Character · 13 February 2003
Some time in the last couple weeks, while working on Textpattern (you know, the CMS I’ve been using on this site for two years, the one that was running like a finely tuned and greased machine, the one I decided to release to the world, whereupon I was seized by a strange and insistent demon who was of the opinion that simply doing one thing and doing it well was not enough, boy, you need to attach a full-fledged browser-based HTML and CSS editing monster that would do several things in a kind of so-so sort of way but it sure would impress the twelve people to whom such a thing would even make any sense, and whereupon I tapped out lines of inelegant PHP code until droplets of blood formed on my forehead and I was hoarse from screaming well why the fuck not at a computer screen every time something refused to work – and of course things don’t work, things don’t like to work – and on it went until I was sufficiently unstupid to pause and grasp that having something that does one thing well is a good deal better than having many things that are just sort of so-so, and hey there’s all this time in the future to add those things when and if they do work, and I began the relatively swift process of dismantling all those flights of fancy until I arrived at the point I am now, which is ready to release a public beta) I discovered that one of the character-conversion utilities I was working on had potential use in the Word HTML Cleaner, which had been giving people problems lately. So I installed it and it seems to work.
So go ahead, try it out. Just make sure to use the UTF-8 character set when exporting from Word.
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