Well, my 1-year experiment with Typo is over. It wasn’t all bad, but eventually I got fed up of having to babysit my blog. And in the meantime, Wordpress caught up with the only real functional advantages of Typo (AJAX integration). The migration has been fairly smooth thus far, thanks to SQL from Stuart Johnston and Eliott. There are still a few things that need to be done:
- Markdown syntax isn’t working. This isn’t a huge deal (although I do like Markdown since I post from several different bits of software, not all of which offer the same keyboard shortcuts), but old articles don’t display very well because I’ve used it in them. Interestingly, this does highlight the point that Markdown syntax is easy on the eyes and makes sense even if displayed as plain text.
- Hemingway woes. There are several serious problems with Hemingway, in my humble opinion. First, the number of articles to be displayed on the first page is hard-coded to 2. The PHP behind the scenes is simple enough that changing this and getting the additional posts to render correctly is trivial, but it’d be nice if it wasn’t hard-coded in the first place. Unfortunately, getting articles to line up correctly when showing more than 2 is a massive pain (I’ve talked about this before), especially when images are embedded in the post. I’m not sure what the answer is.
Update: I think I’m going to get rid of Hemingway…it’s just not working out right now. Especially if I want to keep putting up pictures… I gotta say, I’m getting waaay more spam than I used to with Typo. I think that’s because the default ping server list in Wordpress is pretty long. The SpamKarma plugin’s doing pretty well in weeding the crap comments out though.
In other news, I’m using the new Windows Live Writer blog client’s Beta version. It’s one of Microsoft’s new suite of Live products, and is quite nice. One of my projects for this trip was to hack on Tanjunka to get it to the point where I could sanely use it to post without having to fudge published dates, or wrestle with inserting images. Thankfully, Live Writer makes that unnecessary. It lets you do all the things you’d expect to want to do: drag/drop images, post with a WYSIWYG editor, post with raw HTML, etc. It does some cool things like look at your blog’s styles so that you can post in the same font that your blog will display it as. And, AND, it lets you post a thumbnail to your blog and link to the full version; uploading both is taken care of automatically. Seriously, this is such a major step forward in as far as free blog editors are concerned, that my heart is swelling with gratitude for MS right now. There are some shortcomings:
- There’s no way to get the WYSIWYG editor to produce Markdown syntax or any other non-HTML markup. This means the WYSIWYG edior, with its pretty font, is useless.
- The (Beta version at least) only has one level of undo/redo. Assuming Microsoft’s using one of their basic editor controls for the editors, I expect this to be fixed before the final version is released.
- Saving your raw-HTML post and then reloading it makes Live Writer insert crappy HTML in it.
- You can’t use drag/drop in the raw-HTML editor. Instead, you have to switch to the WYSIWYG editor, and then switch back to raw-HTML, which reformats your post with crappy HTML (see above).
Hello - interesting new look! I could swear that the ‘wallpaper’ is the very same silk wallpaper that adorns the SCR at Pembroke! Very traditional design…I like it. The green bubbly thing at the top, I do not get. The fact that icons for comments and stuff seem to collide with the side margins, I find disturbing.
I liked the bumper to bumper post, btw… nice to have an accepting and positive attitude/reaction to Islamabad’s inevitable growth - and it is inevitable, I realised, why shouldn’t it be…every city starts small and grows up and out…why not ours! That’s a big step for my piddly comprehension as well as for Islamabad… but it doesn’t erase the melancholy I will feel over my very green memories of the city in yesteryear.
Grr, that’s Internet Explorer being stupid. It shows up quite nicely in Firefox…
There is a markdown and smartypants plugin for wordpress. I use it and it works great.
I did turn off the ajaxy editor in wordpress, firstly because I didn’t like it, and secondly..I read somewhere that it screws up markdown syntax by auto ending certain tags.
Yeah, the Markdown/Smartypants plugin is actually pretty decent…and was working when I complained! The thing is that it’s stricter about the syntax you use. So, for example, if you want a bulleted, list, you have to leave a blank line before you start each bullet with ‘ *’. The RoR version (the one bundled with Typo) doesn’t have that requirement so I didn’t realise what was going on right away.
Now there’s the minor problem of converting all my old posts (I’m a big bullet-point user). I think I did 20 posts or so and then gave up…might sit down some day and try hacking some SQL for it…