I normally mention upgrades to site functionality in the sidebar on the front page, but two recent developments commend a (somewhat gratuitous) post, which I may or may not be using for testing purposes.
I've got some new toys.
One of them endows this site with the level of typographical correctness I had been secretly craving; the other operates behind the scenes to make writing new stuff a little less onerous.
Both these finely-crafted toys come from the hand of Mr John Gruber, the self-proclaimed Daring Fireball. The former is known as Smartypants, and is the reason why my quotes are now curly and my dashes now dashing. Well, after a fashion anyway, since Verdana disdains curly.
The latter is brand spanking new--Gruber likes to call it (and I like to call it) Markdown. Among other things, it simplifies the process of typing up link-heavy, quote-laden, or especially emphatic posts, and you know how partial I am to all three.
Since m-b.o doesn't use MovableType, for embarrassing reasons that I divulge in the FAQ, it took a little effort to shoehorn these delicacies into the bread-and-butter pudding that is my home-made blogger. I had actually tried to merge Smartypants into the blogger back in August, but I didn't come up with a graceful solution. I have now, so that's... good.
Regular commentators on m-b.o can muck around with the dingus on Gruber's site--if enough people tell me they want it, I'll get around to enabling it as an option for comments here as well.
Since we are in meta-mode, it occurs to me that this site may not be rendering correctly in KHTML browsers such as Safari or Konqueror. If anyone is using such a browser and can spare the effort to mail me a screenshot, I'd much appreciate it.
Joseph | 11 Mar 2004
Topographic view
The qualifier
Two weeks with the apple and the lone star (illustrated).
Sorry, comments are not available on this post.