[Tips from The DARK SIDE] HOW TO GENERATE your BLOG INDEX IN A FLASH (Part I: Introduction)
If you want the solution right away, skip to my next blog (same thing “Part II”).
You are having a nightmare. In this nightmare, you are taking the final exam for ICS 620 AGAIN. (Footnote for non-CICS: ICS= Information and Communication Sciences, ICS 620 is a course on Telecommunication Technologies by Dr. Jones.) As usual, Dr. Jones, cheerful, tries to relax you by telling entertaining stories, yelling at GAs, playing with the equipment in the room, etc. (Footnote: GA= Graduate Assistant.) But this doesn’t work. You are striving to concentrate the few brain cells that you have left on this one damn question, the question that keeps you from the Perfect, this one blank in your paper (this is just a dream, I mean a nightmare, OK?).
This question is:
What basic principle would you apply whenever you do not know how to do [whatever]? 4 words, NO ACRONYM PLEASE
You think hard, you even try to think in binary to grasp the essence of the course... Nothing comes out except the steam from your overheating brain.
You are now the only one left in the room. Dr. Jones is staring at you with ball eyes, exhaling heavily and tapping on his watch. The exam is over. You give your paper back with this only damn blank in it, mortified. As soon as you go out of the room, before suiciding yourself, you remember the answer:
READ THE F_ _ _ _ _ _ MANUAL (RTFM) (Feel free to play hangman on this one.)
This is the trigger. The nightmare is over. You wake up soaked in sweat and realize this was just a nightmare. In a lightning reflex, you catch your todo list, to make sure you did not forget to come for the 620 exam. Yes, “620 exam” checked. All right, you move on. Something about 640 (ICS 640= Information and Communication Industry, by Dr. Bellaver), checked as well. Then, “602 blog index”. (ICS 602= Human Communication: Process and Theory) Not checked. The CICS still got you, you can’t escape, even in your nightmares (see above).
So you have to do this blog index. You have been such a great blogger that you have 100 blogs already. You want to get this done in a femtosecond because you are waiting for one thing right now: to be in the arms of Morpheus.
You lambda-user side suggests you to copy-paste everything in one document naïvely. But then you think:
"I am in a MASTER’S PROGRAM. I must think as the MASTER I strive to be. - Jedi or Sith? Pick one. - In any case, I have a new light saber: RTFM (see above).
Wait a minute. A machine could do it, faster than me. It is just indexing. This is an alienation for me. Let’s use the machine."
By the machine, I mean the software. The mass of engineers at Six Apart has certainly figured that out before you were born. Movable Type is a professional blogging software isn’t it?
How to do a blog index in a master’s way? RTFM and let Movable Type do it for you. OK, I applied the RTFM principle on Movable Type and give the solution in my next blog.