Nice. Thanks for the reply. Thinking in terms of problems and solutions seems like a good way to visualize everything.

What types of personal projects would you expect/like to see a candidate working on? Would games demonstrate ability at all, or are they too off-track from more standard, real world projects?

Yeah, then you can do what the guy below said - echo a .txt file in a php page. Just set up a template php file with like the html, head, body and all that - kind of a skeleton, then you could read a directory of .txt files using glob from the server, loop through them to extract the contents of each, and spit the contents out into divs with a css class assigned. If you want titles, you can assume the very first line in the file is the title, then two newlines down or something assume the rest is your content.

Making sure I understand what you want to do exactly...

So you'd write a post in plain text, then save it to a server either as a flat file or inside of a database, then post it as an html file that would display the content properly in a web browser?