About
About the author
Matthew Magain works for SitePoint as the manager of online media, based in Melbourne, Australia. In the past he’s worked as an English teacher in Japan as well as a software consultant for IBM Australia. m-dash is his personal outlet for recording random thoughts, commenting on current affairs and venting at the motorist who cut him off on the way to work.
He also fancies himself as an amateur cartoonist, so if you’re lucky you may see the occasional comic appear on this site from time to time.
About the name
An m-dash (actually em dash) is the typographical character “—”. Many people assume that all dashes are made equal, but there are in fact several different types of dashes, each varying in width and length, for use in different situations.
The usage of an em dash is often confused with that of a colon or a hyphen. It seemed fitting, given that my name starts with M.
There are very few web sites that correctly use em dashes. If you’d like to do so, the HTML entity to use is —. Read the Wikipedia entry about dashes for further fascinating information on dashes and the correct use of each…
About this site
Some geeky details: this site is powered by Textpattern and hosted by Textdrive. The design is based on a template by Birgit Zimmerman, with a few tweaks.
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Matthew Magain works as the manager for online media at