as if they’re explaining to a sixth-grader.
It is crucial for everyone to understand the complexities of government for this nation to continue to move forward in a positive way. Journalists must be able to explain the complications of municipal funding–where money comes from, how it’s spent, and why it’s spent that way–in a way that everyone who can vote can cast their ballot with confidence because the understand.
It doesn’t matter if the voter is a rich 17-year-old private school student, a 50-year-old cashier at the local clothing store who was a freshman when she dropped out of high school in 1975, or a 84-year-old retired farmer with a third-grade education. Everyone, every eligible voter, is empowered with the ability to change everything.
And that’s why a journalist’s job is so important. The writer must have a complete understanding of the material to redeliver it with clarity, brevity, and free of bias. It doesn’t matter if he is covering Teacher of the Year or the need for voters to approve a special tax to buy equipment to improve roads (because the ability to do the labor in-house is cheaper that contracted labor and will save money in the long run).
It means the writer must understand the county tax digest fluctuates based on new construction and annual property reassessments, and how those variables impact the value of the millage rates set by county, city, and state governments. And how the proposed tax for equipment can only be used to buy equipment and can’t supplement the property taxes used to pay employee salaries and benefits for the school district, city council, or county office.
It means understanding how state laws and local ordinances may impact the outcome of a court case and having knowledge of area history to keep everything in context for local readers.
Remember our farmer friend? He needs to understand all of that and way more to make an educated decision at the polls. He and millions of his pals are a part of this social experiment called democracy in America and journalists owe it to all of them to present the most complex issues in the most understandable way without killing the context of the content.
Good journalism is hard.

Put "Something" There

After professing my allegiance to Path Finder during a conversation about TotalFinder on Twitter, Mike Alsup said:

ftp put

While it’s not speedy command line magic and isn’t limited to Path Finder, but it’s possible to automount remote WebDAV drives at login and they’ll be waiting for you to put whatever you would like in there. The easiest way for Normals to set this up is using the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

  1. Set up your Finder/Path Finder/TotalFinder so that when you mount a remote drive you can see it on the desktop.
  2. Use your mouse to visit the Apple menu in the top left corner and open your System Preferences.
  3. Once System Preferences is open, click on Accounts, then Login Items under your user account.
  4. Can you still see the remote WebDAV drive on your desktop? Good. Drag that to your list of Login Items in System Preferences.

If you’ve managed to follow those four steps then your remote drive will now be available every time you login to your computer. Your settings may limit where the remote WebDAV drive will show up, but it could now be on your desktop and in the device section of your file management system of choice. Drag and drop to your heart’s content! If you prefer the command line you can find at /Volumes/remotedrivename.
Update: The remote drive jumps around a bit when you want to save something (at least in my Path Finder setup). When you save a file directly from your program to the remote, it’s moved from “Devices” to “Shared.”

N.B. I don’t assume people reading this are clueless. After spending years writing for local newspapers I learned to write to what I believe is the lowest common denominator to ensure all readers are able to take something with them after reading my article. This probably deserves a post of its own.

Tags are the new Category

Eliminating categories in favor of tags on my blog http://nwgawriter.wordpress.com.Providing easy access to my blog history is an important service to provide for to my readers. I am changing how I do things on this blog and want to announce a change on Carrying Stones for the six or seven readers who stumble into my trap each week.
You may not realize this, but the code monkeys running WordPress.com provide two options for their bloggers to sort out their posts; categories and tags.
Categories are pretty inflexible and tend to grow like a topical stew. “Let’s throw a few tech posts in there, and another few about my kids. Tech may not be clear enough though. What about tech and mac and mac os x and iphone and apps and applications and word processing and schedules and desk and productivity…well, do you see the problem? No? Let me take it to the next level then, and if you’re OCD too, then you will certainly understand.
Every time I add a category it sits there in a growing list waiting for me to pick it again. At first I had 10 or so categories. This grew to 20 and is on the way to doubling again like a viral parasite at a rock and roll concert just spreading, spreading.
Anyway, speaking of concerts, tags are the laid back hippy cousin to categories. You enter tags in a box when you publish a post. Maybe you need one tag, Maybe you need 10, it doesn’t matter. Just type in a few descriptors and move on to the next work of creative genius.
Long story short? I have enough lists and things to prioritize and select in my life and trying to figure out which categories best describe the post I’m publishing is one decision I can eliminate (or do I need a new category? decisions decisions!)

The categories are dead. Long live the tags.

So I’m eliminating the list of categories and will begin consistently tagging my posts beginning with this one. I will not be going back and tagging prior posts so those will be floating in limbo, though everything is still searchable using that search box over there.
This post is way meta and really just something to help me think through this. I hope you’ve enjoyed this time in my brain.

Email with Textmate

TextMate surprised me again this week when I discovered I could send email directly from my favorite text editor with the same keyboard shortcut as “Send Mail” in Apple’s Mail.app, which as you know is Cmd-Shift-D.
Bliss! Because you know that means, right? Of course you do. It greases the wheels for me to write messages using every text nerd’s dream formatting languages—Markdown and MultiMarkdown.
I do have to throw in one more step before hitting the shortcut to send the message. Here, I’ll just show you how it works:
Read the three steps first. Then scroll through the three images. It’s really quick, easy, and just the best if you have to send an email using HTML.

  1. Type a message in TextMate using Markdown or MultiMarkdown and press Ctrl-Shift-H, which brings you to…
  2. You’re in HTML now. Nothing left to do but hit Cmd-Shift-D to…
  3. Send it to Mail.app where it’s formatted in lovely HTML waiting for an address, a subject (it automatically grabs the saved name). Then send it!

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Oops! Forgot the two spaces after “Best!” to break the lines. Could have fixed that in post, but I’m lazy tonight.
Hope this helps you too!

Flying

I needed a kick in the pants and began writing recently at 501words.com. The site provides a word every day and challenges writers to get at least 501 words down on the page. Yesterday, the word of the day was “flying.” I’m not sure where my words came from, but I was kind of proud of it so I’m cross-posting it here.
So far I haven’t been very consistent with it, but I am enjoying it and the practice is challenging the creative side of my brain that has been wasting away in a sea of facts and researched writing.
Cross-posting may become a common practice for me. This place needs some content.

Flying

The joints on his fingers grew white gripping the wheel. He set his jaw and ignored her nagging to focus on driving fast. His tires complained in the curves, but nobody was around to hear and the road straightened out on the way to the bluff.
The windows were down and the wind was deafening.
“James, you’re scaring me,” Jayne said. “You said this was going to be fun. It’s not. It’s not fun!”
His head sank. He closed his eyes tight for a second like a boxer shaking off a jab to a broken nose. Her gaze locked onto a sign rushing toward them, whipping her head to the right as she read the numbers out loud.
“Did you see that sign?” she said. “Speed limit 40 mph. 40mph! Are you listening to me?”
He heard her yelling, but he wasn’t listening. Her voice was like gibberish in his ears, like the gnats and mosquitos swarming over first base when he a kid playing backyard baseball with his friends. First base was a rock near a drainage ditch. Sometimes on the way to first base the bugs would fly up his nose and right into his eyes.
His eyes fixed on the road’s horizon, not caring that the needle on his dashboard passed 65. Then 70.
Jayne’s anxious glare shifted from her boyfriend to the speedometer. As the needle sailed past 75 another sign snared her attention.
“Scenic Overlook – .25 Miles, Hang gliders launch – 1 mile.”
At 80 mph, the overlook appeared almost immediately. The back end of the car slid out from under them in the curve scattering gravel over the edge and into the river gorge.
Now, she panicked.
“Jim, damn it, you’re not funny,” she said. “Stop it! Stop it now!”
Jayne’s shrieking faded and the wind held Jim’s attention now.
“Please stop! Why are you doing this?!”
At 90, Jim felt like the car was moving in slow motion and he relaxed. He remembered driving one of the cars through town at 3 miles per hour during the Christmas parade. That’s what it felt like to him now. The corners of his mouth turned up into an easy smile. His hands relaxed and slid limp off the steering wheel into his lap.
Jayne went wild with confused fear, trying to figure out what was happening and grabbing the wheel as the trees thinned and the sky opened up in front of them. They hit the ramp of packed clay where hang gliders jump into the sky.
Chimney smoke curled up from cozy homes below. Men read books in the living room. Women enjoyed the crackling fire. Children played with their Christmas loot on the rug in their pajamas.

Side by side in their seat on a first date, Jimmy and Jayne were slung laughing over rails. The wind hit their throats and stopped up their excitement as the cars raced along the roller coaster’s track to the bottom of the hill and back around to where they started.
They caught their breath as Jim grabbed her in his arms. He kissed her and said it almost felt like they were flying.

The tires suddenly stopped squealing as the ground dropped out from under them. Then it was quiet, floating, like being sucked into space. Time seemed to shift, then stopped.
Jim slowly turned to his terrified fiancé. Jayne’s mouth gasped, opening and closing slowly, but words could not escape. Time lurched back in sync as the car hurtled past its zenith on an arc into the valley. She strained against her seat belt, eyes locked eyes wide open in terror, hopelessly trying to pull herself out of the window.
“I always wanted to fly, and now I’m flying,” he said. “I’m finally flying.”

Hate Gets Us Nowhere

Humorist Mark Twain said, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it,” but I think he would have preferred to serve up a round of verbal sparring instead of displays of physical violence like the recent shooting in Arizona.
If you support this country that is led by a government and that government is comprised of “We The People,” then to hate the government is to hate yourself. Sitting idle while anger builds in individuals until it bubbles over and hurts, or even slaughters, those nearby is not the answer to our nation’s problems. We must rise as one nation, the United States of America, to cast apathy aside, work together, and bring about positive change to heal our wounds.
Twain’s words had bite, but can you think of an example when the writer used his pen to incite violence? I can’t. Citizens and legislators will always have differing opinions and some of The People will always disagree with The Government, but we can agree to disagree and strive for compromise instead of tearing down those with different opinions no matter if their politics lean to the left or the right or some other direction.
The screaming and yelling and finger pointing from the radio and television talk show hosts need to stop thinking only of their own ratings and think of their countrymen. This is still the greatest country in the world and we all live here together, for good or ill, so let’s restore America as the beacon of hope it has always been.

Are These Filter Words Weakening Your Fiction?

I had never heard of “Filter Words” before reading this article by a writer who had never heard of filter words. Filtering filter words strengthens writing:
Are These Filter Words Weakening Your Fiction?:

What Do Filter Words Look Like?

Let’s imagine a character in your novel is walking down a street during peak hour.
You might, for example, write:

Sarah felt a sinking feeling as she realized she’d forgotten her purse back at the cafe across the street. She saw cars filing past, their bumpers end-to-end. She heard the impatient honk of horns and wondered how she could quickly cross the busy road before someone took off with her bag. But the traffic seemed impenetrable, and she decided to run to the intersection at the end of the block.

Eliminating the bolded words removes the filters that distances us, the readers, from this character’s experience:

Sarah’s stomach sank. Her purse—she’d forgotten it back at the cafe across the street. Cars filed past, their bumpers end-to-end. Horns honked impatiently. Could she make it across the road before someone took off with her bag? She ran past the impenetrable stream of traffic, toward the intersection at the end of the block.

(Via Iain Broome)