I am happy to announce that the “curlyquotes” module for Movable Type has passed out of beta into the release stage. Many thanks to Todd of Dominey Design for testing and providing valuable feedback. Here are the updated instructions. For full details, please see this script’s info page, which lets you receive updates by email, leave comments, report bugs, ask for features, and ask questions, et cetera. Here are the updated installation directions:

1. Install the MTRegex plugin. (Directions from readme.txt file)
   1. Get file.
   2. Place the ‘regex.pl’ file in your Movable Type “plugins” directory
   3. Place ‘regex.pm’ and ‘postproc.pm’ in a ‘bradchoate’ subdirectory underneath your Movable Type “extlib” directory.
   4. You should end up with something like this:
      • (mt home)/plugins/regex.pl
      • (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/regex.pm
      • (mt home)/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm
2. Create a new template module called curlyquotes with the code from here.
3. Add <$MTInclude module="curlyquotes"$> to the top of all your templates.
4. Replace all occurences of <$MTEntryBody$> with <$MTEntryBody
regex="1"$>.

Usage is free, in every sense of the word, but if you could throw a link back this way I would appreciate it. Also if you improve on the code in some way, submit your changes so everyone can benefit.

What this module does: It takes straight quotes/prime mark, and makes them proper typographer’s quotes, sometimes called “curly” or “smart” quotes. So basically it takes "this" and makes it “this” using the proper HTML entities. It also works with single quotes, apostrophes, and multi-paragraph double quotes. It slices and dices!

Why? Because there is no button for a curly quote or apostrophe on the keyboard. No really, see the old post for more.

Todd Dominey has reported a small bug in the curly quotes regex where a quote in links, like this “photolog“, displays wrong. I’ve also rewritten the guide for installing the code on Movable Type thanks to Todd and Michael, and I’ll be posting it soon.

Google News has ‘officially’ launched, insofar that it is now a tab on the now-crowded Google toolbar (not toolbar, I guess tab-bar). Although it’s still labeled as beta, those of you who remember what it used to look like know that it’s come quite a way. It seems to have some sort of algorithm running, so check it out. If you’re interested in seeing what else is cooking at Google, check out Google Labs, which currently has such goodies as a keyboard navigable interface, a glossary, something fancy with sets, and an interface that will return results based on your voice commands.

Try it out!

I’m in the process of compiling ht://Dig 3.2.0b4 to add full-featured search to this site. If you don’t have experience with it already, I would highly recommend checking out ht://Dig next time you consider making a search feature. I considered using a FULLTEXT MySQL search but that would ignore one of the largest sections of the site, the Photolog, which is not MySQL-driven (yet).

Back and forth. I like the economic slant, however I disagree with DeLong.

The Soundbug from ThinkGeek came in today, and I got to play with it a bit at House of Pies. So far I’m pretty impressed, but I’d like to try it out on more surfaces. I’ll put a full review up in the Toy section in a week or so. For those of you unfamiliar with the product, the Soundbug turns any surface into a speaker, and can attach itself to basically anything it can suction to. The volume is supposed to be able to go up to 75dBm, and you can hook two Soundbugs together for stereo sound. Pretty cool, huh?

I am proud to say this olde blog now features not only trackback, but also Pingback. I’m so proud :). Kudos as always to Michael, the very able developer of b2. I am running bleeding edge code here, so if you see any quirks anywhere let me know. Now I have some trackbacking to do 🙂