For some time I've been curious about markdown and how it might streamline my writing workflow. I enjoy writing, and the fact that I can write kinda fast (almost as fast as I think of the words) makes it easier. The thing is that I'm not writing as much as I used to. I barely write on my Twitter account (actually I do but not as often as I did a couple of years ago) and my blog, well, it's so dusty… I think I posted about 5 entries three years ago and about 4 were videos or photos.
Again, I DO like writing, as a matter of fact I might have about 20 drafts waiting to be published (after proofreading them) and I even like the new template I have on my blog, the one I'm always tweaking and working on. But for the most part Wordpress is the one to blame. Don't get me wrong. I think Wordpress is a really nice blogging and CMS option, I recommend it for my clients and use it quite often, but it has SO many options that I don't really care of.
Dealing with the formatting
One of the things that makes Wordpress so good it's that is a complete suite. It not only has an online editing thingy, but that can be replaced with others. Plugins, new admin panels and many other available customizations, but all that, which is nice for managing, is what makes the whole creative process very complex. That many options makes an excessive amount of clutter that I dislike and leaves me not wanting to do anything.
I read about Markdown a couple of years ago. It takes a little practice (not as much as shorthand) but after styling a couple of paragraphs and inserting some links and images you basically know everything there's to know.
What I'm doing next
In the long run I would like to stop using Wordpress in favor of something simpler, but I haven't found such tool yet. I know there's are tons of static site generators and blog publishing systems, but at the same time Octopress and Jekyll (the main two alternatives I've found) seem to over-complicate the whole process, so it's hard to pick where to go from Wordpress.
Using markdown in tandem with Dropbox is also a nice idea, but I tried some services that require me to manually sync with their service to push/update the content. For now the only candidate so far is Ghost, which is free, open source and looks very interesting, but the chore of setting up node.js just for that is something I'll have to think about. In the meantime I should try to complete the following list:
- Proofread all of my drafts
- Publish those drafts
- Bring the blog back from the ashes
- Learn to work on markdown, including images and tables.
- Add a Wordpress plugin to enable markdown support
- Find a way to export all my blog posts (dating back from 2005) to plain text in order to use it on a different platform.
This entry was edited on 2016-03-23 because the text was unintelligible because the state of mind of the writer due to lack of sleep. This is, however, the final version of the entry and will probably be quoted by the author in the near future.