Buggin'

One of those things… I assumed Wordpress was a mature platform, and it is, but there's a bunch of weird interactions between, for instance, Markdown and post by email. In this case, the post I wrote last night cut off early, and it took me a second to figure out why, but I think I know.

There's an old standard for signature lines that dates back to Usenet and the early days of email. A signature would be demarcated by "– ", that is, two dashes and a space on a line by themselves. Wordpress is supposed to prune off email signatures… but.

Markdown uses multiple dashes on a line by themselves as a horizontal separator.

Google, I think, trims excess whitespace.

Can you guess where this is going?

I used post by email once a couple weeks ago, and my email signature got attached to the blogpost. I used post by email last night, and everything below my first horizontal separator got pruned. lol what?

Tumblr has issues, but their markdown and post by email were about all I could ask for—simple, clean, error-free. Wordpress is … leaving a lot to be desired.