I discovered a fascinating, brilliant trick you can use with any YouTube video name string while talking with Stephen Carradini yesterday. I shared a Doctor Who clip (this one, if you’re curious), and it took him a bit to get around to watching it because the URL didn’t exactly make it particularly clear what video I had sent him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LakwV3P3qII

We started talking about how YouTube should tag the name onto the end of the link, so that people could actually tell what video they were going to see, and Stephen posted an example of how it could work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LakwV3P3qII_drwhoblink

Lo and behold: that link works. I got curious and started poking around at different videos on YouTube and quickly discovered that you can append whatever text you want after the video ID; you’ll end up at the base URL again. All of YouTube’s link IDs are 10 character strings, with some mix of letters, numbers, and underscores allowed. Everything after the tenth character gets stripped. (Almost everything, that is…)

That’s halfway to fantastic — but only halfway because, as noted, you just get pushed down to that stripped URL. Thus, when I clicked on Stephen’s link, it truncated back down to the original link I sent him. Fine and good for one person, but what if you wanted to re-share it? The link has been changed, so you’d have to go back to where I originally shared it with you, or you’d have to add it on yourself.

Knowing a whee little bit about how these things tend to work,¹ I wondered what happens if you use an & to tell YouTube that you want to add something to the query you’re sending it.² As I suspected, YouTube hangs onto that. Most likely, there are other queries that include more than just the video name — things like content source — so those parts get left in. In our case, that means that we can add a string to the link and it will be there for others to use if they want to reshare the video themselves.

Anybody who curiously hovered over (or clicked to) the Doctor Who video I referenced at the start of the post went to this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LakwV3P3qII&name=DoctorWhoWibblyWobblySpeech

It’s like magic! You can see what the video is about, and even when you click the link, you still have the name of the video to share with all your friends!

And there ends your lesson in cool tricks with YouTube for the day, kids.

Markdown took over my writing life this semester, as I’ve mentioned. I took nearly all my class notes in Markdown (after a brief interval of using Evernote and an even briefer pass with Microsoft Word—neither of them quite worked for me, especially as my addiction grew). The only hiccup with my growing delight in the combination of Markdown and Byword was the challenge of writing papers in them. There was little question for me that it was worth the few additional wrinkles it entailed, however: a nice clean writing environment and the obviousness of Markdown (not to mention the revision-history– and version-control–friendly nature of plain text) inclined me strongly toward using it.

For main paper content—all those lovely paragraphs I hammered out—Markdown was sublime. The trick for my papers this semester, though, was something core to any academic writing: footnotes. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Things currently on my near-term radar, web development-wise:

• Finish up a web site that I’m doing pro bono for a friend. This one’s been on the back burner since we moved, but I’d like to actually get it knocked out at the beginning of the summer. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Just a quick note that I’ve updated my original post on custom Kindle fonts with info for the Touch and Paperwhite (at least if you have current firmware).

For about the last two months, I’ve steady been moving toward doing all my writing in Markdown. Truth be told, I’ve been moving that way slowly off and on before that, having been looking for a simple syntax like it for quite some time. I’d spent some time writing in Textile—a number of my posts for Pillar on the Rock were composed with it, and I’ve even used it on this site in the past with a (now-largely defunct and therefore unlinked) plugin. Textile is great in a lot of ways – if you’re looking for a syntax that maps directly to HTML. (In fact, if that’s what you’re looking for, Textile is much better than Markdown.)

Then, over the last six months or so, I’ve been using Markdown here and there. Read on, intrepid explorer →

This one’s here for my own reference as much as anything, because I will want to do this again and I’d rather not have to go dig it up.

If you want to launch an editor with a list of files matching a specific pattern from any Unix or Linux terminal, the quickest and simplest way I’ve found to do it as follows:

find directory [-name modifiers] -exec grep -l pattern | xargs editor

So, for example, I just wanted to use Sublime Text 2 open every Fortran 95 file in a directory that writes to disk, so I ran the following:

find . -name "*.f95" -exec grep -l 'write(' {} + | xargs subl

Read on, intrepid explorer →