Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Working with text and changing file formats just got a lot easier.

This little essay was written to be posted in a WordPress blog. I have been doing this blog writing bit for a few years and have over 1,800 posts. Seems like a lot, but a couple of posts a week for a few years and it adds up.

From time to time, I take these blog posts and turn them into a more traditional book. Here is one example on Amazon. That used to be quite a chore: download an export from WordPress, run some Python code, convert to HTML, convert to MS Word, convert to some Amazon Kindle format, upload, and on and on.

The hard part for me was the Python code to pull the content from the XML into something that HTML could read. (Pardon my falling down into a pit of endless details.)

Well, it all just got a lot easier (Pardon the collapse of grammar.)

Along comes these chattering bots and their continual improvement. Now I ask one of them (the leading ones all have this capability) to do what I want and viola’, out comes a system that does everything for me. Well, I do have to go the WordPress site and export the blog to an XML file. After that, bing, bang, bong, done.

General tip, if it involves text and file formats, ask a chattering bot to do the work. It is quite amazing but, then again, these chattering bots were built to work with text. Don’t ask them to solve basic math and logic problems, but text and file formats are a breeze.