March 22, 2004
MT-Textile and SmartyPants
Here’s a little peek under the hood, which hopefully might be a helpful tip to other bloggers. In case those of you on my RSS feed were wondering why there were so many modified entries, it’s because I finally upgraded to Brad Choate’s MT-Textile 2.0.
For those of you who blog using Movable Type, this plugin is absolutely indispensable (a similar alternative is Jon Gruber’s Markdown, but I’ve not tried that myself, so I don’t know how it compares). It saves me a lot of typing, and more importantly, it lets me concentrate on writing instead of worrying about proper HTML syntax. Of course, it has its own syntax rules, but they’re much simpler, and they don’t take too long to learn. Here are a few examples:
When you want to include a link, you just type
"Text to display":http://example.com
Compare that to:
<a href="http://example.com">Text to display</a>
It saves about 12 characters of typing for each link, particularly the angle brackets, which can be awkward under your fingers since you rarely use them when writing regular prose. In 2.0, there’s now also support for abbreviating long URLs so you can put the full link elsewhere in the post (I typically put them in a list following the paragraph that references them1), making it much easier to read and edit your post.
The other big time-saver for blogging is blockquotes, for which you now just type:
bq. This is a blockquote
Instead of:
<blockquote>This is a blockquote</blockquote>
Which was obviously a huge pain. New for 2.0 is support for multiple blockquote paragraphs in a row, which I thought was sorely missing from 1.0. Another benefit is that it’s easy to use <strong>, <em>, and <cite> tags2. For example:
I really want to *stress* the _importance_ of watching ??Buffy the Vampire Slayer??.
becomes:
I really want to <strong>stress</strong> the <em>importance</em> of watching <cite>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</cite>.
which then displays in your browser as:
I really want to stress the importance of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
You can peruse the full MT-Textile manual for some other examples, like tables, images, footnotes, etc. Brad also has some additional tips.
The other cool thing is that you can still keep using HTML tags like normal, so you can just start learning a couple of the shortcuts at a time. Plus, installation is a breeze, involving FTPing just two Perl files. A neat bonus is that it integrates nicely with John Gruber’s SmartyPants, which automatically converts your straight quotes into curly quotes and double-hyphens into en-dashes for a more professional typographical look (in addition to Movable Type, SmartyPants also works on Blosxom and BBEdit). I’m surprised at how many of the big and famous blogs and websites don’t use this.
So anyway, if you’re a blogger using Movable Type, try MT-Textile out. You’ll wonder how you lived without it. Indeed, you can use many Textile shortcuts in my comments section!
(Oh, and learn from ampersand’s mistake and don’t compose your posts from within MovableType’s form. Use your favorite external editor — even just Windows Notepad or WordPad or Mac’s TextEdit — and then copy and paste into MovableType. That way, you can save often, have other useful tools available like spell-check, find & replace, etc., and will end up with an automatic backup of your post.)
1 Note that the full link must be defined within the same document where the abbreviation is used, and that, as far as plugins are concerned, the “Entry Body” and the “Extended Entry” of the same post are separate documents. Okay, this is a thinly disguised ploy to play around with footnotes (which I should probably be using instead of parenthetical phrases so as to less disrupt the… D’OH!). Return.
2 You should always use the <strong>, <em>, and <cite> tags instead of the non-compliant <b> and <i> tags. HTML is designed to be (eventually) machine-readable, so the tags are supposed to indicate the semantic structure instead of just telling your browser how it’s supposed to look. So the reason you italicize something is a lot more important than just italicizing it. Return.
