Flashes of Panic

There was a bag crammed in my mailbox this morning, containing my membership premium for Daring Fireball: a t-shirt.

I probably would have responded to John’s membership campaign without the shirt (my running career has left me with a plethora of t-shirts) because of his stellar plug-in for Movable Type, Markdown, which I’m using to write this post; it’s not only hugely useful in letting me present well-presented posts without having to letting the marking-up part of my mind get in the way of the writing part of my mind (which has a hard enough time without interruptions), but also has been ported to PHP, a prospect which will probably lead to me rolling it out on some sites at work, helping the non-technically inclined folks in the office take some of the site-maintaining load off my position.

But the thing that really makes the difference between simply using someone’s work and looking forward to it is the whimsical touches I find on Daring Fireball. For instance, he links to Movable Type’s coming 3.1 version, which will include, in John’s words, “an option to publish live using PHP (i.e. to fry pages instead of bake them).” Best Perl-vs.-PHP characterization I’ve ever seen.

And, of course, there were the suggested levels of membership: $10.24, $20.48, $30.72. Yes, that’s one, two, or three kilopennies.

Now playing: Yellow Brick Road from Five Stories by Kris Delmhorst