I don't like Markdown (at least, the way it's done through nanoblogger), not least because I can't see any difference between a code block that works, and one that doesn't.
Plus, by default, stars around a word don't translate to “bold” ;-)
So, I've installed RedCloth into Ruby, and after hacking a one-line filter I'm trying to get nanoblogger to use Textile instead of Markdown. I'll probably have to edit my old articles, but there aren't many!
Textile has “nice” quotes, … ellipsis, 2×4 dimensions, trademark(TM), registered(R), copyright(C) markers, en - em-dashes – and a few other goodies. RedCloth has a few bugs, but workarounds are not too onerous.
See Installing Textile for more info.
So much of the Rails tutorial stuff is based around the “simple” examples of scaffold, that subtleties in the language syntax are missed out …
Here's what scaffold in Rails 1.0 produces for a form :-
<%= start_form_tag :action => 'create' %>
In text descriptions of “how to do form upload”, we're told to add :multipart ⇒ true to the start_form_tag.
If we look at the Rails API for start_form_tag, we see a couple of extra options – one of which is essential for file upload forms, the :multipart …
start_form_tag(url_for_options = {}, options = {}, *parameters_for_url)
What is very unclear at this stage, is that in order to add the :multipart option to the tag, you must now introduce () and {} syntax that was previously optional and therefore missing from the scaffold code generation.
<% start_form_tag ({:action => 'create'}, {:multipart => true}) %>
This has recently been described on the Rails list as the “WTF!!” stage of grokking Ruby syntax.
Enjoy :-)