Thanks to Henry Farrell sage advice, I've loaded up the Textile and Smartypants plugins, which are very nice indeed. I've had a very quick trawl through the plugin directories, and nothing else jumps out at me as both stable and necessary or even that useful unless I want to do complex things I probably don't have the time to do. (Suggestions welcomed.)
But there are still two features I really wish I had in Movable Type. First, a spell-checker. I am dyslexic and a terrible speller (Bad spellers of the world, untie! Dyslexia rules KO!). Second, the ability to queue up a post. Over at ICANNWatch, the Slash software lets me post stuff with a future date, and won't actually put it onto the web page until it's ripe. Movable Type will let me give something a future date, but will post it right away anyway.
Architecturally, that's understandable: Movable Type doesn't do anything in the background, which makes it much less temperamental than Slashdot, and conserves resources. But what if I was willing to run, say, a cron job looking for MT items due to post? There must be a way…
Sorry about the spelling. I think it’s fixed now. Whatever it’s called it’s a wonderful blog. I just wish that I could copy that beautiful javascript trick you have there for extend posts — any chance you could email me directions on how you do it, please? Please? Please?
Queing is useful if I’m going to be out of town, or on airplanes, or think I’ll forget (there is more to life than blogging…). I know that I prefer to read something updated daily, rather than something with a huge number of entries on an erratic schedule. It shouldn’t matter, especially in this era of aggregators, but I think it does.
The speling is a pane. You might look at Zempt, a client-side front-end for MT (and others). It allows for spell checking. I haven’t used MTSpeling only becuase it looks like it’s time consuming to install.
The second request is an interesting one, and a little fussier. Scriptygoddess has some code and a discussion .