Learning To Blog

One of the cute little things that Vanessa tries to do is to type on my notebook. Here’s one of the snapshot that my Nokia N95 8GB phone managed to capture. Looking like a real professional eh? Both parents are quite IT savvy, so the baby must have quite naturally picked up computer skills.

Another weekend. WordPress is updated, now to version 2.6.3 to fix a vulnerability in the Snoopy library that WordPress uses to fetch RSS feeds.

The last week or so I’ve been also readying a Drupal deployment at work. I’ll talk more about Drupal some other time. But one thing I’d like to share is how WordPress led me to wanting to revamp the documentation platform we have been using at work. For many many years, I’ve been an avid HTML coder. I write everything in HTML. After a while, it gets tiring. When I need to write code, I am still comfortable churning out HTML. But when I just want to write stories, thinking about HTML is distracting. Wiki markups aren’t fun either. In fact for someone fluent with HTML, Wiki markups are even more frustrating.

So WordPress has been quite fun to use, because I can write stories without thinking about HTML. Then, why not the same for documentation?

Then why haven’t I been using various HTML authoring tools like, heaven forbid, Frontpage?

Well times change, and I guess my views of HTML authoring tools have changed slightly. Perhaps my objection with complicated authoring tools is that they often generate non-compliant HTML output, and their output tend to be overly complicated, inconsistent and at times unpredictable.

It’s quite a whole lot different with Javascript editors like TinyMCE and FCKeditor. They both generate excellent neatly formatted XHTML compliant output. It’s surprising that a web-based application should work better than a fat application.