dennis' blog

Well, I haven’t been blogging very long and have zero prior experience doing so, but here are a few thoughts so far.

I wanted to add a blog to my existing site, but also have the ability to add other features in the future. My previous site was designed using static HTML pages and CSS styles I designed myself from scratch. Now I wanted something extensible that worked out of the box and could be hosted pretty much anywhere. I’m a programmer, but I want to spend my time working on the projects I want to work on, and designing a web site and spending a lot of time maintaining it isn’t something I’m currently interested in.

I did some research prior to taking the plunge, asked some friends whose sites I liked what they used and tried some content management systems (CMSs) first. I thought joomla could do everything I wanted, and for some things it could, but there were just too many small issues that added up to a lot more hassle than I wanted to deal with.

Then I started looking more at Wordpress, because that seems to be one of the top (maybe the top?) blogging tools out there and it seemed mature enough. I didn’t realize how many extensions for Wordpress are available; it’s almost like Wordpress is becoming a CMS itself.

Anyway, I tried it and almost everything I have tried with it so far either just worked, or had simple workarounds (for example, there appears to be a problem uploading images with the default tool for this in Wordpress 2.8).

Now that I’ve written a number of posts, the default editor is starting to bug me. It was a real pain in the neck when writing the post about Windows Vista Backup and Restore Center. It kept changing my formatting. It seems to think it knows better what formatting I want than I do, so it just changes it. It particularly likes to eat multiple line breaks, rather than paragraph breaks. Numerous times when I had the formatting just the way I wanted it, the next save changed it, to the point that I changed the formatting, because I didn’t want to deal with the editor in the middle of writing the article.

Clearly, I am not alone and this issue isn’t new. I came across a post called Make Wordpress Editor Less Evil. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call the editor evil. If I had to label it with an emotion, I would probably call it passive aggressive; it just kind of pecks at you with little annoyances. The post is dead on about the problem with replacing quote characters in code. This is something I frequently come across when converting documentation authored by someone else in Word documents to HTML doc. In Visual DataFlex, it causes code not to compile.

The RoboHelp HTML editor does things like this from time to time. It loves adding <div> tags with formatting in places it doesn’t belong, like the middle of sentences, which winds up screwing up text justification.