A while back, I complained about the need to write my own HTML tags for formatting and linking from my weblog entries, desiring a GUI editor that would let me not have to know HTML. I hadn’t really paid attention to HTML since about 1998, and the idea of learning it again (and all the new stuff they’ve added since) just so I could make my text green seemed a little counterintuitive.

But it turns out I learned HTML anyway. Movable Type, which I use to run this weblog thing, is very customizable, and I’ve been altering the look and feel of the pages it generates (as particularly attentive readers may have noticed). This involved reading a lot about things like XHTML and CSS, so I could alter the Web pages and stylesheets. I even wrote my own error page, that matches the style of the weblog, and am thinking about rewriting my other Web pages by hand — the current one was generated by Mozilla Composer, and I never had to even see the raw HTML

The end result is that I no longer feel awkward writing my own HTML tags for the weblog entries, and mostly just write directly into the HTML entry submission form. I do wish either Mozilla or Movable Type had a spell checker, though.