Work (both the paying and the other kind) have left me with less time than I'd like to just blog about casual subjects, but here's some musings about Movable Type:
- My kingdom for a decent rich-text editor. Unfortunately, the only way to do this reliably seems to be to use Flash. One thing I hate about the RTE is my cursor keeps vanishing for no particular reason; maybe that's a Firefox bug (I'm using a nightly). And why is it so damn hard to insert a simple <P> tag in the RTE? Hit Enter and you get <br>, but hit Enter twice and you get <br><br> instead of <p>. Maybe I'll have to hack this behavior into it directly. Blech. (I've found I can cheat by switching into HTML mode first, inserting a <P> tag in the head of the post, then switching back — but that's, again, retarded. Less brain-dead workarounds are welcome.)
- I'm looking into a couple of different plugins to do auto-linking to pre-existing lists of links — something Windows Live Writer does — but it would be great if one of them worked in the rich text editor itself. That would mean one less program for me to use, but I'm betting that would be more work than most people would want to undertake.
- Customizing the fonts in the RTE and some of the behaviors therein was a terrible pain. I could do it, but the elements are all over the place — I had to edit a file here and a file there, with no rhyme or reason as to why things are so scattered. I'm betting the reason is not something that presents itself on a casual glance — I didn't develop the program, after all — but it is kind of bewildering to have to bounce across so many different files and directories and repositories to edit the behavior of what from the outside is one thing. (Again, maybe this just says more about my perceptions than anything else.)
- I've been thinking about creating an actual paper book for it, perhaps something to go with the inevitable 5.0 version when it comes out. Consider that to be a "when I get my pension" type of priority, though.
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