Be friends with your editor
Vim is just wonderful. As my most used tool, it does an admirable job in letting me do what I want with a minimum of fuss. It's great being able to re-format quoted text in mail messages (using "gq}") and knowing that vim will understand that the >'s should be prefixed to each line, and shouldn't be reformatted with the rest of the text.

I don't think that the youth of today truly understand how important it is to become friends with your editor. I still see people who want to do their work in pico.

I suppose I had an easy transition to vi. Whereas other students were used to point-and-drool editors, I'd spent many years on local BBSs using line editors, and my favourite game at the time was Hack, which used vi keys for movement. All that made the move to vi quite natural.

Writing code on Advogato
To answer alisdair's question about displaying code on Advogato, I'd personally make use of the <pre> tags, like this:

<PRE>

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use lib '../lib';
use Finance::Quote;
use Data::Dumper;

 # A very very simple script.  Takes a source and a symbol,
# looks it up, and dumps it to STDOUT.  Useful for 
# debugging.

 die "Usage: $0 source symbol\n" unless (defined $ARGV[1]);

 my $q = Finance::Quote->new;

 my %quotes = $q->fetch(@ARGV);

 print Dumper(\%quotes);

</PRE>

Mind you, I've also found that <TT>works just fine</TT> for small snippets of code.

Unfortuately, if you go back an edit your diary entry which used the <pre> tags, you'll find that a whole bunch of <p> tags have been inserted as well. Bad Advogato.