Tag: markdown

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My writing setup by James (jamesg.blog)
At this week’s Homebrew Website Club, I asked everyone what tools they use for writing. Participants shared a range of tools, from BBEdit, a text editor for macOS, to “Written? Kitten!”, a web-based text editor that shows a photo of a cat after you have written a certain number of words. Delig...

Back in December I bookmarked a post on James Coffee Blog titled “My Writing Setup.” The post outlines one writing set-up and invites people to share their own via webmention. My writing set-up for full articles over at The New Leaf Journal is similar to when I wrote about my writing workflow in December 2021. I draft my articles in markdown using Ghostwriter and then export them into LibreOffice Writer (as .odt files) for final edits and transfer to WordPress. Since the 2021 article, I have added Yoga Image Optimizer to my workflow for compressing images and now use Shotwell instead of Nomacs for basic image edits. On this more humble site, I usually use the WordPress editor (note I use the classic editor) here instead of drafting the posts externally. There are some ancillary components of my workflow. For example, why am I responding to a post from 10 months ago? At some point, I saved it in a folder I created in my Zotero library for future article ideas.

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I send a weekly newsletter attached to The New Leaf Journal called The Newsletter Leaf Journal. Unsurprisingly, I focus on sharing links to my latest articles (including some from here) and news and notes about my projects. However, in the spirit of generosity and sharing external links, I pack each newsletter full of links from around the web (21 per issue, as of late). I had a markdown file with links and comments ready to use in future newsletters. This file was over 9,200 words. I managed to lose the file while reorganizing my documents, notwithstanding the fact that my preferred markdown editor, Ghostwriter, creates automatic backups (single-version automatic backups hit a snag when you accidentally write over markdown your file but keep the same name). Maybe I would have been safe the markdown document was not in one of the few working folders that I was not syncing with my favorite app, Syncthing). But the past is the past. I guess that we will be starting fresh as we prepare to turn the calendar to 2024. Fortunately, I have more than enough new links to keep things rolling (so do subscribe via email or RSS).

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The Classic Editor in WordPress by Jack Baty (Baty.net)
I thought for sure I would finally settle in with WordPress for a while, but Gutenberg always annoys. Some of it is handy, but mostly I just feel frustrated when writing anything more than a paragraph or two. Several people, noticing my frustration, recommended that I try the Classic Editor plugin, so that’s what I’m doing now.

I am using the Classic Editor here at The Emu Café Social, in large part because some of the IndieWeb plugins I am using require it instead of Gutenberg. I agree with this take by Mr. Baty in a vacuum that  the classic editor is better for writing than Gutenberg. However, I use Gutenberg over at my main WordPress-powered project, The New Leaf Journal. The reasons are two-fold:

  1. Drafting articles in markdown (I like Ghostwriter) and converting them using Pandoc for use on WordPress provides a superior workflow to both Gutenberg and the Classic Editor.
  2. Because I draft my long articles outside of WordPress (with a few exceptions), I am more concerned with formatting. Gutenberg works better for me for that purpose than the TinyMCE editor.

(I will note, however, that Gutenberg footnotes almost cost me a great deal of work on a recent project.)