NitSite is the name of my custom blog software and I've just added a new update. Nothing too major at this time, looking forward to a new design, but three features stand out.

First off I've gone XHTML compliant. I really didn't have too many changes to make, but I figured keeping my site valid will help me to keep other sites I work on valid. And the W3C badge (to the right) is just so attractive.

Second, I've added a rich text box for web editing. Recently I had been using a plain textarea, which is of course very reliable and functional, but also lends it self to a few errors and a slower edit time. Luckily I came across the TinyMCE via a post on Channel9 by sbc. Super easy to implement (its all done in javascript and can be applied to any text area), full of plug-ins (spellcheck, even), cross=platform, and to go along with the first point in this post its creates xhtml compliant markup. Awesome tool.

Thirdly, I've added tagging/category support. So what's a tag? They are a label, or say a keyword applied to your entry to help describe the contents. Almost like placing the entry into a category. It's all so familiar because category elements have existed in RSS since 2002, according to Dave Winer. So we've had categories in our syndication but then we also now need them in the html of our page for services like technorati and for users visiting our sites. So all I've done is added tags in the database to be exposed as "Tags" or as "Categories", which is exactly how Channel 9 works. Of course this will become more useful once, I have my own "tags" page for users visiting my site.

This is fun and simple stuff, and its really got me going with ideas for my aggregation tool.