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[“Some time ago”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000174.html], I wrote about using [“MT-Textile (Created by Brad Choate)”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/001653.php] to format posts. Well, there’s a new version out, and it’s better than ever. There are a lot more options (including the ability to add a class or id to tags, a table formatting option, alignment of paragraphs, and lots more goodies. You can [“play with it (Textile Play)”:http://www.bradchoate.com/tools/textile/] here. I don’t mind writing plain HTML, but Textile is a bit quicker, easier to read, and there’s less danger of you forgetting to close tags.

It also works nicely with the also-newly-updated [“SmartyPants 1.4 (Created by John Gruber)”:http://www.daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/], which I [“used to use”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000169.html] for a while, until I had a few problems with it. The little niggles all seem to be sorted out now, and it’s working well. So now, you can feast your eyes on my proper typographical quotes. Somehow that sounds vaguely smutty.

p. I was thinking the other day that it would be useful to have something to convert decimal values for RGB colours into hexadecimal values, and vice-versa. Of course, you can input either value in Photoshop, but sometimes when I’m writing a stylesheet, I would just like to be able to do a quick conversion. And—yes—I could probably do it in my head, but that would be Actual Thought, and I use a computer to minimize the amount of that kind of thing I have to do. Then I had a minor brainwave; I (sort of) know some Perl, so why not write my own tool? I’ve just finished it, and I’m proud out of all proportion to the actual functionality. It’s got funky Unix-style command line switches, a @-help@ command line option and everything!

p. Metaphorically, it’s a painting of a wobbly house with smoke coming from the chimney, and a big yellow sun. Across the top, there’s a crayoned title: “mY fuRst PerL skriPt”. It’s all mine, and it actually works.