Various Lies

Thursday, July 9, 2009

A (not so) secret code?

I am not a programmer; I'm learning Python (slowly) and dabble in HTML. I have to an increasing amount of web design & maintenance though. Thankfully we have a nifty little custom built web-builder that uses a WYSIWYG editor to write the code for you. Except it's a bit shit.

I have a couple of monstrous documents I need to get up on our Postdoc Office website (that I'm also building) ASAP. I have spent a couple of hours today with various HTML tutorials open, but none of them have had examples of exactly what I want.

But, I finally figured out how to do ordered lists with indented, bulleted unordered lists embedded in them! An ugly, but functional combination of

with the odd

  1. text
and
  • text 2

seems to work. s long as you remember where to close the tags. I know this naughty and I'm supposed to use CSS, but...baby steps...

So, to me, w00t!!11! as we say in 1337 speak.

Now, as long as the next part of the list starts at "4" and not back at "1" we might be in business!

Corey Doctorow was right. It is addictive commanding your computer what to do, even when it's something simple as rendering dodgy HTML.

5 comments:

Prof-like Substance said...

My Python books have arrived... and that's as far as I've gotten. When I get back from my last trip of the summer at the end of next week I'm going to drag the lab into this as well. What good are students if you can't make them do things that will force you to do it as well?

tideliar said...

Too damned true mate!

fwiw, the list did number correctly. It looks shonky though cos of the way the web-builder is rendering it, so I'm gonna have to go play withh the code and just embed bullet points I think.

Ford said...

Python is great for those of us too busy to learn a more difficult language but who occasionally need to automate something. I could write simple programs that worked after spending a weekend with the manual. Since then, I've used it to:
1) scan the web pages of several journals, looking for keywords, then generate a personal homepage with links to papers I should read (plus XKCD, if its M W or F.
2) Generate a file of commands to run my computer-controlled milling machine,
3) convert bibliography software formats

tideliar said...

Hey Ford, thanks for commenting.

That's pretty much why I'm (trying to) learn Python. There are a few automated tasks I'd like run because. for example, I just don't have time to keep up with scanning the literature as mush as I'd like. Someone on another blog had a script linked to their PDF/reading folder and would "push a button" and it would randomly select a paper for them to read! I'd love that too :)

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