Hello; use with Blosxom

[John Gruber]

Jason Clark <jason at jclark.org> wrote on 03/09/04 at 9:26p:

> * Neither the Markdown project page nor the Readme mention that 
> Markdown is a Blosxom plugin.

True. I'll tell you why in a second.


> * In order to function as a Blosxom plugin, you must rename the file to 
> "Markdown" (no extension, Capital M).

This is an unfortunate conflict between the plug-in loading rules of
Movable Type and Blosxom. Movable Type *requires* a ".pl" extension;
Blosxom *forbids* it. I ran into the same problem with SmartyPants,
which also works as a plug-in in both systems.

Movable Type's rule wins out as the default, because I use Movable
Type. :^)

The remove the ".pl" from the filename bit will go in the
installation instructions for Blosxom users.


> Numeric prefixes (e.g., 01Markdown) to control Blosxom load order
> work fine.  Could be noted in the Readme?

Yes, probably.


> * As written, Markdown-as-Blosxom-Plugin will always assume every post 
> is written in Markdown.

OK, now I don't have to explain why Blosxom support isn't mentioned
explicitly yet. :^)

The Blosxom code in Markdown 1.0b1 is just copied from SmartyPants.
With SmartyPants, however, it's reasonable to assume that it should
process every single post on your weblog. As you point out, this is
not a good assumption for Markdown.


> I modified story() to make this more flexible:
[...]
> This will only apply Markdown formatting if the Blosxom story header 
> (everything between the first line (the story title) and the first 
> blank line in a story) contains a line reading:  "meta-markup: 
> markdown".  This is a common Blosxom idiom and is used by the Textile 
> plugin, for example.  It requires the Meta plugin for Blosxom, but then 
> so do half the blosxom plugins out there.

Great! That's exactly what I didn't know how to do -- make Markdown
a per-post option for Blosxom users. Thanks very much for sharing
this and saving me the trouble of figuring out the Blosxom idiom for
this. Much appreciated.

This should get rolled into b2, but you'll have to wait for that. I
technically haven't announced b1 yet...

-J.G.