What I work with

This post is from 2013 and is thus extremely outdated. You can see updated contents on their own proper page. —2016-12-28

Occasionally, fellow conlangers – especially beginning ones – want to know how other people work and what tools they use. Here is my stuff:

I’m working on a 6 years old laptop currently running Ubuntu 12.04. Personally, I find that Linux is way more language friendly than Windows since it’s far more configurable and open for tinkering with input methods and such things. Besides that, I like to take notes on paper sometimes, especially when it’s vocabulary. Notes taken on the computer I often print out and put them into the ring binder where I keep my handwritten notes. Vocabulary lists are, however, always transferred to the computer from paper as quickly as possible. Also important, of course, are books for research. Whether my own or borrowed from my university’s library. One thing: university libraries are awesome! I already dread the day I won’t have access to one anymore.

On the computer, the mainly relevant software I use is:

  • WordPress for editing this website. I’m running it on my own, paid webspace so I have full control over it. However, WordPress is both a blessing and a curse because although maintaining a website is rather easy with it, it’s very popular, so you get lots of spammers and crackers trying to litter up and conquer your site for their own nefarious purposes.
  • Kate or any other text editor to quickly take digital notes and to edit code
  • phpMyAdmin and Django to maintain the MySQL database I keep my dictionary in. I wrote some things in PHP to tie the database querying frontend into WordPress myself. WordPress’ template system comes in handy here: the form you can see on the Dictionary page is an HTML template file that calls a PHP script which queries the database and returns the results.
  • LibreOffice Writer to take more fancy notes and prepare PDFs
  • LibreOffice Calc to keep lists