I found two new¹ natural-language markup tools after noticing that RestructuredText hadn’t been updated for 2 years.

The first is PanDoc, a multi-format natural-format converter. It converts to and from Markdown, Wikitext, ReST, LATeX, HTML, groff, man, RTF, and more. It’s only downside is that it’s written in Haskell, which is only a problem if you need to run it on Windows.²

The second is Texy, a PHP-based tool with a syntax that distills Wikitext, Markdown, and ReST concepts into one very complete format. It even supports formatting hints and citations for most XHML tags, in a format that surprisingly intuitive.

1. New to me, at least ↩
2. Not that Haskell isn’t available on Windows, just that it doesn’t appear to be part of Cygwin ↩

Dr. Dobb’s magazine interviews Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, based on Chris’s new startup Storytron (via Slashdot). More about IF at Wikipedia and the IF wiki, and a link to my new markup library intended for use in an interactive-fiction wiki I’m working on.

Charles Petzold writes about a C# Application Markup Language specification. XML is just so great.

40 CSS layouts based on a single page of markup.

A List Apart brings us: Printing a Book with CSS, an overview of what you need to know about CSS 2/3 as a print-worthy markup. Using CSS for print is a great thing, it’s simple, obvious, and beats the pants off of hand-woven PS/PDF/DOC.

I added a few features to my Wordpress link plugin. I had been calling it MagicLink, but am thinking of changing the name to SimpleLink. People fear magic, even though it can be a lot of fun.

Here’s what can be done with Simple Links:

Markup	Resulting text
[http://warpedvisions.org]	warpedvisions.org
[http://warpedvisions.org|test]	test
[test google search]	test google search
[google: more google]	more google
[foldoc: usb]	usb
[imdb: star wars IV]	star wars IV
[perldoc: cgi]	cgi
[here: Google be gone]	Google be gone
[wiki: tsunami]	tsunami
Image linking
[asin: 0898799279]
[image: trees.png]
Special text
[abbr: CSS - Cascading Style Sheets]	CSS
[note: You are here.]	You are here.
[comment: Test comment.]	Test comment.
[warning: Don't!]	Don’t
[tip: A tip.]	A tip.

I hacked together a few WordPress plugins today to add support for the MediaWiki linking syntax. The first plugin, wikifier.php, adds support for double-square-bracket wiki links (to a default wiki, or the specified wiki. The second plugin, magiclink.php adds single-square-bracked external-wiki links and Google I’m-feeling-lucky, similar to my MagicMarkup plugins for Blosxom, which I plan to port in the next few weeks. For now, the plugins can be downloaded here … sometime in the future, I’ll setup a wiki page for my WordPress plugins and hacks.

WordPress has a decent plugin system. It’s a basic callback registration system with priorities, and has many exposed function points. It’s a better approach than Blosxom, mostly because the plugins can be ordered by priority (handy for text filters). It’s in PHP though, which reminds me of my days working in GWBasic and DBase. PHP seems so akward compared to Perl, Java, and C++ (but it’s workable).