Wordpress is a pretty impressive piece of web software. It’s pretty easy to use and has a lot of nice AJAX-y features. The WYSIWYG post editor is nifty although a little troublesome where it comes to paragraph and headline formatting (it reminds me a lot of Microsoft Word in that regard).

By far the most impressive feature though is the post preview window. Click the image below for some Hofstadtery goodness:

It shows you how your post will appear on your site, using the theme you have installed. That’s a pretty piece of web programming.

I remember doing a “corporate preview” page for my previous company. Basically all we did was recursively call the rendering engine from the target page, regex the hyperlinks into dead underlines, and spit it out. It worked, but it was mighty ugly, and the HTML it generated would make your eyes bleed. Times have changed.