Tech Lessons

LaTeX On The Cloud: Meet ScribTeX

anees — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:25:16 +0000

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system which includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation, and is available as free software. That’s what the official LaTeX website says. It’s a document preparation tool and a document markup language (yeah, something like the super-cool HTML). It produces better (read ‘the best’) results when compared to the word processors you use. With LaTeX, you’ll get more time to work on the content as the appearance of the document need not be taken care of.

The only problem with LaTex is that it’s too heavy (Well, atleast for me. I don’t have a faster connection and can’t even dream of downloading a 900MB monster). I did try a windows specific distribution of LaTeX, but that didn’t work for me. It kept asking me to install ‘that’ and ‘this’ package. It was then I googled for an online alternative, and found ScribTeX. It’s a cloud implementation of LaTeX and comes with all the packages you need. You can choose from the 3 plans available. The free plan lets you manage 3 projects and offers 50MB of storage.

To start with a project, either create a new tex file or upload an existing one. ScribTeX comes with an online text editor too which is good enough. When you are done with a project, save and hit the compile button right on top of the text editor, and the pdf output is ready to download. It’s as simple as that.

Give ScribTeX a try.

Vessel: A Thematic Child Theme

anees — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:19:35 +0000

I just made a thematic child theme and named it Vessel. (Don’t ask me why did I choose that name.) I didn’t change anything on the functional side except adding theme info to the footer. The remaining part is pure CSS. Below is a preview.

You’ll need the thematic framework to use this theme. Copy both thematic and vessel to the themes directory under wp-contents inside your wordpress installation, and activate the Vessel theme.

Download Vessel (8kb)

Painless Form Validation Using Jquery

anees — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:44:38 +0000

In an earlier post, I showed how easy it is to validate a form with HTML5. You don’t have to use scripts, but just the markup. But, as you know, compatibility is a bitch. Not all of them who visit your website use an html5-ready browser. Validating what they enter in your forms is a painful task. Here’s the savior. A nifty Jquery plugin lets you validate forms in a simple way that’s quite similar to the HTML5 method. All you have to do is the following .

Include jquery and the validate plugin in your page. Add the following code anywhere between and .

Now, copy down the following code snippet too to the head area.

The above piece of code calls the validate() function for the form with the id ‘commentform’. (If you don’t have a basic idea of Jquery, use this tutorial)

Now, start creating your form. Use the same id you specified in the code above (in this case it’s commentform.)

To validate email, add the class attribute with the value ‘email’.

For a url, use the class ‘url’. For a mandatory field, use ‘required’. For an email that is mandatory, value of the class attribute should be ‘required email’. Below is the markup of an example form.



   Name: 

   email: 

   url:

Ain’t that simple, folks? Now, read the official documentation of the validation plugin here. That contains a demo form too.

Use Your Dropbox Account To Host A Blog

anees — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:08:26 +0000

Just found this service called Calepin, a blogging service but not a blog hosting solution. Calepin uses your Dropbox account to store blogposts. Unlike other blogging platforms, Calepin uses markdown in place of HTML. Markdown is simple. You write using a human readable and easy-to-write plain text format and it is then converted to valid HTML. It’s simpler than HTML and it understands HTML. that means, if you don’t know how to do something in markdown, you can use HTML code instead.

Setting up Calepin

Go to calepin.co and signup. You will be taken to the login page of dropbox. If you don’t have a dropbox account, you will be prompted to register. Now, link your calepin and dropbox accounts (yes, that oAuth thingie you are familiar with, if you are a twitter user). Calepin will create a folder in dropbox by the name calepin, under Apps directory.

Posting your first Entry

Open a text editor, and type the following.

Title: Hello Cruel World
Date: 2011-1-12
Slug: hello-world

this is some text. this is how you add a [hyperlink][1]

[1]: http://techlessons.in

Save it as an md file (like hello.md. md is the extension used for markdown files) and upload to calepin directory in dropbox. Now go to calepin, and hit the publish button.

Calepin don’t support custom themes and it offer only one theme now. However, you can tweak your blog by adding a settings.json file to the calepine directory. The parameters supported by the settings file can be found on the homepage of calepin.

My Verdict

I don’t think calepin is a wordpress/blogger/tumblr killer. But I found it cool and little nerdy. Worth a try, I say!

Now, before going away, take a look at my calepin blog here.

Next Gen Gallery: Image Gallery For Your WordPress Site

anees — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:45:38 +0000

Next Gen Gallery is an integrated image gallery plugin for wordpress. It has an administration system at the back-end and can handle multiple galleries.

Apart from regular image galleries,you can create slideshows too. For the slideshow, you will also need JW image rotator. Download the zipped archive, extract it and copy the ‘imagerotator.swf’ file to ‘nggallery’ under the wordpress plugins directory (wp-content/plugins/nggallery).

With Next Gen Gallery, you can customize almost every aspect of an image gallery; the thumbnail size, slideshow duration and transition effects, slideshow size (WxH) and more. Files can be uploaded one by one or as a zipped archive, the latter option is definitely a time saver.

Another thing you can do is adding a watermark to the images. Go to options -> Watermark (gallery options are found at the bottom of admin area’s left sidebar) and enter the watermark text (or choose an image) and choose a font, transparency, size, color and position of watermark.

Download this plugin

A demo can be found at this page.

Turn Your WordPress Site Into A Wiki

anees — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 03:42:38 +0000

If you don’t like the interface of Media Wiki, what will you do to create a wiki site? As the saying goes, “There’s a wordpress plugin for that!”

WordPress Wiki, a 33kb weighing plugin, adds basic wiki functionality to your wordpress site. Once you install the plugin, a dashboard item ‘wiki pages’ will appear. Click ‘Add New’ to add your first wiki page. It takes you to the WYSIWYG Editor of wordpress where you can add content to the wiki page, just like you create a post or page. Hit Publish and your wiki page is ready.

The published wiki page will look like this. Did you notice the Read, Edit and View History buttons at right top of the content?

And what you see below is the Edit View of the wiki page.

Download WordPress Wiki Plugin

Planning to setup a wordpress site? I can help you do that for a price as low as $50/INR2000 (including 1 year hosting and .in domain). Contact me if you’re interested