Since the GNOME screenshot program is very broken, at least in my installation of GNOME, I decided to try Shutter, the Linux screenshot program written in Perl and seemingly aimed at GNOME users.

Shutter has a lot of options, and so far I can get it to work.

Going back to the beginning, why is the GNOME screenshot program broken in my GNOME installation? I have no idea.

When I hit the print-screen key, nothing at all happens. If I bind it to alt-p, I get the "shutter" sound, and a PNGJPG image appears in my Photos folder. Even if I go into gconf settings to modify just about everything, calling the screenshot program from the keyboard produces the same resultwon't allow me to change the target directory.

But if I hit the super key (or mouse into the hot corner), then search for Screenshot and run it, I get the full GNOME Screenshot window to open, and it has all of my configuration options (JPG instead of PNG, choose my own directory/folder). Why can't I make this work from the keyboard -- from print-screen or any other keyboard shortcut?

I've dwelled on GNOME Screenshot enough. Now I'm going to see if Shutter can do what I need. Or I can just use Xfce, where the screenshot program works like it's supposed to -- with the print-screen key. Why is this so hard, GNOME people?

Update: After using Shutter once (I have it bound to alt-P), the icon sits in my upper panel. I can then take a screenshot by clicking the icon. Easy.

Speaking of panels in the panel-less GNOME (where not having things appears to be a "feature"), I do have a panel in the form of the TopIcons, Places Status Indicator and Applications Menu extensions. And yes, it is not a good thing that what many consider core funtionality can only be implemented through Extensions that aren't part of the GNOME 3 core.

More GNOME Extensions: I just added Frippery Panel Favorites to make the upper panel on my GNOME 3 desktop even more GNOME 2-like.

I'm exploring ways to take WordPress blogs and semi-automatically covert them into heaps of individual static files for use in blogging systems like Ode that take text files and convert them to HTML either on the fly or via a static-site engine.

I think it's going to take a combination of at least two existing tools plus some scripting on my part to take what those tools create and further process the files for Ode.

I tried two WordPress plugins that didn't work at all: WP Static HTML Output and Static Snapshot.

A third WordPress plugin, Really Static, did not look promising, and I didn't try it.

I tested the HTTrack Website Copier -- there's even a Fedora package for it -- and that pretty much downloaded the entire WordPress blog as a fully baked static site. But it didn't produce files or a file structure that is in any way compatible with any other blogging software.

Still, I think HTTrack will be valuable in terms of extracting the images from WordPress sites for use in other blogging systems.

I tried another method using wget (which HTTrack also uses) with a ton of command-line switches in a post titled Creating a static copy of a dynamic website.

In case the above site disappears, here is what you do:

The command line, in short…

wget -k -K -E -r -l 10 -p -N -F --restrict-file-names=windows -nH http://website.com/

…and the options explained

-k : convert links to relative
-K : keep an original versions of files without the conversions made by wget
-E : rename html files to .html (if they don’t already have an htm(l) extension)
-r : recursive… of course we want to make a recursive copy
-l 10 : the maximum level of recursion. if you have a really big website you may need to put a higher number, but 10 levels should be enough.
-p : download all necessary files for each page (css, js, images)
-N : Turn on time-stamping.
-F : When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as an HTML file.
-nH : By default, wget put files in a directory named after the site’s hostname. This will disabled creating of those hostname directories and put everything in the current directory.
–restrict-file-names=windows : may be useful if you want to copy the files to a Windows PC.

This is a cool exercise, and it pretty much produces what you get with HTTrack. Cool but not useful.

Along these lines but aiming for something that's actually useful, I could use wget and just target the images.

Here's where the good stuff stars

It's not all bad. I just tried a Ruby Gem called wp2middleman, which takes a copy of the XML that you export out of WordPress and turns it into individual static files (either HTML- or Markdown-formatted) with YAML-style title, date and tags.

You get the XML from the WordPress Dashboard (under Tools -- Export). Then you process that XML file with wp2middleman.

If you already have Ruby and Ruby Gems set up, getting the gem is as easy as:

gem install wp2middleman

Then you can produce a full filesystem with individually named files with:

wp2mm your_wordpress.xml

That gets you the files. Not the images. I'd use HTTrack or some similar tool to get those.

That I can work with. "All" I'd have to do is convert the YAML to Ode's title and Indexette date format, rewrite the image links to conform to whatever I have going on my Ode site and then convert the file suffixes from .html or .markdown to .txt.

I think I can do that.

Update: Getting the images from a WordPress blog with wget is easy. Stack Overflow has it: How do I use Wget to download all Images into a single Folder

There is enough info there to get them into a single folder, or into a directory/folder structure that could make it easier to call the images into your non-WP blog. I did both as a test:

wget -nd -r 2 -A jpg,jpeg,png,gif -e robots=off http://your-blog-here.com

wget -r -l 2 -A jpg,jpeg,png,gif -e robots=off http://your-blog-here.com

It's low-hanging-fruit day. In my quest to archive all of my old blogs here in Ode, where I have everything on my server and in filesystem-level backups, I'm aiming to bring all of my "old" (and just plain old) blogs into this file-based Ode system that I host myself.

Today I did The CTRL Freak -- the Blogger version (there's also a WordPress version, the blog itself tells me).

It was only eight entries, I left at least one behind (because all it did was point to another blog entry), and there were no images. That made it a quick conversion, hence the low-hanging-fruit analogy.

I'm starting to get pre-2011 entries on this site. I'll expand the date links on the right when I get more vintage content on the site.

Here is what I have on Blogger:

2,000 Days in the Valley
142 posts to do

This Old Mac
61 posts to do

This Old PC
40 posts to do

My jazz guitar journey
48 posts to do

The CTRL freak
9 posts done

The status of my WordPress.com blogs is more complicated because there are backups in there from my company-owned WordPress.org sites as well as the Blogger sites mentioned above.

The WordPress.com sites are:

Steven Rosenberg
378 posts

Takectrl's Weblog (I think this is an old Click backup)
1,149 posts

The CTRL freak (WordPress version with maybe a few more entries)
27 posts

I also have:

Master and Server, which is a WordPress.org site on the devio.us OpenBSD server. It only has a few entries.
20 posts

And then there are my two big Daily News blogs that started their lives on Movable Type and which were converted to WordPress.org:

Click
1,950 posts

Come on Feel the Nuys
367 posts

Clearly these last two are going to either take a Herculean effort or some kind of scripting magic from me. I used to have access to the server and could grab the images in bulk, but I don't think I can do that any more. The hard parts of these kinds of "automatic" conversions are the internal links (WordPress uses absolute links, which are good for SEO but bad for portability) and images (and their URLs, also absolute links).

Today's mood (or mode): I could be programming, but I'm moving blog entries around instead ...

After I started using self-hosted blogging software that wasn't WordPress in February 2011, I began with FlatPress and continued using it through October until I discovered and settled on Ode as the blogging software that best fit how I wanted to run my personal site.

As I write this post, it occurs to me that I've been running Ode just about five years.

It was always my intention to bring all of my past blog posts from Flatpress, WordPress and even Blogger to a single platform. I moved most of my Flatpress posts over some time ago but there were about a dozen or so entries from the early Flatpress months that never made it over. Over the past day and a half, I moved those entries into this Ode site.

I guess that means I can shut down the Flatpress site.

Migrating blog posts is hard. There's the formatting, the file naming (and organizing) and the images. There are ways of doing it automatically, and I might explore scripting the rest of it. But I'll probably just chip away at it manually, starting with my Blogger sites.

That's if I do it at all. The idea of having all of my blog entries in this Ode site, which means I'll have them in a local filesystem, too, is something I would like to do, but it is a lot of work.

After a couple of weeks trying to make GNOME 3 and then KDE/Plasma 5 work for me, I'm back in Xfce 4.12 full time.

GNOME for sure doesn't work for me, and while I really liked KDE's Plasma desktop, it created more problems than it solved.

So I'm back to Xfce, which works like a champ and doesn't get in the way.

In terms of GNOME apps, I've been using Gedit less and less since Geany is so good and allows me to compile code that needs it and run all code without leaving the editor (and without jumping through any hoops at all to make it happen).

One thing I picked up from KDE was that I can still tap the Dolphin file manager when I need it (which won't be very often, but the split-screen mode is something that every file manager should have).

I also revisited digiKam, the photo organizing/editing software from KDE. It is much better than the last time I used it, and I am thinking about continuing to use the app even though I'm not in KDE.

Otherwise GNOME is still a problem for me. I am required to jump through a lot of configuration hoops just to get the desktop I want.

KDE is better. I like the animations (which are minimal). I like the "KDE menu." But it's just not all that stable. And KDE Wallet was continually screwing with my Google Chrome cookies and saved passwords. I didn't need that headache to continue. I mostly used Firefox just to keep from wrecking my Chrome setup more.

One problem I had with KDE: It wasn't all that stable. I killed it more than a few times. However, I love the attention to detail when it comes to configuration.

I had problems with screen-grabbing in both GNOME and KDE. It was worse in GNOME. I couldn't get the print-screen key to actually do the screen-grab. I had to settle for mapping alt-P. And then I couldn't get the format I wanted (JPG, not PNG) or the proper location. If I called the screen-capture utility from a terminal, it would work like it was supposed to. But with alt-P, it didn't.

In KDE, kscreenshot was pretty good, though it also didn't work with the print-screen. I had to call it from the menu and leave it running.

The fact that the Xfce screen-shot utility just works -- and well -- is huge for me.

And as I say above, Xfce stays out of the way and runs like a champ.

So I'm back.

Swing guitarist Jonathan Stout lays out his philosophy on swing music, the guitar, Charlie Christian, Allan Reuss, REALLY old Gibsons and Epiphones, X-bracing vs. parallel bracing and more on his Swing Guitar Blog and Campus Five YouTube channel.

His latest video was recorded on another YouTube channel because he made it at Norman's Rare Guitars in Tarzana. where Jonathan plays Harold Arlen's "It's Only a Paper Moon" on a 1929 Gibson L-5 acoustic.

Jonathan is a wonderful guitarist who explores three distinct "directions" on the guitar: swing rhythm on the acoustic archtop, swing-style chord-melody on the same instrument and Charlie Christian-style swing-to-bop soloing on the archtop electric.

They really are three different kinds of playing -- watch Jonathan's videos and see what I mean.

Read the rest of this post

Though I'm a longtime Xfce user on the Linux desktop (and a longtime user of Fedora as my distribution), I'm open to other things.

As I've written many times, I want to like GNOME 3. Fedora Workstation is based on it. But it just doesn't work for me. I don't want to say GNOME 3 is unpolished, but it's just too stripped down until you start shoving GNOME Shell Extensions onto your system.

Plus, GNOME 3 doesn't play well at all with the Citrix applications that I've been using for the past couple of years and will continue using for maybe the next six months.

And GNOME 3 just doesn't "feel right." And "feel" is something I don't want to ignore.

On what I suppose is a bit of a whim (or maybe I did it by accident, I can't remember), I logged in to the Plasma desktop. I don't know if calling their desktop "Plasma" short-changes the KDE brand, or if that matters at all, but I had a poor grasp of what Plasma is in relation to KDE.

It turns out I like Plasma (or KDE, or whatever it's called).

The desktop works well, is faster than you'd think and has quite a bit of polish. There are lots of configuration options, and they are all built in. It's not like the comparative tragedy of the GNOME Tweak Tool and gconf.

And I am growing very dependent on the Dolphin file manager.

Things I like about Dolphin:

• Split mode. Nautilus used to have it. Thunar never did. It's like having windows in a car that actually open. That's a bad analogy, but the ability to easily transfer files from one directory to another without opening two file manager windows is so fundamental that I wonder why every file manager doesn't have it.

• Faster transfer to USB flash drives. Is it my imagination, or is Dolphin configured to speed up the copying of files to USB flash drives. Those operations are notoriously slow when done on my Fedora system in other file managers. I know there are ways to speed up those transfers, but I'm too lazy to figure them out. I'm happy to have Dolphin do that for me. I'm pretty sure I got this wrong. The file transfers go at the same speed in pretty much all the file managers.

• Configuration, configuration, configuration. KDE has always been about configuration of all the things. And GNOME has been not-so-slowly offering a stripped-down, hard-to-configure experience that is low on included tools. Xfce is very configurable, KDE/Plasma even more so. The file manager is such an important part of any system, it's vital that you are able to do what you want with it.

From the "feel" perspective, as I say above, KDE's Plasma desktop is much faster than billed. The animations don't distract. It seems relatively easy on the CPU. I installed the overly complicated digiKam, which I have used in the past because it's one of a very few Linux applications that allows editing of the IPTC metadata in JPG images that the media industry uses pretty much universally. While still complicated as hell, digiKam passes the IPTC test.

I have had problems with the KDE Wallet system "eating" my Google Chrome browser cookies, and that's something I'm not terribly happy with. I lost all of my stored passwords at one point. Firefox definitely "plays" better with KDE/Plasma.

And right now I'm having issues configuring the touchpad with the KDE-supplied utility, though that's today. It worked a few days ago. GNOME is really bad at this -- as is LXDE, one of the many DEs I've sampled in the past couple of weeks.

I can't say that I will move from Xfce to KDE/Plasma because I probably won't. But I can certainly see using the Plasma Desktop as my part-time environment, with Xfce still doing the heavy lifting for my media production and software development needs.

But you never know.