I’ve moved Bitwise Evolution to yet another blog – this time I’ve moved from WordPress to MovableType. The motivating factor was that WordPress made it extremely difficult to post correctly formatted code along with other content. WordPress also doesn’t store a non-html version of each post, so you can’t easily edit old content without hacking auto-generated html.

Movable Type proved to be slightly more difficult to install, but it is much more configurable, and has a huge set of varied and useful plugins that actually do what they describe (gasp). Some of the things I’ve enabled include:

• Markdown for wiki-like markup
• SmartyPants for smart quotes.
• GeSHi for syntax highlighting. (This required a couple additional plugins)
  • Transcode To hook MovableType up to GeSHi
  • MTMacro Needed to make the transcode syntax bearable.
  • MTRegex To add conditional behavior to the macros.
• Acronym Used to enable mouse-over acronym expansion (so you can easily find out what DTD, XHTML, PCMCIA and etc. stand for, and it’s all automatic.)
• LivePreview because none of the stuff above (except for Markdown and Smartypants) render correctly in the default preview view.

Here’s the macro used to turn ‘<pre lang=”java”> …. </pre>’ into the proper format for transcode:

 <pre><code>transcode-language: java
       ...
 </code></pre>

Macro:

 <pre>``` 

transcode-language:

“`

 <pre></pre>

Sooner or later I’ll probably take another look at blogging from emacs.