Tue, November 16, 2004
Comments for You, the Common Stupid Person—4:07 PM
Just so you know, even though I'm not actually writing all those things I say I want to be writing, I'm not slacking off entirely. I've just finished moving this entire site (plus the 'Porter) to a new web host – with almost zero interruption in service – and I took out some paper and wrote down a bunch of ideas (some new, some long-simmering) for new features. That ain't nothin'! (It may indeed be next to nothing, but it's not nothing!)
Anyway, the first, easiest, and most exciting of these new features is that now you, the reader, can use the same simplified markup that I use when I write for this site. It's based on John Gruber's fine product Markdown, and it allows me to type out my columns a lot faster, using **bold** to make bold text, etc., etc. For a while, I resisted giving the same treatment to the text that you (well, "we") type in the comments boxes, but now it's become easier to do that, so I decided to share the joy. You'll notice a tiny link above every comments box on this site, reading "formatting tips," which will pop up a brief primer to get you started, along with a link to Gruber's more extensive introduction, which itself links to his in-depth rundown of all of Markdown's syntax features. I hope it's useful!
And, oh yeah, this has been applied retroactively to old comment boxes, too. I'm a genius! (Actually, no. It's way easier to apply it retroactively than it would have been to apply it only to new comments – but you would have believed me, wouldn't you?)
Profuse thanks to the daring John Gruber for Markdown, and to Michel Fortin for doing what I (and my limited experience with regexp) couldn't: "porting" Markdown from Perl to PHP. Markdown Classic was working great, but now that I've switched to PHP Markdown, it'll enable lots of cool future wizardry that will mostly occur on my end of things, not yours. (Sorry, can't share all the joy!)
