mandarine

Introduction

Pencasting: publication of manuscript content to the world-wide-web as scanned images of pen-and-paper text. The practice is not new, but the term was first coined in April 2007 by mandarine in Emily’s blog.

The underlying idea behind pencasting is that it can serve as a very nice complement to blogging, halfway between plain digital text publication and podcasting; halfway in terms of how much of the blogger’s personality is revealed, and halfway in terms of how much bandwidth is needed.

People reasonably comfortable with multimedia publication should have no difficulties inventing their own pencasting process. This tutorial is pencasting for dummies (well, not completely, for if you have a scanner, chances are you have already scanned stuff — if not, play with your scanner first).

Minimum hardware configuration

• a pen and a sheet of paper
• a computer with an internet connection
• a flatbed scanner (or a digital camera)

The tutorial

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The name

All right, I know the domain name is pretentious, but let me just give a little background. For this, let me take you back a couple of years ago, when I hardly knew the word ‘blog’. My personal e-mail address has the classical structure first.last@provider.ext. After I sent a birth announcement message to all relatives and friends, I started to get spam mail in my inbox. It was too late when I realized that I should not have used my personal e-mail address for such a broad communication. Now my e-mail was out in the spam world, with my real name in it for everyone to see. I have a very rare name, so if someone looks up my name in Google, all the results are about me: they’ll know what I do and in what city I live, and then if they look up my name in the phone directory, it’ll tell them my personal address.

I do not know about you, [more]

I have added a favicon to my new site so that you know at a single glance that this is mandarine’s place.

Could you let me know in the comments if you cannot see the eye appear in the address bar, in the tabs or in the bookmark folder? Tip: these things are a little capricious. You should force some kind of page refresh (try CTRL-SHIFT-R or clear the browser’s cache from the browser’s settings).
IE tip: I had to check before I believed, but if you are under IE and the favicon does not show, right-button-dragging the address from the address bar onto the page seems to trigger favicon refresh.

I am trying to get the icon to show in feedreaders too, but this seems a little too complicated right now.

Resources

If you have a full wordpress version (i.e. not a wordpress.com blog), you can do likewise. These are the resources I used:

• How to add a favicon in Wordpress
• The Wordpress Codex page on favicons
• And a different trick, putting the favicon in your theme folder

So, there it is: after having said at least three times over the past twelve months that I would go to a real hosting service, I have taken the big jump. I will post soon about the new domain name and some of my choices. For the time being, I am just trying not to lose too many nuts and bolts while I make the move.

With the help of Maria, I have setup a .htaccess file with a Redirect permanent instruction, that should be taking you transparently here

(www.wisemandarine.com/xxx)

from there

(mandarinelechat.free.fr/weblog/index.php/xxx).

Known glitches

The blogroll has disappeared, but I intend to do it all over again, with many many more links to all my readers.
The site map page is kind of strange. This will change too, as I intend to drastically simplify the structure of categories quite soon

Interrogations

I am not sure that the rss feed (for those who keep up with mandarine via their feedreader) follows. You will probably have to modify the feed address to feed:http://www.wisemandarine.com/feed/.

Although search engines will apparently update their index automatically based on the permanent redirect, I sort of believe your links to mandarine won’t. So, if you wish to have an up-to-date address in your blogroll, please change it to: www.wisemandarine.com (much simpler, isn’t it?).

This is still beta

Should you witness anything weird going on, please let me know in the comments. I’ll try to fix it.

Thank you for hanging tight through this traumatic phase.

I have decided to resort to pencasting for all my personal posts. Therefore, my blog will not show up in search results from personal details I wrote. I get to use taboo keywords without fearing hordes of trolls stampeding my way from indiscriminate search results. And it feels like I am writing a letter to my readers instead of writing a textbook, which is how personal posts should always feel.

Enjoy the next pencast, then.

Update: everything is back to normal. If you want to have a feeling of how things looked like on April 5th, try to disable the stylesheet from your browser (I know at least Firefox can do it: view/page style/no style).

No, your browser has not gone berzerk. No, reloading will not change the result. Today is CSS naked day. I have turned the stylesheet off. It will be back tomorrow (if I do not mess it up in the process).

I am learning CSS at the moment, so I can tweak my theme (or maybe build a new one from scratch) without the dreadful consequences of ignorant tampering, and I really must aknowledge how powerful it is.

CSS naked day is a way to pay tribute to web standards.

Three weeks ago, our beloved Mandarine gave birth to a litter of kittens. She is now, at age four, the proud mother of seven.

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Maybe you remember my Christmas e-book stack. After I had downloaded a whole shelf worth of e-books, representing the space of a USB stick, I wondered whether there was a thing I could do to contribute in return. Obviously, I could donate money to the Gutenberg project. But I found better: I found I could contribute by proofreading scanned pages so that they could be turned into free quality e-books.

The distributed proofreaders website organises the work of online volunteers who show up when they feel like proofreading a few pages. The unofficial target is one page a day — I prefer to do seven pages a week. I have found it a marvellous way to contribute, and a great way to get to know books in a totally new fashion. As I write this post, I am correcting OCR mistakes in Hector Berlioz’s Correspondance Inédite. It almost feels as if I am Berlioz’s editor, 138 years after his death.

You might want to give it a try if you feel you have the soul of an editor, if you believe classics are the property of all, if you like to discover new books at random, if you find some thrill in interacting with text, if you want to be part of a team and a project, if you wish to contribute to web 2.0 without being a geek, or if you just do not mind giving a hand to what I believe is a true literary wonder of the world.

I have looked at reviews on automated comment management plugins. Nothing seems perfect. I suggest a basic low-tech semi-manual approach that can help you follow-up on comments you have left in blogs. I describe it with Firefox. [more]