Yeah, ok, so now my comments form has some style. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except that I havne’t been posting much lately.
I was up late last night working on my Instamatic Web project. I’m not entirely sure it’s ready for prime time, but it’s not like that many people read this thing anyway. (I guess this is more like cable access.)
Anyway, the sudden burst of energy necessary to finish the thing was inspired totally and completely by the discovery that Dean Allen over at Textism.com had done all of the hard stuff for me already by creating Textile, a text to xhtml converter in php.
I was tempted to mess around with Textile some, and re-create some of my beloved text formatting rules (having tabs indicate headers was the big one, my favorite anyway), but the way I ended up using it, I can just plug in a new version of Textile if Mr. Allen ever updates it.
Anyway, the main purpose of Instamatic Web was to make it so easy that you wouldn’t have to know anything at all about web development to use it. But as I was writing my text to xhtml conversion functions, I realized that they’d still have to learn some kind of basic rules if they wanted any text formatting at all… and this was SO easy to plug in that I’m definitely willing to accept Textile’s rules over my own, at least for now.
It’s worth noting that until last night, I hadn’t really understood why anyone would care to write their own text formatting plugin for Movable Type. I mean, if you’re using IE, most of what you want is already there with that stupid ActiveX crap.
Now what I really want to find is something exactly like Textile, but for rtf to xhtml… then you really won’t have to know anything to get text formatting.