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January 25, 2004

Sick and Twisted

I had lunch yesterday with Matt Mullenweg. We talked about my recent run-in with the crapflooders, the state of XHTML, and the wonderful work he and his collaborators are doing with WordPress. It’s still a young product, and missing many of the features I’d need, so I’m not about to switch anytime soon. But weeks like this past one make one appreciate the merits of working with Open Source software. So I’ll be keeping an eye on their project. And if anyone wants to help them out, bringing some of the cutting-edge features found here on Musings to WordPress, you’ll earn a special place in my heart.

In honour of the crapflooders, I took S. to the Alamo Drafthouse to see the latest Spike and Mike Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation (yeah, I know, I’m a real romantic, ain’t I?)

Posted by distler at January 25, 2004 2:11 PM

TrackBack URL for this Entry:   https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/dxy-tb.fcgi/296

5 Comments & 1 Trackback

Re: Sick and Twisted

you have my sympathy re: crapflooding. I’ve been hit twice in the last week! thanks also for that other posting (the one about the modified comments file); very timely, informative, and just plain helpful. :-)

Posted by: Katherine on January 25, 2004 2:48 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Sick and Twisted

Sorry to hear about your run in with these scum. Just out of curiosity what features does your software contain that Wordpress is lacking?

Posted by: Phil Clarke on January 25, 2004 7:02 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

MathML-enabled

On my blog, a commenter can (using the itex to MathML with parbreaks filter) type

\[
\int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-x^2} dx = \sqrt{\pi}
\]

and have

(1) e x 2dx=π \int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-x^2} dx = \sqrt{\pi}

appear in its place. For that matter, as you can see in the comment-entry window, the commenter is given a choice of text filters to apply to his comments.

The same is true for posting blog entries.

Of course, to make this practical, we need automatic XHTML validation for everything, including comments. And we need to be able to serve everything (including the comment preview page) as application/xhtml+xml to capable browsers.

That’s just for starters, but you get the idea.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on January 25, 2004 8:13 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: MathML-enabled

To be fair, there is no software that does this currently. If its license allowed, you could fork MovableType plus your significant modifications and numerous enhancements as a seperate product.

Posted by: Matt on January 26, 2004 1:55 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Fork

I’d love to be able to offer people interested in these features a “turnkey” solution, instead of a Rube Goldbergesque combination of plugins and patches and monkeying with templates.

And my fork woulda had comment and trackback throttling in a Security Update Release a week and a half ago. We’re (well, not I, but the majority of MT’s vast userbase) still waiting for Ben Trott to release something.

Sorry to see you got crapflooded. I hope that doesn’t mar your recollection of an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable lunch.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on January 26, 2004 8:12 AM | Permalink | Reply to this
Read the post Back In Town
Weblog: photo matt
Excerpt: The ride back from Austin earlier tonight was a delight. The stars were gorgeous, I felt like the only person on the road, and the music was excellent. The trip
Tracked: January 27, 2004 12:14 PM

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