starseerdrgn: red Nidorino softlight ai (nidoai)
I've been staying mostly offline for the last few days. Between getting some rather disrespectful and outright hate-fueled content thrown my way by social media people (in my RSS feeds), and just a general mass of negativity from the web/net as a whole, I've been trying to keep my focus elsewhere. Even gopher hasn't exactly been a place for positivity lately.

As such, I've been once again trying to learn C a bit more. "Learn C on the Mac" by Dave Mark has been a great help, given that I'm trying to do all of this on my MacBook Pro in Snow Leopard. And despite what I keep hearing from people (especially in the Rust community), C hasn't been that difficult for me so far. Sure, I'm not even done with the basics, but that's why I said so far. We'll see how well it goes in the future.

I've also been trying to figure out a good alternative to Pages '09 for making ePUB versions of my writing. Just in case I have to leave the MacOS platform for something like Linux or Windows in the future.

I tried getting the writer2epub extension working, but alas, it just doesn't run on either OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or NeoOffice for Snow Leopard. And the developer has seemingly disappeared, with all development dropped...because LibreOffice added built-in ePub export, and that was probably enough to make others sort of bully the dev into not updating (because that community hasn't pissed off enough people yet). So, I gave that a whirl.

It works. I'm having to do the testing in my Windows 7 install, but it works. Just... I can't get the cover image thing working properly, and the documentation doesn't say too much about any sort of troubleshooting. It doesn't even give me a size or aspect guideline for the file, or say what file types are supported. I've been having to guess this entire time.

That said, I know Calibre can export files to ePUB as well, so I'll be giving that a shot later. Here's hoping it's a bit more customizable than LibreOffice's offering. If nothing else, I can use my legacy version of Scrivener for Windows to do the work, because I know it works well. I just don't have a working Scrivener for 10.6.8...and that may eventually be a good thing.

For now, I think some gaming is in order. Just not sure what to play.
starseerdrgn: a white dragon with azure crystal horns and snout scales (Default)
So, while my MacBook Pro is crying about me compiling some Perl things, I want to mention that I ended up grabbing Steve Kemp's old Perl-based blog compiler/SSG, Chronicle. I've been wanting to hack on this thing for a while to run my blog, mostly because I happen to like Perl as a language.

Python both pisses me off, and is one of the reasons I nearly swore off programming as a whole, due to my early interactions with that community being on-par with that of many Arch Linux vocalists: "RTFM", and nothing else. I've been using Pelican, a python-based SSG engine, for my story and writing blogs for a while. But I want to be able to actually work on the backend software for my own uses, and given Chronicle is Perl...why not?

Well, I already ran into a problem while grabbing all of the dependencies. "-fstack-protection-strong" is not available with older gcc and clang compilers, so I had to go into my Perl configs, open "Config_heavy.pl", and change the ccflags entry to "-fstack-protection" instead. After that, everything started compiling just fine.

Right now, I'm going through the template docs to make one of my own. Probably a dark theme, thinking Black-Amber or Black-Green like an old monochrome CRT terminal. We'll see what I can come up with, though.

July 2023

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
9 101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 11:24 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios