Here's a particularly tangled and difficult problem. It arises because I have another blog. Specifically this: Team Red Cruising. And it's an unholy mess.

There are two important features of the Team Red Cruising blog.

1. It's managed with off-line editor(s) so I can write posts from the boat and …

http://sdtimes.com/json-vs-xml-battle-format-supremacy-may-wasted-energy/ This article seems silly. Perhaps I missed something important. I'm not sure who's still litigating the JSON vs. XML, but it seems like it's more-or-less done. XHTML/XML for HTML things. JSON for everything else. Maybe there are people still wringing their hands over this. AFAIK …

See http://www.dexy.it Wow. That seems cool. I write. A lot. I've tried a lot of tool chains. A lot. And I mean non-trivial "try". Whole books. Hundreds of pages. LEO + my own HTML Templates. A lot of fun at first. An outliner that generates RST is a …

Once upon a time, Apple offered iBlog. Then they switched to iWeb. Then they abandoned that market entirely.

That leaves some of us with content in iBlog as well as iWeb. Content we'd like to work with without doing extensive cutting and pasting. Or downloading from a web server. After …

For years, I've been using Apache POI in Java and XLRD in Python to read spreadsheets. Finally, now that .XLSX and .XLSM files are in more widespread use, we can move away from those packages and their reliance on successful reverse engineering of undocumented features.

Spreadsheets are -- BTW -- the universal …

Completely revised the Building Skills in Python book.

It now covers Python 2.6 and is much, must easier to maintain in ReStructured Text markup, formatted with Sphinx and LaTeX (via TeXLive) than it was in XML.

XML -- while modern and clean and uniform -- isn't as convenient as LaTeX and …

I wrote the first Building Skills books using Appleworks. It wasn't too bad to organize the styles around basic semantics of the subject area. It's an easy, productive writing environment. Except, of course, for internal cross-references, indexes, and tables of contents.

I converted to DocBook XML markup. The conversion was …

See Python XML parsing and Parsing simple XML files in python using etree.

Originally, I used SAX -- but built DOM objects with it. I moved from application-specific DOM's to generic DOM's.

Then I switched to the miniDOM parser. It gave me structures I could walk with a pleasant Visitor design …

Saw a horrifying design document recently. One that was at the "gouge out my eyes" level of badness. That's one step below "drink until I forget what I saw", but one level above "beat the author with a tire iron."

They were -- I'm guessing here -- trying to develop their own …