Steve's weblog

By the way:

 I was looking at the weblog entry for Wed Jan 28th, 2004 4:14 PM, and
I noticed that some words appeard to be missing.  Sure enough, when I
looked at the actual HTML code, I saw them:

   Dear all publishers: Try this: "Dear <author>: We're sending you an
   advanced copy of <insert title>.  We hope you like it, and hope you
   feel inspired to give us a quote on it.  Sincerely yours."

Anything between angle brackets ("<>") gets interpreted as HTML, and
if it isn't a valid HTML code, it is simply ignored and not displayed.
So "<author>" and "<insert title>" don't show up on the actual
web-page.

I also notice, scrolling through the HTML, that there are also
invisible "<Rant On>" and "<Rant Off>" lines in the entry for
 Thu Jan 30th, 2003 6:53 PM (I am using a nice code editor that
displays invalid HTML tags in red).

In order for them to show up properly, "<" must be replaced with 
"&lt;", and ">" must be replaced with "&gt;".  Alternatively, just
use square brackets ("[]") or curly brackets ("{}") or parentheses
instead of the angle brackets.

Does Movable Type (blog software) handle such things better, I wonder?
I haven't used it myself, but it seems to the the software of choice
for many bloggers.