Wow, I have very much had enough to this back and forth encoding/decoding of text/html nonesense.

To exemplafy – I write in plain text, send to server, convert to xhtml, encode for storage, save to database, retrive from database, decode, stip xhtml, add to page, redisplay to user.

That’s 10 steps to get a post done – and there’s a number of problems with doing it.

Instead, I am now using a system that simplfies things a little.

1. I write in plain text
2. send to server
3. encode for storage
4. save to database
5. retrive from database
6. decode
7. add to page
8. redisplay to user (me).

What’s simpler? The XHTML conversion steps have been eliminated. Using a system like TextPattern’s Textile, I am now not doing anything with XHTML until a user displays in on my home page. At that time it is converted to XHTML.

This allows me to edit and post items easier and with less hassle. Plus with a nice system like this, I can change the way formatting is done if I need to at some point in the future.

However, since all 150 or so posts from the past were done with HTML, it’s going to take me a while to update the whole database to this new format. So if a page doesn’t work, don’t worry – I’ll get to it over the break.