Something new

So this post is something of an experiment. I’m trying to set things up so I can write my entries in MacJournal and just have it actually do the posting to WordPress. In principle this should be no problem at all.

This is also the grand plan for the work blog, actually. And all things considered it is actually a fair bit easier to write my posts using MacJournal than it is to do so using the WordPress composing page. And this way if I want to have a draft, I can just wait to send it to the blog, of course. Which is all rather nice as well.

Of course there are things like post breaks and things like that which I have yet to figure out how will be formatted here in MacJournal, so I’m going to have to do some work to see how to make those things work. Those aren’t things that I use very often, though, so I don’t think it should be too much of an issue. What is more of a problem is that MacJournal seems to be rather more forgiving in terms of what sorts of graphics it’s willing to display. MacJournal is perfectly willing to display eps files, for instance, which are generally what Root does best at spitting out for plots. However, you can’t send an eps file to a blog, it seems. I don’t think this is really a failing of MacJournal per se, since the problem is rather than eps doesn’t render on webpages as far as I know. So I need to start converting the eps plots to some other format, probably png or jpeg or something. And that’s a bit of a pain in the ass.

I tried uploading the old entries for work to an alternate blog (which is private and can thus only be viewed by select people which at the moment means just me), which has worked pretty well except for the fact that none of the plots have come up. And converting the plots from eps to pdf hasn’t worked either, which is not good. So I’ll have to see about making all my future plots as some better graphics format, although I’m not sure I really want to try to go through and actually convert all the old plots. But that may be something I have to do if I am going to present my work blog as an example of how beautifully all this works.

Of course, the comments and things don’t get stored with the blog entries down on this end of things, at least as far as I know.