A new job! - and - Meet Textile!

So, at long last, I have a full-time (temp) job! I'll be helping with IT at a university press. :-)

I haven't started yet, but I've been hanging around to learn more about the press and my responsibilities therein. My job will in large part consist of overseeing a MySQL database/FileMaker Pro installation and doing tech support for my coworkers.

Today, I got my hands dirty in the press for the first time. It was also my introduction to Textile. Let me explain.

My coworkers use Textile to code their website. I've never used it before. But thanks to a good search engine (Google) and Wikipedia, I quickly tracked down the solution to a problem plaguing a coworker in Marketing.

Problem: With perfect syntax, a link was nonetheless not showing up as a link.
Solution: She had to change smart-quotes to straight-quotes. Suddenly, it worked fine!

What's more interesting to me is the tools I found along the way: the Full Syntax Reference for Textile. The really nifty part of this site, though, is that it has a Textile translator. Suppose you enter

"http://www.google.com":http://www.google.com

The translator converts this into XHTML...

    <p><a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a></p>

and shows how it will appear on a webpage!

http://www.google.com 

Voila'!

I ALSO learned that FileMaker Pro 10 moved its "Toggle Smart Quotes" setting out of Preferences into File Options (under the File Menu).

Unresolved: Even though the Smart Quotes option was turned off on my coworker's machine, it was still putting them in! Go figure...