---
title: "Living la vida regex"
date: 2002-08-15T13:33:30-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2002/08/15/ooobce/
author: Les Orchard
---

# Living la vida regex

<p><a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15.html#better_living_through_regular_expressions">Better living through regular expressions</a> from Mark Pilgrim.  This has got me thinking of two things:<ol><li>I need to hack together some MT macros or a plugin that finds &amp; links wiki-words in blog entries to my wiki, and I need to start writing in the wiki again.</li><li>I really dig his blog's skin, and I need to finally read though all of his <a href="http://diveintoaccessibility.org/">accessibility tips</a> and re-skin this site.  This place is butt-ugly.</li></ol></p>
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shortname=ooobce

<div id="comments" class="comments archived-comments">
            <h3>Archived Comments</h3>
            
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        <li class="comment" id="comment-221089786">
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                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://diveintomark.org/"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=2aac8a68f46151f080ddb17ee0d2454e&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://diveintomark.org/">Mark Pilgrim</a>
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                <a href="#comment-221089786" class="permalink"><time datetime="2002-08-15T14:28:35">2002-08-15T14:28:35</time></a>
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            <div class="content">Better!  Make Movable Type understand wiki-style syntax.  Like complete wiki style.  Structured text.  * for lists.  === for headers.  [] for links.  Auto-paragraphs that actually work (and validate afterwards).  The whole works.  I wish I knew Perl.</div>
            
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        <li class="comment" id="comment-221089787">
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                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.decafbad.com"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=2ac2cffd36ada8c734b90e02a1e5c1ac&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.decafbad.com">l.m.orchard</a>
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                <a href="#comment-221089787" class="permalink"><time datetime="2002-08-15T17:11:08">2002-08-15T17:11:08</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Hmm, I could think of 3 good ways to do this...Run my MT entries through TWiki via a little bit of hackery.  But of course, that leaves users of other wikiclones out.Use Text::WikiFormat  from CPAN, which seems like a nifty self-contained implementation of classic wiki formatting.  This choice, though, leaves MT unconnected to the content in an existing wiki.Use a combination of two of my pet projects: XmlRpcFilteringPipe and XmlRpcToWiki.  I'm not sure how MT tags work yet, but I suppose I could make a tag that filters its contents through an XML-RPC-based filter service that happens to run it through an XML-RPC-enabled wiki.I'm leaning toward #3, since with the XML-RPC pipeline concept I've been tinkering with, you could line up a series of transformations (not just wikification) on your blog entries, some of which could be performed via services offered at other websites.

Of course, #2 is the probably the simplest, if all you want is just wiki formatting in MT.

Hmm.  I think I'll have to tinker with this.</div>
            
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