Will Oller .com

Oh yeah. Goin’ to AEA SF08. Thanks, Mike!

There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose the ventures before us.

- William Shakespeare, Julias Ceasar

Blogs, bulletin boards, community sites — the whole web2.0© rely on the same thing: user input. On the web, user input usually means HTML.

Some simple HTML is easy to learn, like <b>bold</b> and <i>italics</i>, but other techniques (like links, lists, and blockquotes) can be a little more daunting. For a site owner, badly written HTML can break a site.

So what are you, the site owner, to do? You shouldn’t have to learn all about HTML yourself (unless you want to), and can’t force your readers to learn HTML just to post feedback.

There are a few apps that can help people “mark up” text, and these work well, in general. The drawbacks are they can be bulky or hard to use, and suffer from technical issues including lack of browser support and buggy performance. These drawbacks make them more suited for intranets and administrators, and less suited for the rest of the World-Wide Web.

Lately, another method has resurfaced: server-side markup generators. They work behind the scenes to change easier markup into HTML. Anyone familiar with bulletin boards will know about BBCode; it generally worked like this:

[b]Bold[/b], [i]italics[/i], [u]underlined[/u].
will produce
bold, italics, underlined.

But this is not really enough. Its really just HTML with replaced with [ and ]. BBCode also can’t do some of the the advanced things (lists, blockquotes) HTML still has to offer.

Along came Textile

Here at Black Dog, we use Textile to solve this problem. It is a server-side markup generator, like BBCode, but it has all of the bells and whistles you need to produce good HTML. Instead of using HTML-like syntax, it uses easy-to-remember symbols. The best part is, the symbols make sense before they are turned into HTML.

*bold*, _italics_.
becomes
bold, italics.

Textile also handles lists and sublists, ordered and unordered:

It also helps you out with the little things: double quotes and single quotes are made “curly,” and dashes — I love those helpful little guys — are made into their correct typographical charaters.

The best part: Textile doesn’t ruin good HTML, so you can mix-and-match HTML and Textile if you want to, but it quietly throws out bad or broken HTML so your content stays nice, clean, and readable.

Everybody wins

As a site owner, you have some additional protection against buggy HTML from users or even yourself. As a user, you can make make your text stand out without learning a bunch of HTML tags. As a reader, the web will be a little easier on the eyes.

Further Information

Textile’s entry on Wikipedia
Advanced Textile reference (hobix.com)
Textpattern (CMS built with Textile)
Dean Allen’s home page (Creator of Textile and Textpattern)

A lesson in procrastination: If you wonder to yourself “should I get my bag out of the car now or wait until tomorrow morning?” - you should go get it now, because in the morning your wife is going to leave for work and take the car, and your bag.

Now twitter powers my blog. I think this is how that Jesse James Garrett guy does it. I steal from only the best!