I’ve just added a new plug-in to MovableType — SmartyPants. It’s a relatively minor thing, but one that’s nice to have — it automatically converts common characters into their typographically-correct versions. Quotation marks display using ‘curly’ quotes rather than ‘straight’ quotes, a series of three periods will be transformed into the ellipsis character ( … ), and two dashes surrounded by spaces ( —- ) will be converted into an ’em dash’ ( — ).
It’s purely for looks and presentation, but I like it better this way. So there.
I’ve also altered the code for my individual entry pages using a trick from Burningbird and Phil so that in addition to displaying any TrackBack pings I get on the pages, those pages are also rebuilt at the time of the ping. Previously I’d been using a PHP include to put the TrackBack information in, but that resulted in a slowdown when people requested pages, as the server had to process the CGI script that listed the TrackBack pings every time a page was served. This way, TrackBack pings will take a bit longer when they happen, but pulling individual pages from my server goes much faster (half a second as opposed to 2 to 3 seconds on average).