I’m setting up my lovely new Apple MacBook, and one of the good things is the Dashboard. I realised there might be a widget for posting to WordPress blogs, and sure enough there is. This looks heaps easier than opening up pages in Firefox, though it’s not obvoious how I can add tags this way.

Another case of the first plugin I tried not working well. This was **Quote Rotator**, and it didn’t display anything, due to some error deep in the script.aculo.us JS it was using. It didn’t look soluble in a few minutes, and then I noticed in the code that it was supposed to change the quote in place every few seconds, which would be too distracting, and it didn’t have a mechanism to turn it off. So time to try a different plugin.

I settled on **Stray Quotes** which has worked nicely. Nothing too clever - just quote per page load. I’ve updated the CSS slightly to make it look nicer. All I have to do now is write a little script to upload the large heap of quotes I’ve collected. Another excuse for some programming

Thought I’d try out the **[Autolink](http://cjbonline.org/plugins/) plugin** for the blog. According to its very brief documentation, it can tell automatically link to movies by adding a \[movie\]…\[/movie\] pair.

Hmph. Can’t get it to work It complains that my Google API Key isn’t valid. I’ve only just got one, so I don’t know what’s going on. I got a Base API key; maybe it needs to be a particular API key I’ll have a look at the code …

So, AutoLink is using the Google SOAP Search API, which is now deprecated. It’s been replaced by the Google [AJAX Search API](http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/). But this appears to specifically stop the programmer from getting at an individual search result easily. You can “clip” things, but that produces HTML fragments that need embedding, which I think would be rather difficult to integrate. At least given my current knowledge of writing WP plugins (which tends to zero).

So, it seems that lots of people don’t like the *WYSIWYG editor* in WordPress, so I thought I’d have a look at some alternatives:

* [Texy!](http://texy.info/) sounded good, but it failed to activate at line 235, and I couldn’t see any obvious reason why. Maybe it’s not compatible with WP 2.3?
* [Markdown](http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/) is something I’ve wanted to try for a while, and it seemed to install fine. The [syntax page](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) is difficult to read, but I’ll try to use it for a few weeks until it becomes natural.

This is a __first post__ to try out Markdown.

Time to try some blogging.

From a quick look at the always beta blog, it looks like WordPress has lots of opportunity to get creative, and with lots of useful tools. I’ve gone for self-hosting, as my hosting plan allows the necessary PHP and MySQL database.