Thanks to Lorelle VanFossen of “Lorelle on WordPress”:http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/one-year-anniversary-review-wordpress-plugins/, I finally have my “Contact”:http://open-dialogue.com/blog/contact/ and “Quotes”:http://open-dialogue.com/blog/quotes/ pages working properly. I’ve been using the Textile 2 plugin because I love its method of marking up my posts. Unfortunately, for some reason, using it also broke the tag on both pages that let those particular plugins work (Textile 2 kept wanting to convert the tag to markup language for some reason). I’d pretty much written off that functionality because I couldn’t identify the problem, let alone fix it, and contact with both the author of Textile 2 and Textism yielded no help. But I was also loth to disable Textile 2 because so many of my entries now use it and I would have to go back and manually correct everything so as not to make reading my blog completely impossible. ((Plus, I really like Textile 2. Did I mention that?))
Well, Lorelle has been blogging a series of one-year anniversary reviews, and today’s tip pointed me to her “plugin page”:http://www.cameraontheroad.com/index.php?page_id=714 on her “Taking Your Camera On the Road”:http://www.cameraontheroad.com/ blog. I love plugins and I always love finding new ones. So I was delighted to find one that gives a greater degree of versatility in what kind of markup an author can use. (Hint: Textile 2 was one of the options.) I decided to experiment by downloading the plugin and installing it. Sure enough, it fixed whatever problem that the Textile 2 standalone plugin had created, allowing both my Contact and Quotes pages to function normally again. This is a huge relief because people _were_ using the Contact page to email me before Textile 2 broke it.
Writer’s Blog is once again functioning 100% as it ought to be.
I’ve never understood why using Textile is good. What does it do that you like?
Essentially, it’s easy. I don’t use the WYSIWYG editor. Ever. I type faster than I can point-and-click, so it’s easier for me to do my markup on the fly. HTML tags are clunky to type and not much more desirable than clicking buttons to format my text. What I like about Textile is that it uses keyboard characters that are already commonly used in normal typing as a quick, efficient way of marking up your text to get hyperlinks, bold, italics, etc., all without having to click extra buttons or try to type cumbersome HTML tags in on the fly. I know there are other markup methods out there that many others prefer. Textile is the one of the first I discovered (I did eliminate one or two others I tried first that I didn’t like as much), and it does pretty much what I want and need, so it’s my preferred markup method.
Ah, that’s right. I forgot about that. I, too, use the keyboard faster than the mouse, but I’ve been hand-coding HTML for over ten years on almost a daily basis, so the html is just part of my conditioning. I don’t think about it any more. Interesting.
Thanks for the clarity.
Also, just a little comment. I don’t know who in their right mind (or lack of it) decided that small fonts in blogs were the way to go but they suck. Especially on a blog that focuses so wonderfully on the issue of reading and writing. With so many monitors now going wide screen and high resolution, small fonts look even smaller. I like not making my reading audience strain. Something to think about.
Great looking site otherwise!
Odd. The font doesn’t really look that small to me. But I’ll see what I can do to adjust up a notch or two. (I’m also not a fan of balloon fonts…)
Ok, I bumped the text size up a notch to make the primary content a bit easier to read. Hope that helps. :)