Mehandiratta

Hi! Today we were conducting the ICT Training at IIC, UDSC which aims at promoting the use of Open-Source Softwares in the University amongst the teachers as well as students. We were giving the Faculty hands-on with Ubuntu and, since, they were new to Ubuntu so many questions were shot on us and one out of them was how to write characters with diacritical marks(e.g ë, õ) in LibreOffice Writer. I found the question interesting as I got a new thing to explore. So I started searching for the solution and within few minutes I found one.

I am demonstrating the procedure below:

First of all go here and download the ComposeSpecialCharacter extension or directly download it from here

Now Open the LibreOffice Writer and go to the tools tab and select Extension manager.

The following window will appear which prompts you to add an extension. Click on Add and go to the directory where the file has been downloaded, select the file and click Open as demonstrated below. Now the Extension Software License Agreement Window will appear you will see the Accept button is disabled. Scroll till end and it will become active, click Accept and close the next window that appears. Now close and relaunch the LibreOffice Writer and you can see that a new option named Compose Character appears under the Insert tab. On clicking the compose character option you will see a window(shown below) appearing on your screen that displays the information on how to use the keyboard shortcuts to enter the special characters on the editor. But before using the shortcuts you need to set the CSC(Compose Special Character) Shortcut key-combination. Click on the CSC Shortcut tab and you will be greeted with a new window that prompts you to set a key-combination for composing special characetrs. Here, as you can see, I have chosen the alt+F3 key-combination, you can choose any combination like shift+F2, alt+ctrl+m, ctrl+g but make sure the combination you choose should not conflict with any other shortcut already defined for the editor. Click OK and also on the next two windows that appear click OK Now the following window shows you the key-pair to use for writing the words with diacritical marks. Suppose you want to write “Ø” then as shown first you have to type “O/” and then you need to press the CSC key-combination set by you, which in my case is alt+F3 Simillarly to type any other character just look for its key-pair value and then afte typing in the key-pair value press your CSC key and you are done. As simple as that!

Hi all! I have been using octopress blog for a couple of months now. I find it very interesting to work with. But a problem I used to face with Octopress is that I was unable to operate it from multiple machines. The complete setup was on my laptop and if I want to post anything onto the blog from a system in my institute, I can’t. As long as my laptop was serving my purpose I didn’t bother but one day my hard-disk crashed and then I was left with no other option then finding a solution to operate the blog from multiple places.

I had the basic understanding as to what does different folders inside the octopress folder actually mean.

The octopress repository cotains two branches: Source and Master The Source branch contains the files necessary to generate the blog and the actual blog is contained in the Master branch. While configuring the blog initially the source branch is cloned into the folder named octopress and the files of the actual blog are cloned into the sub-folder named _deploy.

All the files and folders are pushed to the Source branch when we run the git push origin source command on terminal except the _deploy folder which contains the files of the actual blog and are pushed to master branch automatically when we run rake deploy command.

So the steps that I followed are as follows:

Step.1

I Cloned the Source branch to a local directory named Octopress:

git clone -b source git@github.com:username/username.github.com.git octopress

Step.2

CD to the octopress directory just created and cloned the master branch into a directory named _deploy:

git clone git@github.com:username/username.github.com.git _deploy

Step.3

Then I installed ruby as follows:

curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
rvm install 1.9.3
rvm use 1.9.3
rvm rubygems latest

after this I configured everything according to the octopress guidelines:

gem install bundler
bundle install
rake setup_github_pages

This prompted me to enter read/write URL for my blog

Enter the read/write url for your repository
(For example, 'git@github.com:username/username.github.com)

Here I have omitted the step rake install because it installs the default theme to the octopress and there was already a theme installed on my blog. If you want to install the default octopress theme then run the command rake install before running rake setup_github_pages

That’s it. Now I have a complete copy of my octopress blog. Now I can do whatever I like as i used to do before loosing my blog.

If you want to operate your blog from multiple places you just need to setup a copy of your blog locally on all the machines and then before making changes from any machine do the following:

Go to the octopress directory and pull the source branch:

cd /path/to/octopress/directory
git pull origin source

Go to the _deploy directory and pull the master branch:

cd _deploy
git pull origin master

Make changes and push:

git add .
git commit -m "your message"
git push origin source

Deploy:

rake generate
rake deploy

That’s it!