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December 25 morning

Merry Christmas!… with one small problem for me: internet isn’t working today. That’s not so bad because while waiting for the connection to be reestablished again, I take this as an opportunity to begin reading my two new books unpacked yesterday.

Four days later a technician came to confirm us that it’s really the DSL modem that isn’t working. Unfortunately, he did not have a replacement modem with him. Se we had to call to get a new modem by mail.

It has just arrived now… December 31. We will mail back the old broken one and this will end the story.

PHP Markdown 1.0.1

So here we are now, at PHP Markdown version 1.0.1. What’s new?

1. Faster! If you found an older version of PHP Markdown felt like slow, you will probably find 1.0.1 a lot better. In fact, many speed optimisations have been made to this new version so the Markdown to HTML conversion should be faster.

2. Many bugs solved. The complete list is available on the PHP Markdown project page.

3. License change. Version 1.0 was available under a GPL license while the new version is released under a BSD-like one.

If you are simply a user of PHP Markdown, this license change won’t affect you much. PHP Markdown is still available freely and without restrictions about how it is used.

From a developer point of view, this new license opens some doors. Like John Gruber explained it, a GPL licence makes it difficult to include Markdown in an open source project with a BSD license. However, the new license stays compatible with GPL because it’s simply less restrictive.

So if you want to use PHP Markdown in your own programming project, commertial or not, it’s possible under two conditions: (a) you must give me credit and (b) you can’t use the “PHP Markdown” name without my consent.

The little story of PHP Markdown

This is a story I should have posted some months ago… but for some reasons it didn’t happen. Better later than never.

Markdown is a syntax allowing to write some text naturally so that it can easily be converted to HTML using a small program of the same name. Markdown can handle lists, headers, code, quotes, hyperlinks, and more by adding proper HTML tags needed for web publishing. What makes this format pretty is it’s great readability. It’s like reading an email.

At the end of the month of March this year, I took the challenge to convert the Markdown program — written in Perl — and to make a PHP version. Some hours later, I had a completely functional version of Markdown written entirely in PHP. At this moment, PHP Markdown was born.

At it’s start, PHP Markdown — as opposed to it’s Perl counterpart — was only a tool to convert some text. To use it you needed to call a function from another PHP program.

As time has passed, PHP Markdown became an easier-to-use plugin. It can now be found packaged with many web publishing software, like WordPress, BBlog, and AJ-Fork. PHP Markdown can also be used with TextPattern, Pivot, and every other software having support for the “other syntax”, thanks to the specially-made Textile compatibility mode. PHP Markdown also integrate nicely with any software using the Smarty template system.

Others have made some adaptations of PHP Markdown in a plugin for Expression Engine — a commercial publishing system — and a Drupal plugin appeared too. Moodle — a specialized software for online courses — also use PHP Markdown.

In all this time, PHP Markdown and the original John Gruber’s Markdown evolved up to version 1.0, available for about three months now. Bugs have been slashed and some other things have been added to the syntax. John also has won an award for it’s MovableType plugin.

The user base has also grown since the first version of Markdown and PHP Markdown. But this is not an easy thing to quantify. Search for it and you will see.

Another interesting thing happend in the last months: MovableType, since version 3.1, contains a dynamic template engine working with Smarty. Because of this, some websites now begin to use PHP Markdown instead of the original written in Perl.

What worse could happen

It’s done, Bush has won. And his cabinet radicalize even more.

So, what worse could happen? Hum, simple. Here is what could be worse:

• The US could try to put bombs in orbit ready to fall anywhere.

• The US could give more weaponry to Israel so that palestinian people despair becomes even stronger.

• The US could extort Irakien people by letting them without humanitarian help while they are busy managing their oil.

• The US could punish « evil » states like France and Germany who are more vocal than their neighbors in their opposition to war.

• The US could approve coups in countries where a democratically-elected gouvernement try to take back natural ressources that were given to foreign companies.

• The US could become friend with countries like Russia and China where democracy is in the hand of the media which is itself linked to the people in power.

So Bush won, but that’s not so bad. Many things worse could happen in this world.

Now, back to our regular life…