We’ve come along way since I started this project. [Patrick Ritchie][1] first contributed an alternate method of pre-rendering the posts at post time and then swapping in the rendered version when Radio did it’s publishing. My method was to render each post as needed. Patrick’s method made much better use of CPU resources so, over time and for [power bloggers][2], it should be less processor intensive and more efficient.
[Marc Barrot][3], of [activeRenderer][aR] fame, has done a tremendous job of converting the [Markdown.pl][4] to UserTalk and of generally cleaning up the tool’s structure and code.
I changed around the initial method that Patrick created so that the rendered text is saved and swapped where and when needed and the user’s input text stays the same. This overcomes the difficulty that may have arisen when editing a post. It also requires one fewer callback. Also less swapping is needed.
Here’s a list of stuff that’s been done. It’s a list just so I can make one in Markdown markup.
* Markdown.pl converted to UserTalk
* Rendering working for pre-rendered swapping
* Rendering working for rendering on the fly
* Rendering working for stories (on the fly)
* Markdown working in activeRenderer
* Ability to switch Markdown on/off
* Event logging
What’s left to do.
* Wider beta testing
* Feedback
* Clean up
Much thanks also to [Steve Kirks][5] and [Donovan Watts][6] for their feedback, encouragement and testing.
The final rendering method will be a combination of swapping pre-rendered posts and rendering on the fly. This will help to account for posts that have been written using Markdown markup and weren’t pre-rendered. Stories will be rendered on the fly as there is no place to store pre-rendered text in this case and it really shouldn’t matter.
If you’re a [Radio][] user and want to help test this send me an email.
[1]: http://radio.weblogs.com/0101131/
[2]: http://scoble.weblogs.com/
[3]: http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/
[4]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[5]: http://www.houseofwarwick.com/
[6]: http://www.donovanwatts.com/
[aR]: http://www.activerenderer.com/
[Radio]: http://radio.userland.com/