Most of my posts are too long by half. They should be briefer, though perhaps not as brief as this one.

Earlier in the week, I mentioned “my frustration”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000483.html with the way Onfolio deals with blogging snippets of text captured from web pages.

Onfolio is like a really smart bookmarking tool (among other things). It goes beyond regular bookmarks by letting you write a short summary of the link and it will index the content of the linked page for its search function. Even better, it lets you capture snippets of text along with the link, or even a local copy of the web page.

Their “new beta”:http://beta.onfolio.com also provides a number of mechanisms for sharing your collections of links, comments, snippets and web pages, including the ability to automatically blog items. In some cases (items captured from RSS feeds), the post contains both your comment and a blockquoting of the captured text. For some odd reason though, when it automatically blogs a snippet, it only posts a link and your comment. The snippet that you so deliberately selected to illustrate the relevance of the link isn’t used.

I’d offered construtive criticism about this in their forum, and they’d noted it, but said they weren’t going to change the behavior before the product left beta. I guess my “persuasive reasoning”:http://www.onfolio.com/support/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=628 finally sunk in though, because they just added “a comment”:http://www.geekfun.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=483 to my “earlier post”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000483.html letting me (and my vast and influential readership) know they were changing the behavior.

It’s risky changing a spec so close to shipping, even if its a small change like this one, but I think this was the right thing to do. In doing so, they remove a barrier to Onfolio’s blogging functionality reaching its full potential.

Another example of “search becoming a modern version of the command line interface”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000484.html, this time on mobile phones.

ChristianLindholm.com: Qix from Zi Corporation could revolutionize search on mobile phones

bq. The SW will index the content on the phone and enable search from the idle so that the number keypad enters text mode on the second keypress and starts suggesting suitable words from the menu, phonebook or bookmarks which then can be accessed with the Select-key

No sooner do “I rediscover Textile”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000488.html for long enough to install it, than I come across “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ which seems to have similar aims:

bq. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

I’ve not really had a chance to dig into it. From a brief-glance, it seems that the text pre-HTML transformation is a bit more natural-looking, particularly for headings, which isn’t suprising, since the creator, John Gruber, says that the formatting conventions used in plain-text e-mail is a big inspiration for the syntax. On the other hand, the link syntax for Textile reads more naturally to me.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to bother with Markdown given that 1) Textile’s been more widely adopted 2)I’m planning on setting up a wiki, and both formats are similar to but different from many of the native Wiki markups — learning 3 and keeping them straight is going to be too much for my little smooth brain to handle.

Some “discussion of Markdown”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/02/in_praise_of_ma.html over on “43Folders”:http://www.43folders.com.

After posting about my frustration in “trying to use the GreaseMonkey Textile Script”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000487.html to ease the formatting of entires into my “MovableType Blog”:http://www.geekfun.com (aka what you are reading right now), I kept thinking about it, and the more I thought, the more I fumed. “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ bills itself as a “A Humane Web Text Generator,” but my experience was that it was totally unforgiving of human failing — if you made a mistake and didn’t realize it until after you’d had textile convert your text, the experience of fixing the text and re-using Textile was painful.

I was stalwart, perhaps even giddy, in my determination to channel my righteous indignation into a scathing blog entry. Then I realized that the problem was a simple implemenation issue. The client-side implementation may present problems, but as long as its implemented on the server-side, and does the HTML generation as part of the page rendering proces, everything is cool, as long as the user gets to work on the unconverted Textile tagged text whenever they make edits.

So, I went looking for something more suitable and found Brad Choate’s “Textile plugin for MovableType”:http://bradchoate.com/mt-plugins/textile. The install was easy. I just had to download the archive file, upload two files to my installation, tweak the permissions, and regenerate my posting bookmarklet to show the text formatting drop down menu.

I’m assuming that everything else is going to just work. I guess I’ll see once I hit the Post button.

_Update:_ It works, once I got rid of spurious spaces and other cruft. Bravo to “the creator of Textile”:http://www.textism.com/about/ and “the creator of the MTTextile”:http://bradchoate.com/brad/.

That will be all.

GreaseMonkey is a Firefox extension that lets people write useful JavaScripts that execute against selected web pages. I’m tried using it with a script that will process any text box using Textile to turn a simplified markup into proper HTML.

I tried using it just now to enhance the very basic edit control presented in Movabletype 2.66 when using FireFox. It made it very easy to create the links I used above with a minimum of typing. I also tried to use it to make numbered and bulleted lists, but I had trouble getting the syntax right, and ended up having to repeatedly rerun it. As a result, I accumulated all sorts of difficult to read crap in the HTML, including multiple duplicate paragraph tags, and break tags where I didn’t really want break tags.

I thought it might be a buggy implementation of Textile, but I just visited the cannonical implemenation and found that it is also rather unforgiving about rework.