movable type

Jeff and I went to see Wingfield On Ice last night, a wonderful one-man play currently running at the Winter Garden Theatre. More on this in an upcoming Blathering, but today I feel compelled to Blather about Movable Type.

For those as fanatic about Movable Type as I am: Version 2.6 is out! Plus there's a commercial version being released this summer. Unless it's brutally expensive, I plan to buy a copy. I downloaded 2.6 this morning and am going to humbly beg your patience as I experiment with it in this entry.

Just one of the cool new features: Text Formatting options. One of the great things about Movable Type is that it's structured so that users are able to (and are encouraged to) develop useful plug-ins that enhance the already sterling useability and usefulness of the software. Up to now, I've had to insert any special formatting by hand with HTML tags. By adding Brad Choate's MT-Textile plug-in, I should be able to now easily add formatting with shortcuts. I've also added the SmartyPants plug-in, which should automatically educate quotes, dashes, and ellipses once I modify the template to turn on the SmartyPants options.

TEXTILE TESTING AREA (please ignore):

h2. This should be in header 2 format.

bq. Ideally, this paragraph will be a blockquote block. This is normally a major pain to do with HTML tags, but with the Textile plug-in (Brad Choate), all I have to do is start the paragraph with a lowercase 'bq', a period, and a space.

Then there are the inline formatting options. _This should be emphasized text_. And *this is strong*. -This is deleted text.- +This is inserted text+. ^This is superscript^ and ~this is subscript~.

Oh wow (I'm reading the docs on Textile as I'm experimenting here), and text linking looks much easier, too. Here's a link for "Inkygirl":www.inkygirl.com. Just put the name of the link in quotes, followed by a colon, followed by the URL.

Hey, I should be able to use unusual characters like angle brackets without having to manually provide equivalent HTML entities: < and > and &. Cool, it works.

Copyright symbol: (c)

I notice some of the features in Textile (the plug-in) don't work yet, like list shortcuts, but the plug-in was only released yesterday and other users have posted bug reports, so I suspect they'll be fixed soon.

Today's Blatherpic:

Old photo from the Jeff Birthday Scrapbook.

Feb/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ