Brian York's Life

Today

Written on June 19, 2008

Well, everyone’s back now. The one thing I can no longer say about the house is that it’s quiet. Definitely not. Which is good — as nice as it is to have a bit of time to reflect (and clean without the fear that things will be dirty again in a minute), it’s also good to have people around.

I’m recovering my equilibrium. I had a rather interesting conversation this morning, in the course of which I received some equally interesting news, and I’m still in the process of adjusting and figuring out where I stand on it. I realize that that’s a fairly cryptic thing to say, but that’s about average for me.

I must say that I’m quite pleased with Markdown so far. It certainly seems to be making things much easier at the moment. I still have pretty much direct control over the markup that I use (so it doesn’t insert anything crazy), but it does keep me from having to do crazy things (escape every &, <, etc.) And the SmartyPants add-on is, at least so far, giving me wonderful quotation marks and dashes. Between this and the CSS editing I’m doing, it’s giving me pretty much the HTML control I always wanted — I can concentrate on the content of what I’m writing without having to worry about the format, and when I do need exact control over something I can have it, because Markdown knows how to avoid stepping on my HTML.

New toy feeling. I’m sure at least most of my readers are familiar with it. There’s just the feeling of being able to do so much now that I couldn’t earlier, or at least not without much more effort. Like using a wiki, but slightly different. I also really appreciate what a wiki gives you, but I tend to think they’re ideal for group projects or collaboration, where the ability to put everything on the wiki (and thus have a good ‘paper’ trail of what’s been going on and why particular decisions were made) saves a great deal of time (I say this from experience). For my own use, however, it isn’t quite giving me what I’m looking for. I may end up putting one together at some point, but it won’t be for this. Mostly it’ll be because I’m really impressed with the wiki technology and outlook, and I want to find a problem for which it’s the perfect solution, so that I can play with it. We’ll see.

I think that’s it for the moment, other than to mention notification. I’m working on it. Basically, if I can get either sendmail or smtp working here on a local basis, I can start doing automatic notification, either of e-mail addresses, or (possibly) even of the LJ site. We’ll see what can be arranged.

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Entry last updated July 18, 2004