What did I want from my blogware? Well:

• a minimal markup for inline formatting
• the ability to copy and paste code without having to escape it or encode HTML entities
• extending the code to be fun…

The only decent markup language I’ve come across is reStructuredText, although I can tolerate mediawiki’s. It does things right:

• the markup is pretty close to what I’d use if I was posting in plain text
• you can escape the markup if you need to
• you don’t need to escape literal blocks (apart from indenting them)
• it supports higher-level things like metadata, xrefs, citations

The only problem is that it’s very python-centric. Even though it’s semi-standardised, it evolves as the docutils dev team add features to the docutils processor. There aren’t processors for perl, ruby or C, so it’s not the why-aren’t-we-using-this-it’ll-work-ootb solution that, say, YAML is in its domain.

The plugin that sealed the deal with wordpress was reST for wordpress. It is a hack: it calls “rst2html“ and rips the body out, and recommends you turn off the “correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” feature of wordpress (although this may be to avoid pre-processing, rather than because the rst output is broken).

I really wanted hobix to work. It wasn’t going to happen. Apart from the markup issues, its maintenance future doesn’t look bright. A bunch of stuff is broken, and from my exposure to that code base, adding my own plugins is likely to be anything but fun.

The motivation to post is at the critical lower bound as it is, without procrastinating about mending the posting-platform.