Evernote – an example of “voice”

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Sean M. Brown

“…. Or just relaxt and wait for everything to happen automatically sooner or later.”

Randomizing a list of 25 things using Python

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Sean M. Brown

I got tagged in the oh-so popular “25 Random Things” meme on Facebook. To make a point that I sometimes think in code and I don’t think its weird, I wrote the script below to randomize my list before I posted it.


import random

f = open('25-things.txt')
list = f.readlines()
"""Magnus L Hetland's solution http://bit.ly/uN4iq"""
result = []

for i in range(len(list)):
    element = random.choice(list)
    list.remove(element)
    result.append(element)

i = 1
for line in result:
    print "%s. %s" % (i, line)
    i += 1

Processing WordPress’ Post Content

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Sean M. Brown

If you find yourself directly manipulating a WordPress post (say outside of “The Loop” by using query_posts, e.g. query_posts(array('category__and' => array(1,3)));) you may need to do some extra work to get the pretty formatting that WP does for you in things like the_content() and the_excerpt().

Say you have a single post in a local variable $my_post, if you want to output the content of the post and use the filters that WP does for you when calling the_content within The Loop, you can call the filter functions directly:

<?php echo wpautop(wptexturize($framing_post->post_content)); ?>

References: How WordPress Processes Post Content, Function Reference/wptexturize, Function Reference/wpautop, formatting.php source code

BBEdit, HTML Markup tag on one line

Posted on January 25, 2009 by Sean M. Brown

In BBEdit I use the keyboard shortcuts a lot. They’re a great way to save some time. The default behavior for the keyboard short cut to insert (or wrap the selected text in) the tag always bothered me, it put the and on new lines like:

What I want (almost always) is both and on the same line:

Well I spent some time digging around the plist files and the preferences and couldn’t figure it out for a while.

I don’t often use the menus or the palletes, too much mousing around. But here’s where I found the solution to getting command-option-p to output the tag on one line: In HTML mode, go to the Markup menu, in the Block Elements sub menu, select the first option “Paragraph…” (vs. the second one which has the cmd-opt-p shourcut bound to it). This is the menu based dialog that presents the various options a can have (id, class, style, etc.). De-select the “Place Tags on Separate Lines” checkbox and click the Apply button.

You now have told BBEdit your preference for how the tag is used via this menu command and via the keyboard shortcut, cmd-opt-p. From now on when you use the cmd-opt-p keyboard command, you’ll get:

CNN.com sells own headline-inspired t-shirts

Posted on October 30, 2008 by Sean M. Brown

Take a close look at the icons after certain stories in the ‘latest news’ section of cnn.com

Notice anything odd? video icon, check…. what’s that next to it? is that a t-shirt icon? what could that mean? why is the t-shirt icon next to some headlines and not others?

Go ahead click on one.

Yep. they are selling t-shirts with some of their headlines.

Who get to decide which headline is t-shirt worthy?

Why is “Haunted jail sounds freaky, cops say” t-shirt worthy and “Is your doctor prescribing a placebo? ” isn’t…

Will windfall t-shirt profits change headline writing?