Category: Feature Requests

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Why I can’t use IntenseDebate

I would love to use IntenseDebate on my WordPress powered website.  However, IntenseDebate does not respect post visibility settings.  Once in October 2009 and again in March 2011, I emailed IntenseDebate support about the problem.  Each time the question was courteously answered in a very prompt manner.  Sadly, it appears that they have no plans to implement post visibility setting compliance.

The reason I care about post visibility with regards to comments is that I have many old posts from my early blogging days with lots of comments that I don’t want publicly available for various reasons.  I’ve set them to private for a reason.  IntenseDebate does not respect that privacy and will copy over ALL current comments to their system, thus making them accessible to anyone.  The only way to not have those comments be visible is to completely remove them from my WordPress install.  That’s not an option for me.  I HATE losing data for any reason.  It’s too bad.  IntenseDebate looks like a very good addition to any blog.

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LaTeX, BibTeX, and managing PDF’s

I am in the midde of writing my PhD qualifier paper and should be working on that rather than writing here.  However I’ve been rather irritated lately with several things.

Of primary concern is my LaTeX front end editor.  I use TeXnicCenter and have for about a year.  My masters thesis and most of my term papers of the last nine months were written using it.  The one HUUUUUGE problem that application has is its font choices.  It only will display text in the editor using monospace fonts.  Monospace fonts are horrible (for me anyway) to write with.  They bother my eyes no end and make me less able to write.  No, really.  I’ve tested writing in Word 2007 and TeXnicCenter.  My writing flows way easier in Word than in TeXnicCenter.

Lyx would be a great condender except that it is a WYSIWYG editor and not a straight LaTeX code editor.  I prefer using code rather than formatted text.  It also saves in a Lyx-specific file format.  Yes, it can be exported back to LaTeX but I want it to be natively LaTeX.

WinEdt looks to be equivalent to TeXnicCenter except that it can use any font.  Only problem there is that I have to have administrator rights to install it.  And I don’t.  It also costs $30 to use beyond the month-long trial period.

If only TeXnicCenter allowed fonts other than monospace!

On the BibTeX side of the equation my qualifier paper is now approaching 200 bibliography entries with associated PDFs on my harddrive.  Currently I store PDF’s in directories related to what general subject the pertain.  I make my BibTeX files by hand.  Every entry is manually typed into a BibTeX document.  I want some way to integrate all of that together.

So far I’ve tried Zotero, JabRef, and Mendeley.  None are satisfactory for a variety of reasons.  If all three could be blended together then we’d have something!  Until then I continue to plod along as-is.

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Gallery2 hiccups, barfs, and then recovers

I had a few hiccups today with uploading photos to my Gallery2 installation. Documentation of what happened is on the Gallery2 forums. There still are some annoyances that I run into while using Gallery2. For instance:

  • Not being able to batch rotate photos based on EXIF data after they are uploaded and inserted into an album. Seriously. That shouldn’t be so hard to implement!
  • Not being able to add more than about 50 photos at a time without the program barfing (this might be a Dreamhost limitation but really should be addressed in the Gallery2 core since I imagine many people use a similar shared hosting setup).
  • Not having support for AVI movies in FireFox.  To play them, people using FireFox either have to wade through support FAQ’s for Gallery2 to find some obscure FireFox plugin (that didn’t work for me, by the way), or they have to edit something in their quicktime plugin installs, or just use Internet Explorer.  That is not a very good solution if you ask me.
  • To be able to watch a movie, the permissions on it must be set to “view all” for the Everyone group.  I like to keep my original-sized images to myself and want to just be able to set all of the permissions for all of the albums once.
  • Watermark issues!  It seems that my albums like to have their watermarks vanish periodically.  This is a bit troubling as I want to be able to protect all of my content at least to the extent where people might awknowledge the source of the photos.  I think this might be due to Dreamhost issues with regards to php_memory limits.

All in all, it’s very powerful software.  I just wish they’d change and/or fix these few things.

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