Because knitter's need their own feed symbol...
Scroll down to download knitfeed.zip.
Scroll down to download knitfeed2.zip.
Both zip files include different sized pngs and the original Inkscape svg.
Knitter's Feed Symbols by K. Chester is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| knitfeed.zip | 538.12 KB |
| knitfeed2.zip | 557.85 KB |
Well, it's not exactly my best work, and my accent is a little too obvious for my taste, but I've finished my very first video tutorial. It's a crochet provisional cast-on. Nothing fancy, but it is the first in a series of tutorials for the Japanese short row toe.
I'm inordinately proud of myself. After struggling with this for over a month, I finally have something that is good enough (not perfect, but it's better than my previous attempts) to show.
Awesome! I'm nearing the stage where I can make photo turiorals for a pattern, but I will leave the videos to professionals like yourself. LOL
I ususally use the provisional cast on with a string to hold the stitches the other way, but often wind up with an unintensional mobius - this would be much easier to keep tidy, and crocheting over the knitting needle really streamlines it - thanks!
On January 5, I launched my monthly newsletter. (You know the same newsletter that's had a sign up form for the past month, but no actual news.) My journey towards a newsletter didn't begin with looking at software packages. It began with me sitting down and making a list of what needed to be in each newsletter.
Then I needed a logo. That was relatively easy. My site is called the Knitting Penguin, but I moved away from cutesy penguin logos during the initial design phase. That doesn't mean I didn't create numerous cutesy penguin logos. It just means I didn't use them in this iteration of the website. (And note, this is stage 2 of a 3 stage redesign. Stage 3 uses the penguin.)
I grabbed the cutest little penguin in my arsenal and nominated it as the newsletter logo. Then and only then, did I begin looking at software.
Choosing mailing list software is a bit like buying yarn. There are more choices than you can shake a stick at and some are invariable better than others. After reading reviews, fees, experimenting with PHPList (an open source option that I don't recommend), and trying several of the commercial options, I settled on Mail Chimp.
They're this little outfit out of Atlanta, and their interface and work flow make the others look lame, sick and dying. And they let you have lists of up to 500 people for free. The freebie sends are nice, but they aren't the reason I went with the software. I loved their WYSIWYG template creator. I don't normally like WYSIWYG editors, but they did a wonderful job with this one.
So if you haven't subscribed to the newsletter yet, here's the link. And if you're thinking about creating your own, MailChimp is what worked best for me when I did my tests a few months ago.
I hate Drupal's documentation. There I said it. Go ahead and flame me. I don't care. It's the truth. I recently came up against this lack of documentation issue when I decided to use JQuery UI Accordion on my comments.
I found the documentation for comments in multiple places, but nothing really spelled out how everything worked, not even my wonderful assortment of Packt Publishing Books. I finally ended up opening the Comments module folder and reading the comment.tpl.php file. The example code got me on the right track quicker than reading the API and theming documentation had. And I soon had my output rendering properly except for one, pesky little thing.
There was a seemingly random <a href=”....$comment->cid”></a> somewhere in either my template or the core that I couldn't find. I googled, I pleaded for help on the forums, and I emailed friends searching for this irritating piece of code. My efforts rendered blank looks, numerous complaints on theming comments, a few theming examples, and silence.
Disgusted, I read both my template and my subtemplate files. Then I ran an advanced search on the entire Drupal core, and I found it tucked away inside the comment module itself. (See the comment.module file.)
$output .= "<a id=\"comment-$comment->cid\"></a>\n";
It was probably the six hours spent digging for an answer that incensed me beyond all reason and made me do something that I normally scream you should never do. I edited the core.
I took my delete button and deleted this bit of nastiness so quickly it would make your head spin. Why because this extra element that was being inserted above my individual comment code and consistently blew up the accordion I was trying to use.
By the way, this reference was already being used within my custom comments template. I've since decided it was unnecessary for my site and removed it.
Then I did something really stupid. I posted on the forums under my own question and said I'd found the problem and I'd deleted it. Perhaps, I should've added “in a fit of pique” to that statement, but I don't think it would've made a difference.
There was a little bit of back and forth, and I mentioned that once I had the fix for my issue documented I would make it available to the community.
That's when I got the comment below.
“Comment module has many theme-able functions, if you understand how to use those you understand how to do what you want without hacking core, so theres really no need for us to have screeds of info about doing this or that simple adjustment, just copy/paste the theme function and you're away.”
Forgive me, but I believe the point of this entire post (and the key issue) was that there wasn't adequate documentation. Please repeat after me, if you have to read the code to find the hooks, functions, etc., there isn't adequate documentation.
Documentation is supposed to document what a given function does without you having to read the code. That's why it's called documentation. Perhaps, four plus years dealing with WordPress has spoiled me, but I don't think that's the problem.
This is good comment documentation.
This is what I finally found by going to Theming Guide > Drupal 6 Theming Guide > Anatomy of a Drupal 6 Theme (if only all of the documentation looked like this page) > template files > comment.tpl.php. No where in any of this documentation (nor in the module documentation) does it mention that the module (not the module template, the module) inserts html into your final output. In all fairness, WordPress doesn't mention this either.
If you look at the documentation, you'll notice that the only difference in the comment documentation is that the WordPress docs have an example with the documentation and all of the form theming documentation is grouped under one topic, meaning you don't have to search for it across different sections. (No jumping from the theming docs to the API docs.)
Not having cohesive documentation is a major barrier for newbies. Not everyone wants to read the core code to write a theme. And quite honestly, I don't think anyone should have to.
What disturbed me more than anything was the implication that there's somehow no need to document the “simple adjustments”. Now, I've run across some snobs within the Drupal community and I've also run across some wonderful people. But the idea that you don't want to document how a core piece of your software functions sufficiently to adjust it without reading the module itself disturbs me.
While I don't think this one opinion is representative of the community as a whole, this isn't the first time I've seen an attitude towards documentation like this within Drupal. After my 4.5 failure, I watched the community's attitude towards documentation improve for several years before I downloaded Drupal and tried it a second time. (That's when I fell in love with the software, not the docs.)
In my opinion, an open source project is only as viable as its community. And it's community is only as viable as it is welcoming. Welcoming means documenting the little stuff, having some advanced users do a little hand holding in the forums, and having users who act as advocates. (Drupal has improved in leaps and bounds, I'm not meaning to imply that it hasn't.)
This also implies a degree of civility (and the exchange between myself and the other user was civil) and a willingness to drop the technical lingo with a newbie, which takes effort and practice. I try, but I don't always succeed.
Perhaps my hatred of the docs, which strike me as jumbled and disorganized most of the time, is unfounded. Then again, if I had this reaction to them, there's a chance someone else either has or will.
I like the flexibility Drupal gives me. A few questionable forum posts, poor documentation, and Ubercart's paypal integration, which was sending multiple emails until I became aware of the problem, won't run me off. I have too much time invested in it, and there isn't anything else on the market that will do everything I need this site to eventually do that uses PHP, SQL, and is within my price range.
Plus I like tinkering with it in my localhost (and in brave moments, live). I'm adventurous and I enjoy coding. I've enjoyed coding ever since I did my first website back in the 9th grade.
But my background is more diverse than just coding. Working in knowledge management and teaching has given me a very different perspective on some things. Drupal is a great project. Users like Lulabot make it even greater by their willingness to help educate the community. But documentation that you have to print out, highlight, cut apart with scissors and tape back together to make it make sense harms the project. If separating API documentation from everything else makes it difficult to use the documentation, combine the two. If it's difficult to sift through it and determine what applies to Drupal 5, 6, and 7, create entirely separate documentation for each version. Repeat some sections if you have to.
As for documenting how I created my accordions, I will write it up, and I will submit it to the Drupal theming documentation as a recipe. I have a few things to finish up, including moving the hacked core to the template.php file first before I submit it, but one person's comment won't stop me from doing it.
That's all the rant that I have for today. As for why I posted this here, instead of to the forums...it's my blog. It's fine to rant on occasion within my own space. It's not appropriate to do so in the forums. (Well, if the post's name is Rant Here, it might be okay.)
As for the issues I perceive with the documentation, I may or may not submit them as documentation bugs/feature requests, depending on what they are. I need a cooler head before I make any decisions on that one.
(By the way, I get more use out of this cheat sheet than I do out of the Drupal API Docs.)
Comments are one of those things that can be incredibly clunky and the default Drupal implementation leaves much to be desired. I was shocked when I started digging into the comment documentation, and even more shocked by the response I got.
While my experience with Drupal has been overwhelmingly positive, the documentation is one of the issues I've run into. I've purchased several books through Packt Publishing and I can't recommend their Drupal series highly enough, but books are supposed to supplement existing documentation. I'm still tweaking various elements of my comments, and I'm still researching various functions and issues. Many times, this involves tracking them across modules.
I've also decided to post the anchor issue as a bug report because despite the argument to the contrary, it is a bug. The module itself is injecting HTML into the code. This is what we have template files for.
I would also say I have found a lot of variability in the documentation. Sometimes it's great, and easy, and clear, and sometimes its non existent. The difference with a newbie like me, is that I tend to assume that I am the problem, and that there must be something very simple I am missing since no one else has had this problem before.
All this from my one little observation about the comments on your blog....
New Year's isn't a day that I normally use to stop and take a breath. I typically spend the day planning out my strategy for the next six months, reviewing accounts, and such. In essence, it's just one of many days that I spend working.
This year is different. The past month has been both busy and fruitful, but mostly busy. After several years of beating on the doors and getting enough rejection letters that they'd probably be hip deep if I printed them all out, three of my poems were accepted and published in the latest Fib Review. (I'm actually more excited about these than I am about anything else I've done in the past year. Sad, isn't it?)
I also had a completely random moment, wrote a little tweet about a father telling his son a blinking red light was Rudolph, sent it in to Thaumatrope because their tweets seriously make my day, and had that published too. The inspiration for this one was my father who used to tell us that the light at the radio tower was Rudolph. I was seven before I noticed that the light was there year round, but even then it never failed to send both of us running for our beds. (And some of you are probably wishing I'd posted this little tip before Christmas...)
I finished the deadline knitting. And for the record, loosing your chart, having to recreate it from the sample, and then screwing up badly enough to have to rip the whole thing out after you've finished 2/3rds of it, isn't fun. It's done. It's gorgeous, in my not so un-biased opinion, but it's a miracle I still have any hair left.
Then my father got a cold and promptly gave it to everyone in the family as a Christmas gift. I got sick two days before Christmas and I'm still not over it. It was bad enough to interfere with my last minute knitting, which means his Christmas gift is still in my basket.
I'm still busy with secret projects and the Newsletter, which will launch on January 5. The Newsletter is a new step for me, but I think it will be a good one. It features a monthly drawing, and I'm experimenting with a Ravelry notebook ad to build interest. If anyone wants to mention this month's drawing ($25 WEBS gift card) on your blog or tweet it, let me know. I'll be happy to reciprocate. If you've already signed up for the newsletter, you are automatically entered in the drawing.
Here's hoping this year's better than last!
Kristle
The DIY Tools group is one of my favorite places to lurk, and the place where you're most likely to catch me these days. Why? I'm cheap and I come from a long line of junk collectors.
Wool combs made out of nails and epoxy, custom stripe dying with pvc pipe, and spinning wheels out of old bicycles mesh perfectly with my junk genes (and it gives me a better reason to go to the hardware store than buying a drill gauge to size knitting needles.)
A CMS is the backend of your website. It lets you add new content, moderate comments and trackbacks, rearrange pages, etc. Often, it lets you do this with very little to no knowledge of html or css. It is an administration method that doesn't rely on hand coding and FTP transfers. Nice, eh?
I'm not going to get into which CMS is right for your business. That is a rather complex evaluation and is a series of articles in and of itself. This is about getting your feet wet and installing and building an experimental website. For our purposes, which CMS you choose is based on your technical abilities and your desire to tinker.
Never Heard of a CMS or Little to No Knowledge of HTML or Curious, but don't want to spend more than 1 hour
Try Wordpress.
Used WordPress Before or Some Knowledge of HTML or Willing to Spend a Few Hours Experimenting
Used One of the Previous Systems or Some Knowledge of HTML and PHP or Willing to Spend 8+ Hours Experimenting
Try Drupal.
For our purposes, you are picking something that you will install and run locally. It will never see the light of day unless you upload it to a real host or change your machine's web server settings, which I don't recommend. Shared hosts are generally more secure and have better up time than you would hosting your own site and the price is about the same.
This is what's known as a localhost. It's a real web server that is only visible on your local machine. You build and test everything locally and then you upload it and make it available for the world to see.
Why do this? Well, ask yourself if your readers will like seeing all the “Under Construction” notices, error messages, and constantly changing layout. (Hint: The answer to this is a resounding no.) Also, it's a non-threatening way to experiment.
It doesn't matter if you blow up the web page (as long as smoke isn't coming out of your computer, but that's a separate issue) because no one will see it but you.
By far the simplest method is BitNami. Simply choose which system you want to install and download and install the native stack. Follow the Readme instructions for your operating system to run it.
BitNami is cheating compared to the old install MAMP (Mac), WAMP (Windows) or XAMPP (Linux and Windows). Download the CMS from its website and install it into the htdocs folder. Then configure the file permissions and set up the database and run through the CMS's setup process. Later, especially if you have a host that doesn't use Fantastico or some similar system to install common CMSs, you may want to try doing your own install with a clean MAMP or XAMPP and the downloaded application. But for now, stick with the quick and relatively fool proof BitNami method.
The price for both the BitNami and the MAMP/XAMPP methods is the same...$0. In other words, it costs you nothing but some time to experiment and set things up the way you like them before you push your site out to the world.
For your first experiment, I recommend sticking with one of the systems offered prepackaged by BitNami. Later on, you may want to explore a little more. I'm mostly a PHP person, so the systems that I'm most familiar with are PHP-based. I've tried others. Below are a few that I've tried and run long enough to say they work in some situations.
XOOPS (PHP)
CMS Made Simple (PHP)
Plone (Python)
Django (Python)
Movable Type (Perl)
XOOPS is what I almost went with for this site. It's nice, very nice, but it lacked a few features that I felt I would need in the future and I didn't see anyone in the developer channels discussing adding them.
In all honesty, there is little difference between what you can do with CMS Made Simple and what you can do with WordPress, but sometimes you don't want a blog. You don't have to have a blog with WordPress, but it's name is almost synonymous with blogging. If that bothers you, SimpleCMS may be something you want to look into.
Plone and Django were both run in test versions for clients. I really don't know enough Python to be able to delve into their inner workings, so I didn't try. The administration interfaces were clean and the learning curve on Django was much lower than I expected it to be. That's about all the insight I can offer on them, other than hire a Python developer.
I ran my personal blogs on Movable Type for about three months before I moved it back to WordPress. It's nice software, but the moment I decided to start consolidating, and in one case selling, my blog content, I no longer had any need for it. I found WordPress easier to use both from the administration aspect and from a coding one. (Remember that warning at the top. This is me. I want to at least be able to skim the code and know if it makes sense or not.)
For this site, I use Drupal. It has a higher learning curve than some of the other choices, but it offers some functionality that wasn't readily available on the others, it has an active community, and it's development cycle means I won't be upgrading my system every other month. (The constant upgrades was my major gripe with a self-hosted WordPress and what eventually pushed me towards using Wordpress.com for a time.)
As a complete newbie, I used BitNami on Kristle's recommendation, and it was really easy. Idiot proof, once I learned how to open a directory and start my local host =). She said elsewhere it took her five minutes to set up. Well, I thought, she knows what she's doing. It only took ME five minutes to set up, too.
I'm also using Drupal to build my site (much more slowly), and I would only add that I also love a lot of things about it, but the area I've wanted more knowledge the most is images. There are a lot of possibilities, but they all take learning something more (not always much, but something).
Very much hoping more posts on this topic are planned....
That looks very interesting. Unfortunately, it isn't one I have personally tried so I can't recommend it one way or another.
I'll put it on my list to experiment with in the future. I will say that having been on the implementation side of wiki projects, wiki text is a serious adoption issue for users who do not have previous html experience, so I'm not sure if the wiki text ability is a true selling point. However, the admin area looks amazing. That by itself puts it on my "try" list.
I'd like to point out that a CMS that could fit in the middle category that wasn't mentioned is Enano CMS. BitNami offers a module for that system and it is rather easy to set up. Themes and Addons are available at the Enano CMS project website ( http://enanocms.org ) and there are a couple that are unique to Enano CMS as far as I can tell.
If you are familiar with editing wiki pages, you can use wikitext for posting any content in Enano. Otherwise, you can use the built in rich text editor that uses HTML.
I needed the perfect yarn like an ice cream sunday needs fudge. Without the fudge, it's not a sunday. Without the perfect yarn, it won't be worthy of being mine.
When my bank account vehemently disagreed with me, I went to the sock drawer and began digging though it, searching for a few extra dollars--spare change that I missed in the first pass. That's when I saw IT--the teal cashmere sweater that I bought at the Goodwill not long after I moved to DC. It never fit, but I was freezing and looking for something to layer underneath my coat. It worked. For $10, it more than worked; it was perfect.
I haven't worn it in years, not since I got my first pay raise and was able to afford clothing that fit. So when I saw it my drawer, my first thought was “Didn't I give that away?”. Then its beguiling voice whispered in my ear, “Knit me.”
I gnawed on my lower lip and looked around the bedroom, searching for the source.
“Knit me,” it whispered.
I looked between the sweater and my dog. People will think I'm nuts if I say the sweater talked to me, so I almost convinced myself it was the dog, who is neither knitable nor spinable.
The sweater rubbed against my fingers, reminding me of how luxurious it once felt against my skin even though the sleeves were too short. A small smile skated across my face and I lifted it out of the drawer and rubbed it against my cheek. It was still soft--make you want to wrap yourself in it and never take it off soft.
I stroked it for a moment. I promised my sister she could have this, but that was before her she got the 'twins'. It wouldn't really fit her after her enhancements, I told myself as I surreptitiously turned it inside out and checked the seams. Crocheted seams, no button holes or nasty zippers, minor felting at the arm pits, but I can around that, I reasoned.
Excitement coursed through me. Maybe I didn't need more money. Maybe all I needed was my yarn swift, a seam ripper, and a tapestry needle. Sweater in hand, I dashed into my living room and grabbed the yarn gauge.
Ten stitches per inch put it on the finer end of the lace weight yarns. Perfect. Ten minutes later, I found myself sitting in my rocker, carefully removing the seams.
Many hours of Law and Order later, I have 115g of 2-ply lace weight cashmere. It's not the color I had in mind and there are a few stains, but a little vinegar, some Betty Crocker Gel Food Coloring (blue), and a crock pot should fix that.
To be continued...
I've never been very good at being a selfish knitter. Family and friends are kept warm by my sweaters, scarfs, gloves, hats, and the hand knit socks they beg for. I've kept very little for myself, and it's been several years since anything new graced my closet. Everything seems to go from my needles to the post office without any stops in between.
Knitting on deadlines (a.k.a. submitting and getting lucky) is actually a little worse. You pour your heart and soul into an item, mail it off to someone you probably don't know, and hope they like it as much as they did the proposal.
Either of these is enough to take the joy out of knitting. The combination sucks the life out of you quicker than a vampire after a hundred year fast.
Instead of making yet another pair of hideous socks for a recipient who asked for yarn that looks eerily like the oak tree in my back yard, I want to make something for me. I want a project that recaptures the joy I used to feel when I picked up my needles. A yarn that slides through my fingers and has just the right combination of softness and squish. Something that is me.
A project with no deadlines that moves at my pace, however slow that pace may be. There were a few problems.
I sketched out a pattern and worked up a few quick swatches to see if I liked the effect. Starlight lace with a simple, geometric border. It works for me. Now I need to find something that suits it.
To be continued...
Thank you for the wonderful feedback. It will take me a while to implement all your suggestions, but the extra eyes were wonderful and greatly appreciated. If I can ever return the favor, let me know. The winners will be notified shortly.
And the winners are....
$25 WEBS Gift Certificate: Comment #30 (Candice)
Shalott Sock Pattern: Comment #16 (Laurel) and Comment #20 (Zebra)
Share Your Thoughts