7/10/2023 0 Comments Marsedit wordpress![]() So using Markdown when composing content makes sense, not just because it’s quicker, but also because it generates much cleaner code. Red Sweater blog Using Markdown to compose content Markdown strikes a nice compromise by providing a predictable set of rules so that you know exactly what you’re going to get. If you can get your content to look the way you want it to, you’ll probably be horrified to see the HTML code that has been computer-generated to make it happen. I see Markdown as a response to a major problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors: they overpromise and under-deliver, almost guaranteeing disappointment. ![]() As pointed out by Daniel Jalkut, the developer of MarsEdit, it’s also a much cleaner way of generating code: Using Markdownįor reasons explained in my 2007 post, I’ve been using John Gruber’s Markdown for three years to compose my blog posts, and I’m still sticking with the method I described in that article: I compose the post in WriteRoom, using Markdown, which is a fantastic time-saver. This makes the processing of images really painless. I upload the image files directly to the S3 bucket using Firefox’s S3 add-on, and link to them directly from the blog post HTML, using a MarsEdit macro I wrote for that purpose, which also handles proper formatting of captions. Also, caching can’t at this stage be fine-tuned to apply different refresh times to different sorts of content. A new plugin called W3 Total Cache, which I’ve been testing on a sandbox site, has the potential to cut loading time still further, and is clearly a potentially very impressive solution, including advanced caching features (with an option to use memcached) as well : I haven’t yet used it with this site, though, because I’m not really comfortable with the way it modifies the WordPress directory structure and quite aggressively takes control of files, to the point you don’t always know where they are meant to be stored. Rather than explaining how to set up Cloudfront for use with WordPress, I’d suggest referring to Paul Stamatiou’s excellent tutorial.ĭoing this, combined with gzipping the files and setting far-ahead headers for them, has considerably cut down the site’s loading time §. I’ve also simplified my storage of images, as part of the change of theme I recently applied to the blog: I now store them on an Amazon S3 Cloudfront server, which means they’re served to my readers, who are evenly split between the US and Europe, more quickly than if everything were stored on my MediaTemple server. The W3 Total Cache plugin and Amazon Cloudfront The barriers to switching your desktop software are inexistent, so switching is hardly a major issue: you just pull your posts from your blog in whatever you switch to, and you’re up and running in seconds but currently, MarsEdit definitely has my vote at present. I’ve switched back to MarsEdit from ecto for drafting my posts, though: ecto was acquired by a company called Illuminex in 2008, and hasn’t been updated since, effectively becoming abandonware §, which makes it pretty unusable, in contrast to MarsEdit, which is regularly updated and fixed: it still doesn’t support custom fields, or WordPress’s new thumbnail feature out of the box, but using its powerful macros you can actually achieve pretty well anything you want in that respect. I’ll concentrate, in this post, on saying a bit about how I use three tools (MarsEdit, Cloudfront and Markdown) to make my blogging easier. If you are, then you might want to read on. Also, using WordPress’s built-in WYSIWYG editor still doesn’t result in very clean code: so I would recommend disabling it §, unless you aren’t bothered with what your underlying HTML looks like. I haven’t personally gone that way, however: I still find using desktop clients infinitely more comfortable and it gives me greater flexibility. Uploading of images, via the media library, in particular, has been made radically better. WordPress itself has improved considerably in the past three years, to the point that writing blog posts in the wp-admin web interface is now a real option for those who want to keep their blogging simple and aren’t interested either in refinements or in using code. Available tools have changed slightly since then, and I’ve also changed the way I use them. I first wrote about the way I write my WordPress blog posts in 2007, and updated the method I described for using WriteRoom, TextMate and and desktop blogging software in 2009.
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