Somehow I feel like downloading some MovableType plugins and playing around with them. These are the plugins I begin with

• Textile 2
• SmartyPants
• CodeBeautifier

Textile 2 allows you to type your blog entries in a somehow simpler syntax than XHTML. You don’t need to bend your fingers to write all those tags. You just write down a block identifier such as “p” or “bc” follow it by a “.” and start writing your text. It feels a bit like TeX. There are other identifiers and they are followed by periods instead of being preceded by backslashes, but other than that it’s the same feel. As in TeX in Textile blocks are separated by blank lines.

SmartyPants beautifies the appearance of text. It changes normal quotes into curly one and knows how to handle en- and em-dashes.

Codebeautifier changes boring looking code blocks into syntax-highlighted – possibly still boring ;) – code blocks. Let’s try something in Java:

public class SomeThing extends NoThing
{
  public void doAnyThing()
  {
    System.out.println("Maybe I should say something?");
  }
}

One cool thing about CodeBeautifier is that it integrates nicely with Texttile.