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I will need to take an enforced break from posting here for what I hope will be a short period time. After binge-watching a TV series I’ve managed to go over the usage cap of my ISP (Demon Internet). This means that I’m currently rate-limited and “enjoying” dialup speeds for the first time since I’ve had broadband. It’s not a pleasant experience and it was all I could do to post this message. Although I was ready to upload my next ink review that will have to wait as it is too image-laden to be practical.

This is the final spur that I’ve needed to leave Demon after more than 20 years – they were my first real ISP after using Compuserve and CIX. Demon was a real trailblazer at the time, but the company has changed hands a few times since then and for several years they have only stood out as expensive for the service that they provide. I’ve been a fool to myself for not leaving before now. I’ve signed up with another provider and am just awaiting a MAC authorisation, although from what I’ve seen elsewhere Demon can be obstructive in this regard and the web page I entered my details on gave no acknowledgement that the request had been received. I fear an uphill battle is ahead.

In the meantime I may try a links post if I’m feeling brave, and the occasional update if the move to another ISP doesn’t go smoothly, otherwise normal service will be resumed once the move to the new ISP is complete or I drop below Demon’s capping threshold.

There are other issues affecting the site at the moment. There appears to be a DNS or routing issue on my web host which is stopping the Lifestream plugin from accessing content hosted on the same server, which means that (for example) links bookmarked to Shaarli and aren’t appearing in the Lifestream. This has been reported but has not yet been resolved. The Instagram widget isn’t updating either – that could be related to the other issue or it could mean there has been an API change at Instagram – either way I can’t debug it with such limited connectivity.

Software

Distraction Free Writing and Markdown

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208x128For most of my recent posts I have been using Windows Live Writer to draft the post and upload it to WordPress. It works okay but I had problems with a few basic WordPress functions (especially embedding). While I seem to keep having such problems with WordPress regardless of how the text is entered (too many annoying little things don’t seem to work as expected) I wanted to see if life would be easier if I took Live Writer out of the mix.

So I have reverted back to editing in a browser. I had previously found this to be too distracting, so I also tried out WordPress’s “distraction free” full screen editor. Coupled with the “full screen” mode in the browser (F11 in Chrome and Firefox) it really gives a minimalist approach which I think I can live with.

I have also disabled the Visual Editor – I only switched to it once during drafting this post and it mangled some html I had entered. So I have now removed the temptation to use it at all (the profile page in the Admin Dashboard is the place to disable it.)

Having done that and gone into full screen mode, most of the handy buttons (apart from those to insert images and links) have gone. Although I’m fairly competent with html I need the easiest way to show a few words in bold, or insert a heading when necessary. This is where Markdown comes in, which is now available through the Jetpack plugin (it just needs to be enabled).

The following are a few examples of Markdown (Hosted on Pastebin because WordPress insists on transforming some of the characters in the links to html entities):

And here are the results:

This is a level 2 heading

This is a level 3 heading

This is some normal text. Here is some text in italic, bold and monospace.

  • This is a bullet point (the preceding blank line is needed)
  • This is a second bullet point
  1. This is a numbered list
  2. This is the second line – the number used doesn’t matter!

This is quoted text
This is a second line of quoted text

Say I want to put something in *asterisks*

This is a simple link: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics

This is another link example with a title.

The Markdown Mark comes from here: https://github.com/dcurtis/markdown-mark