A week or so ago I stumbled across this blog, which went almost instantly into my RSS feed, due not only to the name of a post which cracks me up (yes, I know my humor is off ;P) but also to the posts I found really interesting.
And then I came along this post which got me thinking about what software I ended up using towards the end of my bachelors. Or the software I have learned of since, but wish I’d known about earlier. I began to write a comment to her post, but realized that it would be too long, so I write here instead. All credit to Hazel though, since without her post I wouldn’t have been inspired to write this one.
My list, as compared to Hazels, will not be as well-rounded, it won’t necessarily fit every student the way her list do. Also, the software I list will only be guaranteed to work in GNU/Linux, as that is what I used in the final semesters, and have continued to use since.
First of all, a text editor. It doesn’t really matter which, just evaluate a bunch until you find one you feel comfortable with. Once you have found “the one” become intimate with it. Become a frakking Jedi-master at wielding it. I’m still a padawan-level user of Vim, but I’m getting there.
I say the same about web browsers, mail clients and instant messaging clients. Find a good one, learn as much as you can about it, and use it effectively. Firefox, Thunderbird and Pidgin are my preferred tools.
A bug-tracker, although often web based creating a need for a web server, can often provide more “good stuff” than just tracking bugs. Stuff like statistics, or, if you think outside the box you’d be able to track things other than bugs, which I guess it was issue-trackers does. Some of these also include a wiki-system, which makes establishing a project-specific knowledge-base kindof easy. In the one university project where we used such a system (and where I realized its potential) we used Trac.
A blogging-system with an RSS-feed capable of being filtered on tags or categories could be used to distribute status updates to other members of a group. That I’m using WordPress should be fairly obvious to all.
Use a version control system wherever and whenever possible. With the next two suggestions on the list, “wherever” will be a lot more commonplace than one might first believe, even for non-programmers. At the university we had access to SVN-servers, and also tried Mercurial, a distributed vcs. Mercurial stuck with me ever since.
From generic suggestions, let’s go specific.
I could encourage you to check out markup languages such as reStructuredText or Markdown, to find one which suits you best and to run with it. And since I’ve now written the terms you’d need to Google, you could do that, but I’ll simply recommend LaTeX. The reason for markup languages in general, and LaTeX specifically is that you can then store your information in one plaintext format (which makes it easy to manage in version control) and can then transform it to a slew of other formats as needed.
Most of the time we needed to hand in PDFs. LaTeX excels in that and manages all the typesetting stuff and (obvious) formatting. Which leaves you with more time to focus on the content. One could also either extend LaTeX with Beamer, to create presentations, or simply generate a PDF and run Impress!ve.
For diagrams, graphs and flowcharts or representations of state-machines, Graphviz would be my recommended way to go. Again using plaintext to control the content, again with the benefits of version control. Inkscape saves files in the SVG format (again, plaintext) which might be usable (especially since it can also save files as both PS and PDF)
If you need graphical representations of statistical data or other plots, matplotlib could be the way to go.
I personally don’t like managing things, or management-related stuff, but lately I have been haunted by the feeling that if I used management tools, even if I would only be managing myself and my pet projects, I could be more organized and efficient. So I have started looking at TaskJuggler. It is similar to Microsoft Project, with the largest difference being that… you guessed it, you code the project plan ;D. Plaintext yet again. And then you compile the plan and TaskJuggler attempts to verify that no resources have been double-booked.
Considering each piece in this list on their own, it might seem like a waste of time to exchange one software with another. I do find each of these softwares impressive in and on their own, but it is when they are put together, when all their strengths are combined, that you tend to get the most out of it.
The all plaintext approach I have tried, both in groupwork at the university, and later on my own, work rather well. That so many of the softwares on the list can be used to communicate and transfer information between parties is also intentional as without communication the chance of a successful project outcome diminish rapidly.
The last (bonus?) item on the list would be to recommend learning, at least superficially, a programming language which you could hack together small scripts with. Something which you could use to “glue” together the other parts. I adore Python, and many of the softwares listed above have python-bindings ready to use. Perl, Ruby and others, which elude me right now, would undoubtedly work equally well or better, but as with the text editor, pick a language you feel comfortable with, and rock on.
Thoughts? Questions?
Update: Fixed broken link
More WordPress
Friday, December 26th, 2008I found myself today with the urge to finally, once and for all, find out what this “nofollow” business is. I have tried before, but either never understood it, or understood it only to discard the information. My understanding now is that the “nofollow” attribute tells search-engine crawlers whether or not I endorse the site to which I am linking. That is, if I have found a site which has helped me, and I want to give “love” back to the site, I then write a post, linking to it, NOT including the “nofollow” attribute.
The reasons why a blog might want to deal with this concept is simple: If you have a blog which has become somewhat of an authority in a specific topic, and you get a whole lot of comments, what is to hinder unscrupulous commentators from adding their own links to comments, which will then be indexed by search engine crawlers (they only see the html-source, where a link is a link, unless you mark-up specific links differently so that they stand out. That’s what “nofollow” is for.
However, when I was done reading (I searched Google, opened up a lot of tabs), I found “related links” at the bottom of one page (oh what a scourge on my time they are ;)) which lead me to another topic, “9 Easy Ways to Get More Blog Comments“, which offers up a slew of plugins which might make a difference.
One of these being the “Show Top Commentators” plugin, which purportedly gives “love” to the most active commentators of the blog. It’s a great idea but I’m just not so sure about giving the most active commentators the most love, since the quality of the comments should come into play as well. Of course, then you’d need a rating system, and a policy of who gets to rate comments, and soon it would be chaos. Having only the author rate comments could create a biased environment, running the risk that only positive comments would be rewarded. On the other hand, letting users rate each others comments… well let’s just say that it could work if only registered users were allowed to rate comments (although not their own). The sad truth is that a small portion of the unregistered commentators could not be relied upon to be honest, and would thus skew the statistics, knowing that, as they are unregistered, there is no effective means of tracking them and hindering their attempts at self-aggrandizing or sabotaging other user’s comments. I am however unaware of any such plugin which would work on ratings rather than volume.
Another (potentially) cool plugin, is WP-PostRatings which would give registered users, and possibly anonymous guests as well, the ability to rate blog posts. As with the “Top Commentator” plugin, this could be misused, this time by rivaling authors in the same niche. But that may just be the pessimistic side of me talking
In any case, there are a lot of nifty plugins for WordPress, although this one plugin seem engineered more towards generating quantities of comments rather than quality comments. And that would possibly be a better metric and a better merit for commentators.
Tags: comments, nofollow, rating, WordPress
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