Can you see this word?

Here it is with backticks:

Here it is on a line with backticks:

Can you see the ?

It begins as a dollar sign: $

Here it is as a code block set off by a tab/indent:

And here it is at the beginning of a line with backticks:

I imagine this is a potential problem because of the way Ode passes data from the script to the HTML.

My question: Is there a way to "escape" the $ so it appears on the live Ode site without resorting to backticks?

It seems that I can get a single $ but not a with backticks.

See the markup: Here is this file as plain text.

I just removed the social-sharing buttons for Google Plus and Twitter from this site.

Even though almost every http request for content on this Ode-powered blog is done via Perl CGI on shared hosting, the site is extremely quick.

And these two social-sharing buttons, which appear on every entry, were really slowing things down. (Instead of a third-party social-button service, I used embed code provided by Google and Twitter, respectively).

The question/dilemma I face: Is the reduced "performance"/speed of the site a fair tradeoff for what the social buttons have to offer?

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I've been playing with the idea of using Ode as both a traditional blogging system as well as a social-media platform generating exactly the kinds of posts that I normally would originate on sites like Twitter.

With the help of dlvr.it, this is entirely possible not just with Ode but pretty much any blogging platform.

The key to this concept is that my social-media updates should originate on my system, where they will continue to live. They are mine. Twitter will have a copy, but I will have the "original."

And now I can tell you how easy it is to do this. And it doesn't just work for Ode but can be done on any blogging platform (including WordPress) that allows you to post to categories (or directories or folders) and tap into RSS for that specific category (or directory or folder).

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This paragraph is set off with tabs and has a Markdown-generated link:

This is my Ode site, [which lives here](http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog).

This paragraph uses "blockquote" HTML tagging and an HTML link:

This is my Ode site, which lives here.

This paragraph is set off with tabs and has an HTML-tagged link:

This is my Ode site, <a href="http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog">which lives here</a>.

None of this text uses the "code" tag.

So my question is, how do you call "blockquote" without "code" in Markdown?

Later: I have the answer. Set off every line with the > character:

> This text will be set off in blockquote style.

With the proper Markdown, this becomes:

This text will be set off in blockquote style.

Changing fonts in Ode is as easy as changing the .css file in the theme(s) you are using.

I've been having some trouble in Fedora with the Arial font, which looks like hell. The Wine non-emulator that runs Windows software in Linux brought an Arial font into my system, and it's just plain ugly.

I started looking at Arial and Helvetica not just in Linux but in Windows, too, and I decided that I don't like either one very much.

So I went into my CSS and killed out Helvetica Neue and Arial. Now Verdana and sans-serif, in that order, are the default fonts.

Looks better, I think.

There is a new Ode-running site out in the wild. Announced on the existing Surface Markup blog is the Surface Markup development blog, which has one of the nicest themes I've ever seen on an Ode site. It's minimal, beautiful and responsive.

Designer/writer Hans Fast helped me make this site responsive, and I continue to thank him.

In my Ode system running on an Apache web server, I'm "exposing" the existence of the /documents directory by stashing HTML there for my site archive.

Normally only text files and images live in that directory, and Ode uses them to produce the HTML pages it serves out of another directory.

I'm not crazy about exposing the contents of directories that don't, for the most part, serve HTML. So I decided to disallow directory listings on my Ode site with this line in .htaccess:

Options -Indexes

Now my readers can see http://stevenrosenberg.net/documents/archive.html but not http://stevenrosenberg.net/documents and the entire structure under that.

Even if I do decide to move my archive file to another directory (and I am seriously thinking about doing that), it still seems like a good idea to block access to the "raw" directories in Apache.

I've been messing around with scripting, and I created a static Ode archive page that lists every entry on this site.

I hacked it quickly. It needs some work. I think this would work better as a full-on Ode extension. For that I'd have to write it in Perl and figure out how Ode add-ins work. It could also be an extension of the Indexette add-in.

I'll be thinking about how to do this.

I decided to script my blog updates via a Bash script for Unix/Linux that runs both my Unison sync and the Indexette reindexing necessary to to make those entries live.

You're probably not running Unison like I am (and I still need to write up my Unison tutorial), but the reindexing line is worth sharing because I find it very useful to reindex the blog without using the web browser.

First of all, you need to install wget on your Unix/Linux system. It's available in just about every distribution. Use your favorite package manager to install it.

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That title sounds like a bad master's thesis, right?

What I'm trying to do here is see how Ode posts that get their Indexette tagging locally play with my Unison sync setup.

If Ode doesn't "touch" the pre-tagged files on the server, I think we're all good.

Minutes later: That works. Now to code up a way to drop in the Indexette tag with system-generated current date and time.

Weeks later: I did write the code in the form of a short Perl script, and I incorporated it into the Gedit text editor via the Snippets plugin. I will detail this in a future post.