Rodent Regatta

There’s little comfort in knowing that many of my validation errors are due to a flaw or bug in Movable Type. I’d like to see that corrected in MT 3.0, but the list of editors makes me realize just how much might be possible if I start composing and editing entries in another tool and copying them here for posting.

I recently added a site called white space to my news aggregator. Last night I read an entry titled Non-scientific poll: HTML/CSS Editors. When I first found the entry, there were 64 comments. This morning there were 86 comments.

Someone else will do a much better job of this, but I created a checksheet while reading the comments. If a product got mentioned in any of various versions or forms, it got a check. I probably double-counted or missed some, but here’s where things stood as of 86 comments: (Note that the editors are ranked and the number of times I counted each one is shown to the right.

1. Homesite 23
2. TopStyle 21
3. Dreamweaver 18
4. BBEdit 17
5. Notepad 9
6. Textpad 9
7. Style Master 6
8. ColdFusion 5
9. SubEthaEdit 4
10. UltraEdit 4
11. skEdit 3
12. Bluefish 3
13. Crimson Editor 3
14. GoLive 3
15. SciTE 3
16. FrontPage 3
17. VIM 2
18. jEdit 2
19. Quanta+ 2
20. EditPlus 2
21. HTML-Kit 2
22. Web Minimalist 1
23. EMACS 1
24. Nano 1
25. Mozilla Firefox 1
26. Kate 1
27. Code-Genie 1
28. Screem 1
29. Kwrite 1
30. RKedit 1
31. PageSpinner 1
32. IntelliJ Idea 1
33. Eclipse 1
34. Notetab 1
35. EmEditor 1
36. CSSEdit 1

• * * UPDATE * * * I’ve added links to each of the editors. While owning one or more of these tools won’t make you a web designer any more than owning a stethoscope will make you a doctor, knowing one or more of these tools fluently is a likely key to full employment in the web design and development industry.

I just ran the Regatta through the HTML Validator and it’s down to 599 validation errors. That’s what happens when the pace of posting slows down!

I’m still wide open to suggestions about why my entries aren’t valid!

I need to know some things. I’ve got projects to do and how they get done depends on the feature set of Movable Type 3.0. Some of what I need and want to do relates to changing this weblog. Other tasks involve new weblogs with specific capabilities. Here are some examples of questions I have:

• To what extent are features previously available via plugin or third-party going to be native to MT 3.0? e.g. blogroll features found only in blogrolling.com?
• I want to be able to turn off comments on posts older than a couple of weeks. That can be done with a plugin today, but it requires that the underlying database be MySQL – not the Berkeley db. Is this going to change with MT 3.0?
• I want to switch to the MySQL database, but some have cautioned against it while others say, ”run the script; no problem.”
• I’d like to better understand the referral information for this weblog. To use Refer, I have to be on MySQL. Any plans to build this type of functionality into MT 3.0?
• Finally, when?

This could get very interesting for all the weblog writers who use blogrolling extensively. I do, and I know just how much more could be done with the service were certain features made available. However, were BlogRolling.com taken in a different direction, each developer of weblog software might have to develop a feature for tracking blogrolls.