Forums are great. BBCode in forum posts is great. BBCode in a blog backend is not so great. For almost a year, I've used a from-scratch BBCode system as the primary means of formatting the many posts I make here *cough cough*.

In any case, FCKEditor will now handle all the backend post composition. I came across this free rich-text editor at work during brainstorming of a new CMS system. The project flopped, but I learned a lot about how the editor works and decided that it was exactly what I needed to add some much-needed power to the whole posting process.

FCKEditor has it's fair share of plugins, including one I installed that functions as an AJAX auto-save system. Now, every 30 seconds (or whenever I hit the save button), whatever I've written in the FCKEditor window is backed up to a database and restored next time I pull up the "Create a New Post" page. This feature addresses one of the issues I had with writing posts, namely the fact that I didn't have a lot of time to devote to sitting down and writing  these. Now, I can work on a post in parts and continue whenever I have a free moment. My upcoming year-long trip to Japan motivated this upgrade, as I wanted everything to be ridiculously simple for me to use when I'm abroad; I'd rather spend my time seeing the sites than spending a large amount of time writing new posts or trying to figure out why my BBCode interpreter is freaking out.

Speaking of freaking out, I'm going to tweak the CSS so that posts work a bit cleaner with the new editor; if you go back to a post before this one and the formatting looks all off, you now know why.

And before I forget, a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!