Spiffy Tech II
Further messing with Movable Type plugins, designed to widen the distance between myself and the great unwashed masses trapped on BlogSpot. I installed SmartyPants and MT-Textile. SmartyPants gives typographically correct quotes “like this” (or ‘like this’) and also—hurray!—correct em-dashes as well as … wait for it … proper ellipses.
MT-Textile implements Dean Allen’s excellent Textile markup system, which makes entering formatted text much easier. You don’t have to worry about all the HTML tags, so you can concentrate on your writing more, but you still get the benefit of nicely-formatted text. For instance, you can do stuff like add emphasis, cite text (may look the same but is different—- that’s why structured documents are important!) and even have properly annotated acronyms WIVC. You can also do those tricky symbols really easily.(tm) Dean is working on a CMS called Textpattern, which I will not be able to resist using to manage my webpages once it’s done.
All of which is great fun for a type-freak such as myself who wants to see the text available online take advantage of the hundreds of years of experience that typographers and book-designers have accumulated in making stuff easy and pleasurable to read. If you really don’t care about type or design then of course all of this will just be boring. But it’s my view that if you really don’t care about type or design then you are a philistine.
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