The Problem

In this blog, I would like to include photos. The easiest way would be to embed them from Flickr. Flickr allows embedding photos, not only your own, but also those of other Flickr users, as long as you respect the license of those pictures. But Flickr’s terms also require that every embedded image is linked back to the original page on Flickr. This is not a problem for a single image, but it becomes tedious when you have many images to embed. I have written about this problem in more detail in a previous post. Here I will discuss the different solutions I have found to this problem, and the one I have implemented in my blog.

The ed text editor does not allow you to filter lines of the buffer through external commands using the ! command. What you can do is to read the output of a command and append the output to a specific address within the text. The general solution is to use a temporary file to hold the output of the command, and then read that file into the buffer at the desired location.

I have transitioned this site from AWS Amplify to Render.com for static site generation and hosting. The reason is that AWS Amplify suddenly started charging for a service that was initially free. In particular, the firewall functionality started to cost money, something I was either unaware of or not really advertised.

La Pavoni

The La Pavoni is a manual espresso machine and I own one since I bought it in 1994 while in Florence. While I have always loved the idea of this machine, I never really learnt to use it properly. It requires a lot of love and most of the time I am just to impatient to use it. So I rarely use it and hence I am not good at using it. A vicious cycle.

Tufte Layout

While trying to redesign this blog to something more visually pleasing, I came across the works of Edward Tufte.

The issue

I use a gitea instance for my git hosting. A firewall hides the service for ssh access unless I am in the local network. So I have to use https for the git URL, which forces me to use a username and password when using the command line.

Flickr requires a link back to any image that is included in a web page. The easiest way to do this is to make the image a link to the flickr page.

To see the image in the web page, the static url has to be extracted. This has to be wrapped in a link to the Flickr page.

Introduction

I love LaTeX, which I have used for serious documents (which I define as documents with more than ten pages). It is unparalleled in typography, typesetting and reference and document management. It is almost indispensable if writing mathematical formulas. In addition, it uses plain text files for its documents. The thing LaTeX is not, it that is is not WYSIWIG.

While trying to learn Haskell Language I stumbled over Hakyll as static web page generator.

A Unicode test