If you want to try the Ode blogging software that powers this site, it comes in two parts. First is the Ode system itself.

There are also a bunch of addins.

Here is what is available from project leader Rob Reed:

• The Ode software (use this to get started)

Addins:

• Disqus (Add comments)
• EditEdit (Create and edit posts with a web form)
• Indexette (Give posts date stamps in metadata instead of using file time)
• Jumper (Add a tag that puts a post preview in the index with a link to the full entry; included in main Ode package)
• Mrkdwn (Use Markdown to simplify the HTML tagging in posts; included in main Ode package)
• Shyposts (Hide some posts from indexes)

Some Ode themes can be found here.

I've been thinking for a while about breaking out my social/microblogging posts and putting them on a separate site mostly because the number of these short entries quickly outpaced the number of "regular" posts.

They're different kinds of content, and I think having them on separate sites works better.

I now have a live microblogging site, also based on Ode, and I'm experimenting on how to tweak the Ode theme(s) to better accommodate what are traditionally considered social posts, meaning they don't have a title and are just a block of short text.

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There is plenty of documentation that comes with the Ode software, but Rob Reed has written a lot more about how the Ode blogging system works.

If you get everything you know about programming languages from Twitter, Reddit or blogs, you might miss that there are fascinating things in every programming language, old and new.

Or at least they're fascinating to me (or you) at any given moment.

My semester of programming at LA Valley College was heaving on using loops of all kinds, but we didn't get to separating things via functions or object-orientation.

I'm trying in my own code (currently Ruby) to make things more modular with blocks, some taking arguments and others not, and using classes is something I'm trying to wrap my head around.

I was reading one of my Java books (Sedgewick and Wayne's Computer Science) where the authors say in the long Chapter 2 (they're all long chapters) that separating operations into distinct functions is something programmers should strive to do.

It's the idea of organizing the code, and the ways the various languages allow (or maybe encourage you to do that) that I find fascinating at the moment.

Using Vim in my project has really helped my skills in that editor. That's what working with a couple dozen small Vim files per day will do for you.

I had to ssh into a server yesterday and set up a small script and a cron job, and I could feel how different that process was now that I can do more with Vim.

I can move around in files much more easily, and I know the basics of copy/move/paste, which is more than I could say before.

Clojure is trying to push me in the Emacs direction, and maybe I could get comfortable with that editor, but the universality of Vim/Vi is hard to ignore.

There's a random \n in my BlogPoster script. It doesn't show up all the time, but there are circumstances where it appears in the final output.

Am I inadvertently inserting it, or will I have to chomp it out? That is the question.

Update: I figured out where the random \n was being inserted, and I was able to .chomp it out in Ruby.

I'm not sure exactly why the random \n was being inserted. It could be in the editing operation of the file (I hope not, because that complicates things), or in the conversion of the edited file back to a Ruby variable.

According to its web page, "Reason lets you write simple, fast and quality type safe code while leveraging both the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems."

Often called reasonml, it is based on OCaml, is integrated with NPM and compiles to JavaScript.

The language is a Facebook-sponsored project, so it's marketing is pretty good, plus it works in some way with FB's React JavaScript framework.

Two good places to start are the What & Why and Community pages.

I turned the laptop off and only booted once from Puppy Linux's Xenialpup over the weekend. When I turned on the laptop (2017 HP Envy) to start working in Windows 10, today, for some reason the desktop remembered that I had at least one Google Chrome tab and a few apps open.

I also started a new Chrome window for my "main" work, and the laptop was aggressively swapping for maybe a half-hour, during which time things barely worked, or were just slow as hell -- whatever you want to call it.

Now that I've been working for a couple of hours, everything is working well, but this just serves as a point of evidence that Windows 10, right when it starts up, isn't exactly ready for "vigorous computing."

It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally have my Ruby environment set up in Puppy Linux's Xenialpup (based on Ubuntu 16.04) so I can use my BlogPoster app and also work on its code.

I didn't have any trouble installing Ruby and the ruby-nokogiri package from the Puppy Package Manager. But I couldn't get ruby-twitter to install. gem install wouldn't work -- I didn't have the ruby-dev package -- and I didn't see the Ubuntu package that I needed.

I looked at the problem again, and I figured out that I was missing a repository in the Puppy Package Manager. Once I added the "missing" repository (which involved checking a box -- nothing too difficult), I was able to install ruby-twitter and get my script running.

My next problem was the vi in Puppy. I think it really is vi and not Vim. I couldn't get any formatting commands like :set number to work, either in command mode or .vimrc. The fix for this was quick: I installed Vim from the Puppy Package Manager.

Now I can call the "old" vi, or the "newer" Vim as needed, and my BlogPoster script is running great.

I'm having some issues pasting links into the terminal, but that's something I could overcome. Right now it's a lot of awkward "middle" clicking on the mouse, which for practical purposes means clicking both buttons at once. I'm getting better at it, but I could also use Geany instead of Vim as my editor. I tested Geany with my Ruby script, and it does work.

In other development-related news for this Puppy system, I installed the Racket programming environment from the script provided by the project. So far it works pefectly. I started up DrRacket and was coding right away.