Update: ew, dammit, argh: no, putting the excerpt on its own line doesn’t work. (Is that a WP setting?) And the markup…gr. No p tags, just line breaks. Bleh. (Again, is there a setting I can tweak?)
Further update: no, there isn’t a setting to tweak the excerpt, unless I’m missing something. Nor can I find anything that generates better markup. (Alas, I’m not surprised.) Oh, and the category thing? Not really sure, since they went from tags to folders after the book was published.
I’m actually testing out 2 things this afternoon.
- Publishing a Google document to my blog.
- Using my room as a workspace.
I got a copy of Google Apps Hacks the other day, and am spending a chilly May afternoon skimming through it. To my surprise, you can publish to a blog from here, which is pretty freaking cool. A much friendlier interface, as far as I’m concerned, for the task of just plain writing. For my purposes, I need to make sure 2 things work: categories and excerpt. I’m very particular about my excerpts, since that’s what shows up on the homepage. (Categories I’m less picky with, since 80+% of the time I’m writing stuff for the General category, and most of the rest is conference notes.)
I think that writing the excerpt as the first paragraph will work, since that’s where the excerpt usually cuts off anyhow. Categories apparently get mapped to GDoc tags, which I use only very slightly.
As for the other experiment, usually I work on the computer in the front room, but C is reading, and I’m just too excitable about all the nifty new things I’m figuring out to be able to leave him alone. So I’ve got a tray table & an office chair under a lovely south window. Alas, the view at the moment is torn-up garden, aspen saplings, and the side of the neighbor’s house. (What about the office, you ask. Oh, don’t ask.)
But there is a fat bird camped on the fence (a jay?) and tho the saplings stress me out (did you know that one of the world’s largest organisms is a single aspen tree? Covers multiple square miles, IIRC.) they are pretty leafing out. And the light here is great. Not as much glare as I expected. Although I think it’ll take some adjusting before I find the most comfortable setup.
Because I’m trying to get back into a regular habit of writing. Not just here, either. I had a bright burst of inspiration on a long-dormant project and I’m also writing a series of posts on bike commuting this month at OlyBlog. I’ve been thinking lately quite a bit about what I really want to be doing in my life, and writing is something I want to be doing that I’m not doing anywhere near enough of.