More than once, readers have written to me, asking if it was possible to track an RSS feed from a Weblog or news site with a shell script. Sounds kinda wacky, but in fact, it’s a very good use of a shell script, as the following rather extensive entry — including source code! — demonstrates. If you’re a bit confused by the following, you might want to consider picking up a copy of my best-selling Wicked Cool Shell Scripts.
A question came in from a fellow writer with a tale of woe: “I managed to goof up my contract with the publisher so good (being given a chance as an aspiring author and all) that I really don’t see a way out of my situation right now.
“In a nutshell, I didn’t negotiate my contract and ended with with non-compete clauses of all sorts which now prevent me to author a new
revision of my book…”
I’ve been using various versions of Firefox for quite a while, but this week marked an important milestone in the evolution of this slim, small Web browser from the Mozilla team: the release of version 1.0, the first “official” release version of the program. Is it a good browser? Oh yeah, I have lots of good things to say about Firefox and its many capabilities (though why it can’t import Safari configuration settings is a bit puzzling). But there are some gotchas too, particularly from the perspective of a Web developer.
The question arose: “I’m always forgetting to change the copyright notices on the bottom of my Web pages, so it’s not uncommon for me to have 2003 as the copyright well into 2004, and I’m sure that I’ll do the same thing in 2005. Help! Surely there’s some easy SSI trick for fixing this?”
This is a fun question: “How do I change the icon shown for my hard disk on my Mac? I used to know how to do this with the older MacOS, but not with Mac OS X.”
A reader writes:
I had taken an intro course to UNIX a few years ago, but have found your book Teach Yourself Unix in
24 Hours MUCH more comprehensive and user-aware!I have hit a stumbling block in Chapter 16 (page 337) where you illustrate the use of cat, however. You show:
$ cat average.awk NF > 2 { count += 1 totalsize += $5 }There is more that follows on this page and page 338. This seems to illustrate that the cat command allows you to input text into the named file. Perhaps that is not what you meant. Did I miss something?
I occasionally receive email from people telling me that they think they’ve become quite the HTML/CSS mavens and are curious if there are any competitions they could enter to demonstrate their prowess. It’s a great idea if you think about it, because I know that I’ve certainly come across little CSS pages or JavaScript widgets that are just, well, amazing. So how do you get some peer and industry recognition for this skillset?
Having had oodles of experience with contract negotiation and publishing, I’m reviewing the contract that a very large publisher sent a colleague for a book she wants to write, and it amazes me how it has all the same anti-author clauses of just about every other publisher’s agreement I’ve seen (with a few notable exceptions). This is why people who aren’t familiar with the business really need to consider an agent, lawyer, or someone else who can represent their interests when reading through a legal document of this nature.
