Xiaowen and I took out a Catalina Capri 16.5′ on Lake Harriet.  It was a very brisk day for small boats, winds gusting up over 15, steady at 10-13.  Our club boats are moored to buoys in a buoy field, and typically you row them with a tender (rowboat) to the dock to rig them up and take’em out.  Towing her through the field was mighty tricky as the waves were extremely choppy.

But we got the boat to the dock, rigged her up, and shoved off the dock on a port tack.  Or so we thought.  Then we started going backwards, drifting towards the boats in the buoy field and the shore.  I had no idea why the boat wasn’t responding.  At first I thought maybe I just was stuck in irons, the bow  pointing into the wind.  But it was obvious that this was not the case as no matter how I adjusted the sail trim, I couldn’t get any forward momentum.  Steering seemed really unresponsive.

We were just about to crash into a boat in the buoy field, and monetarily entangled a spar, but Xiaowen was able to grab an oar from our hold and push us a way.  We didn’t hurt the moored boat, thank god.  We did however assemble a crowd, as folks from the shore (non sailors, thankfully) watched our pathetic drift through a crowded buoy field towards the shore.

I was just about out of ideas when I finally realized that the issue must be the steering.  I looked at the rudder, and what do you know, it’s retractable!  Wow, don’t think I’d seen one of those before.  And of course the rudder was in the retracted position, not in the water.  That’s like trying to drive a car with a steering wheel hooked up to nothing.

I pressed the rudder down into the water, caught the wind, and instantly we were under way, a mere ten feet from getting stuck in the weeds by shore.

I managed to sail us through the buoy field and onto the open lake without any damage, except some shredded nerves and a maybe a wounded pride.  Still, it was definetly touch and go, and not a situation I’d like to find myself in again.

So next time during my pre-dock departure mental checklist, I am certainly checking out the rudder, and making sure it is IN the water before shoving off.

I’ll try and make my next sailing post a happy one!

The problem is Instapaper assumes you only have one file your are instapapering, not blog posts split into many many pages.  So I needed a way to make this one monolithic file.  I couldn’t find any programs for free that do this, so I wrote a little Python script I call Cheeser.  Cheeser downloads WordPress blog posts in chronological order.  Why is it called Cheeser?  From Urban Dictionary, Cheeser definition:

In the gaming world, a person who repeatedly performs the same moves in fighting games (such as in Soul Caliber, Street Fighter, etc) in order to win.

Cheeser goes through a WordPress site post by post, using the trick of WordPress’s ‘p=100′ where 100 is the post number.   So it’s repetitive and using a lame trick, it’s a cheeser.  The code for cheeser is at the end of this post.  I tested it on Python 2.6.  You will need the Beautiful Soup library for Python as well.

To get Cheeser working, edit the constants at the top of the script to meet your needs.  In WordPress templates, usually there is one DIV container that holds the content of each post.  The default search settings in Cheeser should find this DIV for most WordPress blogs.

Once you have your huge html file, you will need to upload it somewhere on the web Instapaper can see it.  Once it’s there, browse to it, click your Instapaper ‘Read Later’ button, and your golden.

Oh one caveat, Cheeser currently isn’t smart about encoding, and assumes the blog is in UTF-8.

One other note, I know this scraping stuff is considered gauche by some.  Of course, you shouldn’t scrape sites to redistribute them, sell them, or make spam sites from them.  I would take down the html file as soon as I Instapaper/sync it to my device it if I were you.  You don’t want the Google bot finding it.  At the very least, use robots.txt to make it unsearchable.

Here’s the code.

import time, urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from urllib2 import HTTPError

# Base URL of the wordpress blog you will be downloading
BLOG_URL = 'http://www.domodomo.com?p='

# Save end result to this HTML file
SAVE_FILE = '/Users/ianfitzpatrick/code/cheeser/domodomo.html'

# Break between downloading each page, in seconds.
SLEEP_LENGTH = 30

#  Range of posts to download
START_POST = 3
END_POST = 100

#  These three constants are how Cheeser finds the element that contains the blog post
ELEMENT = 'div'
SELECTOR_TYPE = 'class'
SELECTOR_VALUE = 'post'

TITLE = "Domo Domo - Ian Fitzpatrick's Project Log"

HEAD = """
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'>
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' dir='ltr' lang='en-US'>
<head profile='http://gmpg.org/xfn/11'>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' />
"""

HEAD += '<title>' + TITLE + '</title></head><body><h1>' + TITLE + '</h1>'

TAIL = '</body></html>'

def write_output(output):
    outfile = open(SAVE_FILE, 'a')
    outfile.write(output.encode('utf-8'))
    outfile.close()

# Write document header
write_output(HEAD)

for i in range(START_POST, END_POST):
    try:
        page = urllib2.urlopen(BLOG_URL + unicode(i))
        soup = BeautifulSoup(page, fromEncoding='utf-8')
        output = soup.find(ELEMENT, { SELECTOR_TYPE : SELECTOR_VALUE })
        write_output(unicode(output))
        print 'Reading blog post ' + str(i)

    except HTTPError:
        print 'Skipping blog post ' +str(i)
        continue

    time.sleep(SLEEP_LENGTH)

# Write document tail
write_output(TAIL)