I actually spotted it first on a Twitter post – the jQuery Plugins site had been deleted (explained here). Crazy! So much for my Wiki Text jQuery Plugin.
However, the jQuery blog posts explained that they were hoping to move to a new model for publishing jQuery Plugins to their site – using GitHub and post-receive hooks. It is all explained at https://github.com/jquery/plugins.jquery.com. So I headed off there straight away and got cracking.
Git and GitHub
As it happened, some of my colleagues have been pushing (hmmm) me to use Git for a while so this seemed like an excuse to find out more about it.
I created a Kajabity identity and an initial wiki-text project. Unfortunately, when I happened to do a search for Wiki-Text I came up with quite a large number of hits. It’s obviously not a particularly unusual name.
I wanted something a bit more definitive and the answer came almost immediately – Wicked Text. Almost the same but much more distinctive. You can find it here:
Along with the name, came an idea for a Logo for the format – though it’s only on paper, so far. Also, most projects include a README file written in one style of mark-up or another and GitHub use a tool to render the document on the site. I want to use my own Wicked Text format (it’s Markdown, for now) – so I plan to write an extension to the tool to render it. This will need a new file type – “.wit” for WIcked Text which doesn’t appear to be used for anything else.
Future Tasks
The problems at jQuery have been a good thing for me and I have realised that there is more to be done and a number of opportunities for Wicked Text.
First, I need to complete the jQuery plugin so that it handles the full collection of mark-up I originally planned (images, tables, hierarchical lists, still to do).
I also want to produce a unit test web page – to make sure the quality becomes and stays much higher.
Once that’s all done I will be implementing the format in some other languages – Java, .Net, and maybe Perl or PHP.
I also have some ideas for using it in an AI context – taking it towards an area I’ve always been most interested in…
So, like the Phoenix out of the ashes – Wicked Text is born from jQuery’s plugin disaster.