I admit it, I’m a naughty blogger. Don’t feed the beast frequently enough, don’t interact with other bloggers enough, too Minnesotan to engage in flagrant self-promotion (guilt-free, anyway), and prone to posting when I fancy, about whatever happens to be on my mind at the time. That said, I do try to keep my posts […]
[Note: Surfingedges has lain fallow for quite a while now, as life has not been kind to the kind of free time that allows for blogging, especially in the essayistic style I’ve been going for most of the time. The problem with that is that, with a blog, you’ve gotta keep “feeding the beast” to […]
This is the time of year in which I find myself continually reminding my students–not to mention myself–not to neglect self-care, even when there’s only time for small breaks. In that spirit, here’s a “review” of sorts of one of my favorite coffee-break timeouts. One of the themes of the “Tech” thread of this blog is […]
The first six lessons in my series on plain-text writing should be enough to get anyone–even the least techy–started with a complete plain-text writing workflow, using Gedit, markdown syntax, and Pandoc. But I’m not done with the series. Look for more to come on editors, operating systems (and why you should seriously consider Linux), more […]
Note: if you’re new to this series or to plain-text writing in general, please refer to Lesson One of this series to get started. As I mentioned in the previous lesson, one of the biggest pains for me in academic writing is dealing with what happens to footnotes and citations in Word documents over the course […]
In two more weeks, I end my post-heart-surgery medical leave and go back to doing what I love the most: being with students, teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare, and studying the literature and culture of medieval Britain. It’s going to be a bit of a transition after three months of focusing on healing, so I’ve been […]
A better way to manage footnotes.
Pandoc: The Magic Wand of Sustainable Document Conversion Now that you’ve had some fun playing with a great text editor like Gedit, and have played around with Markdown syntax, it’s time to work a little magic on your plain-text writing. Think of Pandoc like a magic wand: it’s a tool that takes your markdown text […]
Introducing Markdown, the Plain-Text Writer’s Power Tool Everybody’s familiar with the usual way of formatting text in a traditional word processor, but have you stopped to think about how laborious the process normally is? If you want to make a word italic, your hands come off the keyboard and one hand moves to the mouse. […]
[Note: This is part two of a multi-part series on the joys of writing with plain-text tools. If you haven’t already, you might want to take a look at the first lesson, which covers why one might want to use plain-text tools in the first place. This lesson, and all the forthcoming lessons, are geared […]
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