Here's some tricks I'm using to help manage this blog, particularly with ROOT.
Because I sometime do the same thing multiple times, I'm often pretty careless with filenames, particularly for plots. So, I've decided to organize all of my plots by date; I'm usually not stupid enough to make the same filename muliple times on the same day.
So, I create a directory in my blog:
$(HOME)/www/blog/upload/2006/07/24/
That is, my main blog directory, an upload path, and the current date (24 July 2006) in a well-formated fashion.
For one-off uploads, I use the built-in MoveableType file uploader (which ignores the "day" part of this path and just uses month). But I make a lot of plots; for that, I like to use a ROOT macro, which I explain below...
First, I make a file called ".rootrc" in my home directory. This is a configuration file that ROOT looks for when it first starts up. I put a line in it:
Rint.Logon: /Users/tagg/.rootrcdir/rootlogon.C
(Note that the path above is to my machintosh home directory, which is where I do all my work.) Then I make this hidden directory ".rootrcdir" in my home directory, and put in a file called "rootlogon.C". This file does all sorts of things, like set up default pallette and colors and so on. Here is a link to my current version. Note that I include another file in the same directory, called publish.C
Now the "publish" command is available from any ROOT or Loon command line.
Using it is very simple. When I have a plot in my main Canvas that I want to show to the world, I simply give it a name and call the script:
root [5] publish("20cm5f2cm")
URL is:
<a href="http://minos.phy.tufts.edu/tagg/blog/upload/2006/07/24/20cm5f2cm.pdf">
<img alt="20cm5f2cm" src="http://minos.phy.tufts.edu/tagg/blog/upload/2006/07/24/20cm5f2cm.png" width= "505" height= "321"/></a>
Info in <TCanvas::Print>: file 20cm5f2cm.png has been created
Info in <TCanvas::Print>: pdf file 20cm5f2cm.pdf has been created
C++ Macro file: 20cm5f2cm.C has been generated
Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.
20cm5f2cm.png 100% 7905 7.7KB/s 00:00
20cm5f2cm.pdf 100% 13KB 13.3KB/s 00:00
20cm5f2cm.C 100% 4405 4.3KB/s 00:00
Then I simply cut-and-paste the link it prints out into my blog entry. The script automatically sets up the new directory-of-the-day if it doesn't yet exist. It creates a .png, .pdf, and .C macro version of the plot. Then it uploads all three versions. The image gets pasted into the blog, and clicking on the image will give a high-quality PDF version that can be used in LaTeX or otherwise. This example gives:
