The Unicode for an em-dash?
What, you mean 8212?

It's your fault that I know that, Kip, I'll have you know.

Textile is cool. Thanks! Have you checked out Textpattern at all, by the way? I've been idly considering moving the Overanalyzing archive into that format, since my server's outlawed MT, and I've been getting complaints about there no longer being a working search function and commenting ability and suchnot (I don't know why people complain to me about the comments, since all of the non-spam comments I ever got seemed to be from people who failed to notice that the posts were written in 2002, and so wanted to inform me of events from the fifth book, but nonetheless. People have grumbled. Whatever.)

I'm sort of reluctant to lose my URLs, though.

Eh. Thinking about it.

I haven't dug into Textpatter
I haven't dug into Textpattern yet, and probably won't, since I got seduced by WordPress. It's a little further along development-wise, and the host I'm switching to offers free and painless installation of WP, so no-brainer. —As far as permalinks go, I'm in the middle of that hell, too. You can write re-directs and stick them in a file that will painlessly route people from the old to the new, which is probably what I'm gonna end up having to do, but you have to, you know. Write re-directs. Sigh.

Wordpress installation is pre
Wordpress installation is pretty goddamned painless even if you do it yourself. I'm a total incompetent at all that stuff, and I managed it first time out. You just upload the files and change two lines in the config file, and then it does everything else for you. I adore the WordPress people for that. They are kind to Luddites.

WP doesn't seem to be able to archive both by month and by week, though, or to display different fields for different views (excerpts for category and month, full text for week, which is how I had it set up on MT). Not, at any rate, without a whole lot of hacking that I'm not sure I can figure out how to do. And I don't seem to be able to make it replicate my "two-column for reading, three-column for indices" layout, either.

Really, given that it's a static archive anyway, I'm tempted to just keep it as HTML files, clean up the code a bit to use more CSS, use some server-side includes in case I want to change it in the future, stick a bit of script in there somewhere to enable a search function, and blow off the comments altogether. I never liked having comments on that site anyway: it seemed reasonable to enable them at the time, but when it comes right down to it, I just don't have much of anything to say these days about stuff I posted to a newsgroup three years ago --yet ignoring people's comments always makes me feel vaguely guilty. Not good.