Martin Geisler Online

I just took the time to read what Mikkel actually writes on his little corner of Cyberspace:

• Analysis 1 (Real, unreal and surreal analysis)

There are some real gems hidden on that page… :-)

With no less than 7,816,230 digits this is the largest explicit known prime. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) announced today that the 42nd Mersenne prime has been found. Congratulations!

So, Kristian also decided to move his blog to WordPress: http://zianet.dk/blog/ — the link in the sidebar is updated! He has his old posts there too, pretty cool.

Having gone from a simple home-made system based on HTML fragments, to a system with Wiki markup, and now to a dedicated blogging system using Markdown markup I now have posts in three formats. No two, since I’ve converted the HTML fragments.

I think we need a simple format to store posts in to avoid such stupid situations. This format could very well be an XML dialect, but that’s not the important part, the important part is to have a single format for blog posts. Posts could then be translated into whatever format your favorite blog requires, be it XHTML, Markdown or a Wiki markup format.

If this common format is an XML dialect it would be easy to parse, but tedious to edit — XML is not meant to be edited by humans. (Not that it’s impossible, using the nxml-mode for Emacs it’s not that bad.) So to make it efficient to we need to be able to map back and forth between the canonical XML format and a Wiki-like (or Markdown, call it what you want) variant.

Given such a format and solid conversion tools I hope that we can avoid parse errors like those I’ve written about before. And we would have a more versatile tool than what we have with XHTML, Markdown, Wiki, and all the other markup languages separated.

Using the Wiki-like markup system PHP Markdown is not without issues. Or rather, testing a little on the PHP Markdown Web Dingus (I wonder what a “dingus” is?) shows that it must be the way WordPress handles the data that causes the problem.

Take a look at this comment. The double-quotes are escaped with a backslash, why?! My guess is that WordPress is broken with regard to special characters. It reminds me of the problems I had when I was just starting out learning PHP. But please don’t tell me that WordPress has such embarissing mistakes! A system installed on more than 12,126 systems (as of February 17th 2005) should be better tested than this.

Hehe — I suddenly have 240 posts in my blog! They are old news, actually the very first “news items” I put on my site back in May 2000 long before there was anything called “blogs” around. Or at least before I knew anything about them.

All the new old posts are categorized as “uncategorized” until I look them through and fix any missing cruft and assign a category to them.

I was my good friend Kristian who got me started with using Linux, programming in PHP and HTML back when we both was in gymnasiet (high-school). It was an exciting and enormous world that opened itself to me. Since then my computer has been my favorite toy!