Talamathi

This happened over a month ago, but a really nice thing to come along was the release of “ PHP Markdown Extra + PHP SmartyPants Typographer Text Filter for MarsEdit .” I still use MarsEdit 1.2.1, well, because I don’t really post enough to justify getting an update. That means some of how this works might be different. But, basically, after you put the folder in ~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/TextFilters there is a formatting option to pick the new Markdown and SmartyPants filter. This means that the preview will now be run with a PHP version of SmartyPants , and the enhanced version of PHP Markdown . 1 Blogger doesn’t use Markdown, or SmartyPants, so it has to be converted before being sent. For this, I’ve been using “Translate Markdown to HTML,” from Drew Thaler . 2 This has been updated to 1.0.3 , which I am guessing probably makes the change even easier. In order to get this to work with my newer Markdown and SmartyPants, I ch...

I happen to love newspaper comics, but over the years I’ve either not gotten a newspaper, or not gotten a newspaper carrying all the comics I’d like to read. I know I’m not alone in loving comics; just take a look at Comics Curmudgeon . The people who both read and post comments there clearly love comics, which is half of what makes it fun. Add in to it with some of the cartoonists clearly joining in with the joke, and really its a lot of fun. The lack of print has made things difficult in the past, but I have tended to get by. The general solution most people use is to go to the online sites of newspapers carrying the comic of their choice, in particular, one that also puts it up online. The more industrious of us use things like the Perl tool dailystrips . Basically, you tell it the pattern for finding a comic of a particular date, and it scrapes the website for that comic. This works, but has some hangups. Most importantly, it means the newspaper is not getting a...