Jeni's Musings

So I finally have just enough spare capacity to start blogging. And if James Clark and David Carlisle can join the party late, why not me. (Yes, M. David Peterson, your eveel plan is coming to fruition.)

So what can you expect? Well, naturally there’ll be musings about XML, XSLT, schema languages and so on, including tips and tricks as I think of them. I’ll probably also have a few rants about overlapping markup, particularly LMNL and Creole. And anything else that sparks my interest.

Blogging Software

For those who are interested, I’m using Drupal for content management after a fairly successful trial run with a private blog about two years ago. Drupal seems to have moved on fair bit in that time, and even if set-up wasn’t exactly “a breeze”, it was way easier than last time, even doing it on a machine I don’t own.

This is a fairly minimal installation at the moment. The only thing I’ve added is the ability to use Markdown syntax when writing content (including comments). My experience with the LMNL Wiki is that, even for a markup geek like me, it’s a lot easier to generate content if you don’t have to write tags, but conversely I can’t stomach the lack of control of WYSIWYG. I couldn’t find a Drupal input format for Wiki-style input (at least, I found the PEAR Text_Wiki module but couldn’t get it to create <pre> elements successfully, and since I intend to write code samples on this blog, that made it pretty useless), and Markdown seems a pretty usable alternative.

I’ll probably be adding more modules as time goes on and the need arises. If there’s anything you, as readers, want added then let me know, particularly if you can point me at the relevant Drupal module.