Admin: Software change

I've made a behind-the-scenes software change that hopefully won't give you any grief. If you see errors in formatting (especially in old posts) please let me know.

The details, for those who care

I use the Blosxom blogging software with a home-grown plugin to use Wiki markup to format the text. I type simple text symbols and the plugin converts the symbols into HTML codes. Stuff like *this is bold*, and it's that simple. I write nearly all my creative work this way, because I work in a plain text editor. (I then convert it to HTML and dump it into Open Office when I want pretty formatting.)

Until today, I've been using a markup language based on a sub-set of TWiki markup, in a module that I wrote to manage my personal files.

Today, I switched over to using WikiCreole, which is a markup language meant to bridge the Wiki world. It was created by a consensus among many of the great minds involved with Wikis, and most Wikis seem to be adopting it.

Since I find the markup acceptable, and I've been hoping that this would eventually come about (it's a pain to move from Wiki to Wiki, each one doing its own thing with markup… I use TWiki at home, TikiWiki at work, TiddlyWiki for personal projects, MediaWiki to contribute to Wikipedia, etc. and each one has its own markup), I'm adopting it now myself. (After fixing a bug in the Perl Text::WikiCreole module. :)

Now, the nifty thing about Blosxom is that all of the original source files are preserved and I can edit old posts ("status" posts like the "About Me" post, fer instance) in their original format. But since Blosxom uses those source files every time it has to render the HTML, I had to write a little utility to convert all of them from TWiki markup to WikiCreole markup. I think this worked successfully.

Of course, in writing this post, I used the incorrect markup three four times and had to back up and fix it. :) Old habits die hard.