Does anyone know of a program that will strip away the formatting and any special characters (like curly quotes) from a selection of text?  I find that notepad usually does that, and/or pasting text into my Movable Type blog interface, but sometimes it doesn’t work, I guess.  I mean, to me, it looks fine, but when I send it to someone else, sometimes weird characters pop up, or more recently, weird quotes (and in random places!).  

 It would also be nice if anyone knew of a way to add simple HTML to a document, such as <i>italics</i> tags, and link code.  The Movable Type interface does that, or did; when we upgraded to 3.2 just recently, I noticed that it doesn’t use the standard tags anymore.  Now, when you tell it to italicize something, it puts <em>italics</em> tags around it.  Which is fine for MT, but not acceptable for my purposes.  (My purposes are writing my SCI FI Wire pieces; I have to turn them in with that kind of simple HTML included.)

 

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My blogging software, Movable Type, was just upgraded to version 3.2.  This should help fight comment spam and will do a variety of other things.  It looks to be working fine so far, but if anyone notices any bugs, let me know.

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Chris Roberson recently launched a new website dedicated to his new novel, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance.  It’s got lots of cool stuff on it, *and* has a whole prequel novel available for free featuring the protagonist of Paragaea. 

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The government is trying to kill your TV, iPod, and computer.

Tell your congressional representative you don’t want them to do that. 

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There have been more reports of subscribers, who, upset with the magazine’s content, are actually tearing out the offending pages and mailing them back to us along with a subscription cancellation. 

The latest example of this involved David Gerrold’s “thirteen o’clock” in the Feb. 2006 issue. It’s not clear if the subscriber was offended by the story’s content, or by the lack of punctuation.  It’s a toss up.  (There were also Puritanical complaints about the Gary Shockley story, though no pages were torn out in outrage, as far as I know). 

In order to placate these subscribers, F&SF‘s pages will henceforth be perforated to facilitate the removal of offensive material.  We’re definitely still going to keep publishing offensive material though.

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