My Current Blogging Workflow

My blogging workflow has been bugging me for some time. I used to write directly into the Blogger's editor in the web browser, but that's just begging to lose work, so I've explored a number of other options.

I've written drafts into Evernote, where I keep ongoing notes, mostly work and personal projects. They felt lost there, so that didn't work for long. I next wrote into my DevonThink journal file. That was cumbersome, since I keep that file in an encrypted disk volume for safety's sake, so that didn't work to well either. I wonder if that's one reason I don't write journal entries as often as I like.

I've drafted quick thoughts into Simplenote, and they have occasionally become blog entries. That works great for quick thoughts that need developed, but it's cumbersome for longer entries, since I use Simplenote and Notational Velocity for more ephemeral things.

I installed the MarsEdit trial a long while back, and bought it when my evaluation period was over and I wasn't anywhere near done with my evaluation. I very much like the post management and publishing aspects of MarsEdit, but I very much dislike composing text there.

I've been keeping an eye on Markdown for a very login time; I knew it would one day be important to me, but I'd not yet figured out how it fit into my workflow.

Last night when I was writing up a summary of iOS weather app evaluations for a friend in email, I realized where Markdown would fit in: as the language for draft blog posts.

I next revisited Markdown tools. I tried it first in MarsEdit, but the whole thing felt clunky. I Googled around a bit, and then tried BBEdit - another tool I'd purchased a long time back before my eval was done but after the free eval had expired and was sitting idle. BEdit makes Markdown dead simple, with its built-in preview and quick access to the Markdown to HTML conversion filter.

Here's the current workflow: Draft in whatever is handy - BBEdit if I'm at my Mac - then save in my blog posts folder as I go. SugarSync keeps track of the saved drafts as I go - so nice! When I'm happy with the post, I copy it into a new blank file in BBEdit and run conversion filter to get HTML code. I then copy the HTML and past it into a new post in MarsEdit and publish, immediately checking any links to ensure they work.

I suppose it's a bit more convoluted that it should be, but at least I'm comfortable with it, and I've picked up a new skill: composing in Markdown.

An ironic side note: to date I have used TextMate rather than BBEdit as my daily go-to text editor. I prefer TextMate's clean UI to BBEdit's cluttered interface. I'm now looking into cleaning up BBEdit's UI through its extensive customization; I'm making progress.

Update

I couldn't find a stock template I liked more, so I decided to fix this one. As I looked into the way Blogger used the various header levels, I determined that this template reserves h1 and h2 for itself, so I must start with h3 and work down from there. I updated the post on iOS weather apps and it now looks much better.

This blogging stuff is now kinda fun. I hope to now post more frequently.