javascript

A method for stripping diacritical markings from Russian text.

I wrote a piece previously about using JavaScript in Anki cards. Although I haven’t found many uses for employing this idea, it does come up from time-to-time including a recent use-case I’m writing about now. After downloading a popular French frequency list deck for my daughter to use, I noticed that it omits the gender of nouns in the French prompt. In school, I was always taught to memorize the gender along with the noun.

Hexo, the static blogging system that I use is very extensible and provides numerous hooks into generation pipeline. While working on a Russian language blog that’s coming online soon, I had the opportunity to write a filter to render Cyrillic text in a different font than the rest of the body text. Markup filter use case I wanted to set the Cyrillic text apart both in color, typeface, and font weight.

[N.B. 2016-03-26 Nathan Ifill pointed out that it is possible to use Anki’s built-in conditional replacement feature to do what I’m illustrating. I’ll have to work on another example!] Anki is a widely-used flashcard application. If you’re learning a foreign language and you’re not using Anki, you should be. If you are using Anki and are picky about the appearance of the cards, you should know that JavaScript can be used in the card template.

In my never-ending journey to find the optimal blogging platform, I wandered into the hexo camp. Among its many attributes is speed. Compared to Octopress, site generation is very fast. However, deployment has been tricky. Since I host my blogs from an Amazon S3 bucket, I tried to use the aws deployer commonly used with hexo; but I could never get it to install properly on OS X 10.11. So I wrote my own deployer that essentially just runs an AppleScript that handles the synchronization task.