Well that was quite a hiatus…

Long time no post. Been very busy, just not out in the open!

A recent post on Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog inspired to dip my toe back in the water though. First was a post where he coined the word ‘Blessay‘ (though he was unaware that Stephen Fry got there first). While I don’t think I’ll be writing in the scholarly manner Dan advocates, the idea of writing longer form pieces appealed to me.

One of the reasons I wrote blog articles was to ‘give something back’. If I hit upon a solution to some interesting problem, I’d write about it. However, in the past few years StackOverflow has provided an avenue for that kind of altruism.

However, the trouble with StackOverflow is it tends to become a race to write an answer as fast as possible to garner quick upvotes. If someone posed an interesting question, I’d spend some time writing a more considered answer. While I might learn something interesting, that writing is lost among a sea of quick answers.

Until I read Dan’s post, I hadn’t realised how much I enjoyed writing longer pieces. So, I aim to do that, and get better at it!

So – the blog has a new look to focus on the text. And away we go…

How to make drawings and diagrams have more detail in Google Docs

Ever made an intricate diagram in a Google Doc only to find it hopelessly pixellated when you print it?

It seems Google take the nice vector image you’ve created and render it as a 600 pixel wide bitmap. That’s always going to look bad in print.

After a document I was writing got bitten by this, I figured out a way to fix it. You do need a little familiarity with HTML, so here goes:

1. Go to Edit -> Edit HTML

2. Find the img tag which corresponds to the image you want to modify, it will look like this:

<img src=”http://docs.google.com/a/drawings/yourdomain.com/image?id=s08e-HCOucm1vs2N4yDwx6g&w=600&h=600&rev=710&ac=1″>

3. That URL can be modified to return an image wider than 600px with more detail in it. So triple it and set the w and h parameters to 1800

<img src=”http://docs.google.com/a/drawings/yourdomain.com/image?id=s08e-HCOucm1vs2N4yDwx6g&w=1800&h=1800&rev=710&ac=1″>

Now this image would be too big for the page, so we add a width=”600″ attribute so that Google docs makes it fit the page width

<img width=”600″ src=”http://docs.google.com/a/drawings/yourdomain.com/image?id=s08e-HCOucm1vs2N4yDwx6g&w=1800&h=1800&rev=710&ac=1″>

4. Job done! You should see the improvement on screen and in print!

Pastebin.com has a new owner!

Congratulations to Jeroen, who is the new owner of pastebin.com. Many thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in taking it over.

The site is now running on vastly improved hardware, and I’m sure Jeroen is going to do a fantastic job in taking the idea forward.

End of era for me, but I wish Jeroen the very best of luck!