Spanner Wingnut Respawned

I rebooted Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab on Blogger to assist me in Blogger template choice and customization.  That is the 4th incarnation.

I think I have learned how to get reflow and margin extension working, at least on the default Blogger template.  It remains to confirm that the technique works here with what I suspect is a theme of the “Simple” family with no background.  I’ll now when I replicate it there and see if my discovered customizations succeed.

Margin, Margin, Who Has the Margin

I was despairing over how the sidebar leaks over images that are too wide for the body column.  It was my main annoyance with how the current Blogger was handling my images.

Looking at the legacy Orcmid’s Lair, I realized that the solution I already knew was to put the sidebar on the left of the body, even though the body does not reflow well as the browser window is expanded/shrunk horizontally, thanks to “improvements” in the HTML specifications and the styling used by Blogger.  I don’t know if the level at which Blogger provides advanced formatting control will allow me to solve that problem.  Being a proud card-carrying member of Raymond Chen’s Backward Compatibility cult, this annoys me no end.

Notice that a new category/label, “Professor von Clueless” has been added along with this post.  That’s in homage to geeky, developer-related posts and another legacy Blogger blog.

World Digital Preservation Day 2019

I’m not certain preserving media, whether floppy disks or CDs, is getting the job done, although it certainly can’t be done without that much. #WDPD2019

Orcmid’s Lair Rebooted

This is not the first Orcmid’s Lair.  Reconstitution here is an effort to make blogging easy to restore and continue, especially on behalf of the Miser Project, my career capstone effort.

The Conundrum

I am torn between using Blogger for reconstituted and continuing blogs and, for The Miser Project, using GitHub as a place for publishing blogs as well as  project code and other documentation. 

I expect I will continue casual use of Blogger in the manner of this post, and still look for something better for The Miser Project, probably based on GitHub.

GitHub Niceties

The advantage of using GitHub is having version control and a way of archiving everything. 

The disadvantage is having to use Markdown, not having the convenience of Live Writer, and needing to be devops for the blog creation and publishing process, likely based on Node.js with all that entails.  More freedom, many more dependencies, yet more control, maybe even having MathJax. 

Blogger Convenience

The advantage of Blogger is that I can use Live Writer, there is next to nothing in terms of devops, and I have all the Live Writer drafts on my PC for archiving any way I want, including via OneDrive.   And RSS feeds are also available as another form of preservation.

Definitive Miser Project materials are still version-controlled on GitHub and I can make Markdown pages there to have more-appealing technical documentation. 

The disadvantage of clinging to Blogger is the lack of version management and the tendency of Google to “improve” Blogger from time to time.  I am also quite restricted in terms of formatting and plug-in options.

Deja Vu All Over Again

The original Orcmid’s Lair blog was initiated via Blogger on 2002-10-28.  It took a while to figure things out. 

After having a number of posts lost due to disconnects and other interruptions in the midst of editing, I learned to use an early version of BlogJet as an authoring tool.

Later I came to know and love Windows Live Writer.  I am creating this post with Open Live Writer, despite some deficiencies with integration in its Blogger setup.

I also succeeded in using Windows Live Writer to recover some older posts and reconstitute them here under the Miser Project category.

The Preservation Urge

I have succeeded in preserving all of my old blogs, their archives, and the RSS feeds.  This was mainly possible by preservation on my own web sites.  I love that continuity.  And apparently, there are posts that still catch the attention of others.  I want to continue having that durability.

Well, That Didn’t Go Well

I was able to recover a Miser Project post to this blog using the original post date.

1. I couldn’t just use the draft in Open LiveWriter that I used for the original post.  It just wouldn’t go. [2019-11-07T10:24 I have workarounds now.  Not entirely satisfying but good enough for casual blogging.]
2. So I used the web-page creator for Blogger posts, with copy and paste of the original text, and reloading of the screen capture I used for the WordPress image.
   [2019-11-07T10:23 Once I get a post into Blogger, I can retrieve and update it using Live Writer though.]
3. [2019-11-07T10:22 I have enough work-arounds for this, but the layout is not pleasing, especially when the sidebar becomes long enough to overlap images in the body text.]
4. Unfortunately, the problem between LiveWriter and Blogger is that it doesn’t allow custom image scaling.  I had to use the largest size it does support that would not blow out of the page.  That’s not very readable on-line.  I also can’t make an image link to the original file so someone could get a direct view of that PNG image.
   [2019-10-30T12:28 OK, OK, I found the workaround for this.]
5. I also included the wrong PNG image.  I will see if I can repair that.  Unfortunately, Blogger apparently doesn’t allow editing of existing pages (or I can’t find it).
   [2019-10-30T12:29 I found the edit-post link.  Just above where comments appear.  Sheesh.]

Tasks

• Replace that post on Blogger with one having the correct image.
  [2019-10-30T12:26 Well, I learned how to edit a post and to redo the image.  I also learned that Blogger makes the image clickable to provide a right-sized view.  I made the image "original" size anyhow, before I discovered that.]
• Create a Miser category and see if that is useful.
  [2019-10-30T12:33 I forgot they are called "labels" and I started using "Miser Project" for that sequence of posts.]
• Think about what it takes to use GitHub as a blog host.  It means I need a Markdown-oriented blog creation procedure, but maybe that’s necessary after all. [2019-11-07T10:20 and I am still stuck about this.   The Blogger image-handling is becoming an annoyance.]

Preparing to Prepare

I also want to deal with some matters of layout and organization.  My job jar at the moment.

• Complete my profile
• Recover previous Orcmid’s Lair and Orcmid’s Live Hideout archives as historical archive preceding the one now arising.
• Figure out whether categories provide a means of segregation rather than the previous use of multiple blogs.  Or have multiple blogs.
• It would be great to have MathJax or some other way to incorporate [La]TeX formulas.
• It would also be great to use Discus for comments and not be tied to whatever Google provides via Blogger.
• In moving Miser Project posts from Orcmid’s Live Hideout, there will be embedded hyperlinks that cross reference among them.  This will be restitched to the versions here as progress is made (fingers crossed).
• Add pages about stuff, as I was attempting with the Hexo Landscape work at Spanner Wingnut’s.  Umm, not certain why I am not doing something like that here on Blogger.  Heh.

First things Firster

While there is much to do (including settling in on a name and categories for this blog and templating more features), an important factor here is using Open Live Writer to recover important-to-me posts from other blogs.  Ideally, I can place them here under the original post dates.  We’ll see.