i summon one kim

I think WordPress needs dedicated filters to be applied on content and excerpt immediately when they are retrieved from the database, to be used by formatting filters such as Markdown.

I like Markdown, but I was having problems with how WordPress does not pass the complete article to it when the “more tag” is used, and when forming RSS descriptions. Markdown uses shorthand link tags that would normally be resolved with references placed at the end of the document. With the truncation, links were not being resolved, and what’s worse, Markdown notation was left in the resulting display.

I created a patch that fixes the problem for my current articles. However, I think multipage entries would still have this problem, so this patch is not sufficient. Also, I’m not sure if I’m causing undesirable side-effects by moving the the_excerpt filter further up in the code.

Before I start working on the filters to be applied on database retrieval, I’m waiting to hear back from WordPress developers about the approach, to avoid wasted work.

I took some time today to release tcsh 6.13, allowing Christos to spend his time on code enhancements rather than the release procedure. The latest beta had already been out for a couple of months, and I had been using it every day for over a month without problems. This combined with no complaints on the beta testers list would seem to indicate it was an excellent release candidate. The previous release was from July of 2002, so it was about time to get a new release out.

Christos has promptly committed new patches into the code repository, so I’m thinking I’ll try to pick another beta 6 months from now and see if I could push the next release out soon after.

It seems unbelievable that I have not written anything for almost eight months. Maybe it is not unbelievable to people who know me (or are waiting for an email from me), but I’ve certainly surprised myself. I must be good at self-deception.

I just got WordPress embedded to my site today. WordPress is quite flexible — I was expecting to have to modify the code, but as it stands today, there are no local modifications. The only “change” is that I’m calling the code from my custom index.php file, but that’s actually how the authors intended it to be used anyway. Once I get familiar with the new tools (such as sending in entries via email and blogrolling links) I hope to get back to more frequent updates.