I suspect a lot of HN folks don't know who Dean Allen is (was), which is a little unfortunate. He was an early and strong advocate of, well, making the web readable and beautiful -- and of keeping in mind that those two things aren't mutually exclusive, something we've occasionally lost sight of in the years since.

He created Textile, a Markdown-like "lightweight markup" language that actually predates Markdown (and is, by some measures, more powerful). He went on to create Textpattern, a blogging system that, like WordPress, bloomed into a lightweight CMS -- but unlike WordPress, TXP (as its fans call it) has a much better template and extension system. And, Allen created TextDrive, an early shared hosting service that, at least until its unfortunate-in-retrospect merger with Joyent, was a power user dream. (No offense to the folks at Joyent -- well, not much -- but TextDrive became their transparently unloved "low end" brand surprisingly quickly.)