keizo/weblog

There are too many text markup/down/tile/wiki syntaxes out there and it’s a pain to relearn how to make bold text for every new website. Setting up a website is even worse since you need to decide what your users will likely be happy using. Markdown is a good choice. It’s pretty and simple, but it still has it’s problems. The casual user doesn’t realize a tab or ` will cause their text to pre-format and so they end up with messed up text. Sometimes people will forget a space when making a list and then they end up with a messed up list. The syntax was designed by a geek (perfectionist) and it shows when you have non-tech users.

My point is that a syntax should use what people already know and already do.[1] Two things you can assume people on the internet capable of posting comments know: that an address/url points to a website and what an email address is. Anything beyond pasting these two things and inputing plain text into a text box will probably require a good majority of internet users to learn something.

That is why I created Googtube — a text filter that converts links to Youtube and Google Videos into their embedded code. It’s the easiest possible way for anyone to embed a video into any website. Most of the time no instructions are necessary.

Googtube is currently available for Drupal, please port it or copy the regex for whatever platform you want. If you do this, I’d love to know.

If you see anyway Googtube could be exploited, let me know that too.

Notes

[1]: Ok, John Gruber did design it like this, but it only works sometimes. It’s a hard problem to fix. URL filters and email filters help a great deal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.