Jim Groom and others have been getting excited lately tools and techniques for integrating blogs and wikis. A while ago we had worked on a one-off script to bring the content of a wiki directly into WordPress blog. The idea is similar to XML separation of content and display--wikis are fantastic as a collaborative writing space, but don't have the robustness for presentation that WordPress has. So, we worked on a quick-and-dirty, one-off way to bring content from the writing space of one wiki page and stuff it into WordPress, treating WordPress as the presentation space.

It's been a good bit of debugging, and I've learned a lot! So far, I've discovered a lot about regular expressions (don't fear the geekery) because IE can't handle XML very well, which means switching my nice tidy XML responses from the server back into plain text for the AJAX to play with. Quite a variety of search-and-replacing came into play, especially to get rid of the white space (carriage returns and the like--carriage returns will be an upcoming blog: since when did anything return, and what's a carriage?) that appears here and there in web pages. In short, the XML tools led to nice elegant solutions, but the incomplete implementation of XML tools require icky moving back and forth between XML and plain text.