upgrading to the newest TeXnicCenter

I've been using ShareLaTeX online, so I haven't had to open up TeXnicCenter recently. But today I had to update the bibliography, and AGU doesn't want a separate .bib or .bbl file, they just want all of the references pasted into the main file. I don't know how to do that on ShareLaTeX - they advocate using some newfangled BibLaTeX thing, but I didn't see how that would create a .bbl or have anything I could paste into the main file.

Therefore, I went to see about updating my TeXnicCenter so I could do it the old school way. Sure enough, there was a new release, 2.02. I installed it, and tried to remember how to create the .bbl file.

After some failure, I found the following information online:

In order to correctly Build the file, you also have to install GhostScript (I already had MikTeX on my computer.)

When I restarted TeXnicCenter after installing GhostScript, a wizard guided me through setting things up. I mostly hit the defaults, but set the PS viewer as the newly installed GhostScript executable.

Then when I hit Build, it ran LaTeX, then BibTeX, then rerun these a couple times (I never know why you need to re-run them, but the number of errors goes down.)

Then I pasted the .bbl output into the main file, and I can go on my way editing in ShareLaTeX with the updated Bibliography.

There must be a better way.

Stuff I needed when running BibTex:
%\bibliography{BibTeX/erosion}
%\bibliographystyle{BibTeX/agufull08}

I still use JabRef to organize the bibliography.

All of my files are backed up in DropBox and synced with ShareLaTeX so I feel pretty good about that.

plot.ly and matlab

There's some crazy stuff on the internet these days.

I wanted to make an interactive plot for one of my figures that is hard to fully grasp. I remembered the plot.ly software and of course they have added a lot of new stuff since I've last looked. Such as converting matlab figures to plotly.

https://plot.ly/matlab/getting-started/

Which resulted in these abominations.

https://plot.ly/~hsu.leslie/8  (default styling)

https://plot.ly/~hsu.leslie/10  (supposedly my original styling)

Looks like it could be really cool if used properly. Still some conversion issues obviously.

Hope someone I now figures it out and shows me what to do.