Irreal

As I wrote previously, Ben Maughan is writing a tutorial on Org mode basics. He continues the series with a very basic introduction to tables in Org mode.

This post covers just the very basics like how to enter tables, how to import them from a non-table region in your file, and how to export them to various formats. Once you’ve got these basics down, all the other power of tables is open to you. Maughan hints at these and promises to cover them in subsequent posts.

Again, if you’re new to Org mode, Maughan’s simple tutorial is a good way to learn the basics. Afterwards, you can branch off in whatever directions meet the needs of your workflow. I can’t overemphasize how useful and powerful Org mode is and spending a little time learning about it will repay you manyfold.

Erik Clarke over at pleiotropy has a couple of nice posts on using Org mode as a lab notebook. The first post lays out his requirements for a digital lab notebook. As you can probably guess, these include

• Permanence
• Citations
• Ease of use
• Discoverability

By citations he means the ability to include BibTeX-like citations in the notebook and have the full citation included when the notebook is exported. Discoverability means that it should be easy for him or others to search the notebook to find entries on some desired topic.

The second post is the code and configuration data that he used to implement his notebook. It’s straightforward and easy to understand and is therefore easily adapted to your particular needs. Clarke uses Papers, a research paper repository tool, and added a bit of applescript to export his bibliography from Papers¹. He also added a hook to automatically commit his notebook to version control whenever he saves it. That last step is an important part of the permanence requirement.

If you’re in the sciences and the idea of an easily searchable and printable lab notebook is appealing to you, you’ll want to take a look at these posts. Clarke’s solution probably won’t fit your needs exactly but his ideas constitute an excellent infrastructure for you to build your own solution on.

Part of the reason that I moved Irreal from Blogger to WordPress was that I wanted to use org2blog to write and publish my posts directly from Emacs. As a result, every post on Irreal started life as—and is maintained as—an Org file. If I need to update a post, I just update the Org file and republish it.

Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder, on the other hand, just recently started using org2blog. I’m happy to welcome Rettke to the one true way™ but the conversion does raise a problem: how can he convert those old posts to Org documents so that he has a uniform method of maintaining the posts?

Rettke found an excellent solution. It turns out that Punchagan, the author of org2blog, also wrote org2blog-importers, a way of importing WordPress files into Org mode. Rettke shows that he can import WordPress posts into Org mode, modify them, and republish them perfectly. If you have an existing WordPress blog and would like to start using org2blog, you should definitely take a look at Rettke’s post. It will delight you.

I’ve mentioned Howard Abrams’ posts on Literate DevOps before. I think of it as a sort of reproducible research where you record the steps you use to create a deployment image including the code for each step. Abrams does this using Org mode and Babel so that he can execute the code directly from his Org file. This makes it easy to share his results with colleagues, reproduce an image for testing, or even just remember how he did it.

At the EmacsConf 2015, Abrams gave a talk on the subject and subsequently made a video recreating his talk. It’s a really interesting talk that has ideas applicable to anyone who might need to share or recreate a complicated task. That’s almost all of us. How many times have you figured out how to perform some non-trivial process, needed to do it again later, and couldn’t remember exactly how you did it? It happens to me all the time.

Using Abrams’ techniques you write a story about what you’re doing and why and you put the necessary code right in the document and execute it from there. Then if you later need to do it again or if someone asks you how to do it, you have a file with all the steps and code. Abrams shows how to execute the code on remote machines and even how to execute the code on a machine protected by a firewall.

It’s a great video and everyone can probably learn some ideas from it. It’s about 28 and a half minutes so you’ll need to schedule a bit of viewing time.