Blog

Growing number of styling languages

Off course the HTML language is the core of the web, but it’s not always great to type what you have to say in a textbox having to type tags to put <em>emphasis</em> or <a href="url">links</a> in your text. That’s why there is now substitute languages, simpler to type and remember, allowing you to format your text. As an example, this site use one of these syntax to allow you to style your comments. (Click on the Preview box of the comment form for more details on the syntax)

But the number of formatting rules is increasing. I can count five distinct flavor of them currently: SPIP’s formatting shortcuts and Textile (in use on this site). And now there is a new one: Markdown. There is also the Wikipedia syntax. And by writing this entry I found a new one: ReStructuredText. I would be surprised to have found them all.

I think we will need to do something about this, and fast, or else all these different but similar easy formatting syntaxes are going to make so much confusion that they won’t be easy anymore. Where is the ring bell when we need it?

Too much ads

I just found photographies of McGill metro station from Montreal, and I must say I really dislike the colors. Since the start of march the station is covered with iPod ads… and in a heavy manner. It seems all the stations of Paris (in french) suffer from the same thing too.

Not that I dislike the iPod, but these ads are a lot too much intrusive to my taste: there is too much of them. There is less advertisement even inside a McDonald’s! I really hope no one get inspired by this.

Bad timing

It seems I did not choose the best time to move my website. My new hosting provider is currently moving and cannot respond adequately to support requests. I have for example a strange thing going on with the DNS record of my mail server.

I would also have preferred using a PHP script to catch file not found errors. That would allow me to install a efficient cache system and to have better URLs. But after a week without response I decided it would be better launching the new website now than waiting indefinitely.

Today I reached someone who explained me what’s happening: the phone lines of their new support center are still not installed (installation planned for tomorrow) so support doesn’t work… I suppose what they mean by that is that internet is not accessible to the support staff. Bell is responsible of this delay apparently.

They have really good prices however. :-)

Renew

Welcome to my new web site. New because it took new colors. New because it now has a much friendlier address. New because now you can post comments.

But it’s still the same. The same because I’m the one in charge. The same because what was on the site still is on the site.

Ok, that makes 3 against 2, the new is the winner. :-)

It has been about two months since I begun working actively on this project. I must admit that the update frequency drasticly dropped in the last two months. Using the log archive, just take a look at the calendar for November and then look at the February log and you will see that I was very busy in the last month. Blog activity will increase, I hope, now that this website works.

And if you find a bug with the site, contact me. Now, comments are yours!