Like a Charm

I just chased down the last of the validation errors on this site that were introduced with the WordPress install. The fault wasn’t that of WordPress alone, but was due to the fact that my entries were exported from Movable Type with <p> tags wrapping some stuff, and it lead to some messy interactions. Other validation errors were created because of my nice image macro… WordPress kept trying to close them off with </p> tags. Some of it just required cleaning up the entry, and then I wrote a few search/replace macros to clean up the rest. </blockquote></p> should never happen… ever.

Anyway, I validated my entire site, including comments, by submitting two URIs to the validator. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing a picky validator scan through tens of thousands of lines of XHTML and declare it perfect.

I’ve also got a few other things working on here that I think are rather cool.

First off, my 404 page (you know, the one that is generated when you go to a page that doesn’t exist) does a WordPress search. So if you go to http://txfx.net/something something something, it’ll search for “something something something.” Let’s test it, shall we? I’m going to type a word that is contained nowhere else on my blog: autochthonous (it was Dictionary.com‘s word of the day.) Now, if you go to http://txfx.net/autochthonous, you’ll end up right back at this entry. Slick, huh?

Also, you may have noticed that my comments now have live previews (for those of you with JavaScript enabled). I’ve placed it below the textarea so that you are forced to scroll past your comment before you submit it. It even handles markup such as bolding and links! Note that it will display markup that will be stripped out of your submitted comment, so don’t think you can post pictures or anything like that, because you can’t.

Also, stay tuned for a rather cool WordPress plugin that I am writing. Here’s your hint: Hansel and Grettel. (Come on, I know someone got that).