Since I ended another long period of blog hibernation and began posting regularly again, I needed to attend to some overdue blogkeeping duties like making sure my software was up to date. In the course of routine maintenance, I discovered a plug-in called Markdown that I wanted to start using, which would simplify the process of writing my posts. Without going into the techie details, what this plug-in does is simplify what it takes to pull off formatting like italics, bold, and making links, compared to doing those same things with HTML tags. Basically, it lets you just write instead of having to write and code for formatting at the same time.

Markdown is a great plug-in, but what I unfortunately discovered after starting to use it was that it conflicted with another plug-in I’ve used quite a bit called Collapsible More. The latter allowed me to collapse my long posts on the main page, so that after the first paragraph, for instance, readers would see a “Show more…” link that if they clicked, would immediately expand the post to it’s full length. Without that plugin, the only options are to show the whole thing, or to have a “Read more…” link that instead of immediately expanding the post, takes the reader to the individual page for that post, where the full text is displayed. I prefer letting readers stay on the front page, but using Collapsible More to avoid having that front page scroll down for a mile. (Yes, I can get a little… verbose at times.)

I’ve been hunting around for a solution, but no luck so far, and I don’t have the programming skill to resolve this conflict myself. I’ve posted in a couple places asking for help, so I’m hoping I can make these plugins play nice again, but in the meantime, Markdown is the more important of the two, so that’s the one I’m using. I apologize for the monster length of my front page, but if I can’t fix it by getting the two plugins to work together, I’ll choose a new way to compensate, like resorting to the built-in “More…” option, or displaying fewer entries on the front page. I suppose I could write shorter posts… naaaah.

Update 12/23/06: I couldn’t find any solutions to this conflict and no one responded when I posted a question about it in the WordPress forums. Since I don’t want a mile-long front page, I had to punt and resort to the usual “More” feature. I don’t like it as much as having the full post revealed right there on the same page, but it’ll have to do unless I ever find a better solution.