Up and up: page generation times

28 Aug 2004

After briefly flirting with Daring Fireball’s Markdown, I have since abandoned the tool for several reasons. Firstly, I’m convined that (this version of) WordPress’ implementation of it sucks… simply because code that works perfectly well on the Dingus page fails in a most spectacular fashion when applied locally.

Yeah. So that was sufficiently disappointing. I’m inclined to blame WordPress over the utility itself, because according to the WordPress Plugins page, it was written in Perl, translated to PHP, and then again modified for inclusion in WordPress. It’s just like programming Chinese Whispers, really.

What’s more, is it added a large-ish time to my page generation, which just won’t do, considering the fact that I’m trying to prove a point over here!

Then, of course, there is the complication of trying to learn a new markup (or down) language, and making sure this doesn’t interfere with my use of real HTML. I believe the documentation when it says that it won’t, but the fact that WordPress’ implementation of it seems to be so broken causes the rising of eyebrows.

It looks relatively fixable with little amounts of effort, but (yes, there always is one, isn’t there?) I’d imagine that this would either have been resolved or abandoned for the 1.3 build of WordPress (still in development and testing) — I’m running 1.2 this part of the world.