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Category: Tools and Technology

MLA (7th Edition) Updated EndNote Style

Published by Iris on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

I’ve made substantial changes to the EndNote output styles for the 7th edition of MLA. If you downloaded my last version, please download the new files. And since there seem to be endless ways to mess these things up, please let me know if you find irregularities. I’ll do my best to fix them and then redistribute these files.

Once you’ve downloaded them, be sure to look at the “About This Style” part of the styles for specific instructions on making this work with MLA style. I’ve outlined the biggies in my previous post.

Alternate link to the files.

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Blogging Dilemma

Published by Iris on Thursday, August 20th, 2009

I think I need two blogs, but I only want one. What I really want are nested blogs.

Here’s the thing, I have some longer-form things I may want to actually *write* rather than just think about writing, but long-form doesn’t really go over well in Blog World. So I’d like to have a place to put those that’s a little separate from my main blog, and then I’d like to use this blog to just gloss those a little and point to the longer essays in case anyone’s interest gets whetted. So I guess what I want is an “essays” page here that’s really another blog to house the essays.

I could use the “more” tag, but that would still dump the long essay in people’s RSS aggregators (I think), which seems a little inconsiderate of those who really don’t want to slog through more than a few paragraphs of my writing at a time.

I could use “pages” that are just not included in the navigation, but that would rely pretty heavily on a plugin. And besides, true masochists who might want to subscribe to those essays would be out of luck.

I could simply upload completely separate files and link to them, but I’d really like to avoid that scenario. For one thing, I doubt I’d ever actually do it if it required too many different types of composition platforms and upload steps. That starts to seem like work!

And if any of you suggest I go in for formal publication… but no, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you? I’m allergic to formal publication.

So I don’t know quite what to do, or if this is even a good idea. Any ideas?

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Welcome!

Published by Iris on Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Welcome to the new version of my blog. If you’re seeing this in your feed reader, woohoo! You’re all set. If not, I know one of two things about you. You either a) landed on this page in its native habitat and should really subscribe to my new feed, or b) REALLY aren’t seeing this post at all, and there’s not much I can do about that. Most people in the world will fall into Category B.

While you’re here, let me know if there’s something that’s not working the way you think it should (internal permalinks are definitely one of those things, I know — I’m investigating my options there). Perpetual Beta, Baby!

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Firefox Search Bar Frustrations

Published by Iris on Friday, July 31st, 2009

It’s a tiny thing, but I use it about a million times a day. It’s the FireFox Search Bar — it’s my supplier for all that Googly goodness I need in a pretty much constant stream throughout my day. I’ll probably get some sort of repetitive stress injury from the specific action of hitting ctrl-k. In fact, I sometimes even use this search bar to open a new tab since hitting ctrl-k and then enter (I have the box set to open searches in a new tab) can be easier on the hands than hitting ctrl-t sometimes.

But my search bar isn’t working, and hasn’t been for about a week now. I can ctrl-k myself there, type in my search terms, and hit enter, but where I’d expect to see a Google result list, I see a pristine Google home page. No search terms. Nothing. What’s more? I can change that Search Bar so that it says it’s searching Amazon, or IMDB, or anything, and when I type in search terms and hit enter… I get a pristine Google home page.

For a completely unrelated problem, I ended up uninstalling Firefox and and installing the new beta version, but the search bar problem didn’t go away when I did that. I poked at the internet for a couple of days trying to see if anyone had come up with a fix, but didn’t find anything. I searched through the Firefox support forum and knowledge base and found people having similar (though not necessarily the same) problems, being told to follow the directions in the knowledge base. Then the thread would be closed as “solved” before anyone could say “but I tried that already.”

Knowing a little bit about how these support forums work, I search hard before posting my own question. I know there’s no patience for people posting questions that have already been answered a million times. But I finally did, and I included in the post that I’d already tried those other directions with no success, and I’d already uninstalled/reinstalled, etc. And now I can’t find my forum post anywhere, so I’m turning to you. What do I try next? I’d really like this search bar to work. Really really really.

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