Author: Elaine

Posted on

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knitting & Crocheting

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Knitting & Crocheting
author: Gail Diven
name: Elaine
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1999
rating: 2
read at: 2011/10/01
date added: 2011/10/05
shelves: crafty, non-fiction, own, knitting
review:
I bought this at Half-Price Books several years ago and promptly stuck it in the back of a closet. Found it again two weekends ago and figured it was time to give knitting a try. This book, however, was not as helpful as I had hoped it would be. I managed to figure out single cast-on, but could not make enough sense of the instructions to get a basic knit stitch started.* There are a couple of interesting patterns at the back of the book that I might try out, but otherwise I was pretty disappointed with this.

I had much better luck with Red Heart’s free ebook
Knitting Made Easy
 (learned knit stitch) and The Chicks with Sticks Guide to Knitting: Learn to Knit with More Than 30 Cool Easy Patterns (learned binding off). I’m still working on my first actual project – a basic scarf in knit stitch.

* I’ve always been somewhat spatially challenged — and I’m left-handed. FWIW, after reading the lefty instructions, I decided to just learn knitting right-handed. I already use scissors and mouse right-handed, and the thought of spending the rest of my life trying to figure out instructions backwards was NOT APPEALING.

Posted on

Today’s Links 10/4/2011

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Posted on

Today’s Links 9/30/2011

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Posted on

Missing tweet posts?

So…I have Twitter Tools installed, and it was set to auto-post a daily digest of my tweets, and that’s not happening. (Last tweet post was on September 18.) All the settings look right, and this blog still has access rights in Twitter. What gives?

(Looks like last update to either WordPress or Twitter Tools can break stuff. Solution is apparently to revoke and reissue access. I’ve tried that, and we’ll see how it goes.)

Posted on

Today’s Links 9/29/2011

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Posted on

Blogging from Pinboard

(Explanation for my regular readership: With the last Delicious disaster, a group of fanfic folks have started a Google Doc with feature requests and whatnot for Pinboard, the bookmarking service. I skimmed it, noticed a request for blog posting, and said that I was doing that and would be happy to share how.)

I’ve been posting links to Pinboard.in for a while now. And then sometime later I decided I wanted to cross-post my links here, because I’m a belt-and-suspenders kinda gal.*

What I’m doing is ridiculously simple: I have the RSS Digest plugin set to create a daily digest of my Pinboard RSS feed. (A typical result.)

The Pinboard RSS feed is formatted like this: http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/

You put that URL (with your username) in the Feed URL field, set the rest of the options however you want them, and that’s it.

It’s worth noting that this doesn’t save any private links, which includes anything marked as “to read”, since it’s taking from your public RSS feed. You could in theory use the feed with the secret token.

And I haven’t yet worked out how to include the tags, although it doesn’t look like that can be done with RSS Digest. I also have the FeedWordPress plugin installed, which is what I use to repost the reviews I write on Goodreads. (Why do I have two different RSS posting plugins installed? No idea.) It looks like the custom post settings in FeedWordPress could be used to do that. If I try it, I’ll report back here.

* I signed up for Pinboard really early, when it was in beta and it was free. I’d been using Delicious for a long time even then, since before they got bought by Yahoo. I poked around with Pinboard, but still liked Delicious. Then there was a scare (in 2009?) that Yahoo was going to be bought by Microsoft or something. I don’t really remember. But it made me nervous, so I switched over to Pinboard full time. I actually prefer having a doubled-up system with both my site and someone else’s service. For several years I had disastrous experiences with webhosting, which once included having to call a colo in Colorado (!) and beg for access to my files because the reseller I’d bought hosting from had vanished from the face of the earth. So I have paranoia in both directions.