Static Publishing With VoodooPad
August 28th, 2012Gus Mueller of Flying Meat is a good friend who, for a short time, even worked on MarsEdit. Much to my chagrin, Gus doesn’t actually use MarsEdit for editing his own blogs. When I’ve asked him why, he explains that he’s too tied to a particular setup involving VoodooPad, his desktop wiki app.
To make things worse, he’s finally made his blogging solution public! You can read all about static publishing with VoodooPad on the Flying Meat site. There goes the neighborhood.
Although MarsEdit supports static publishing, I have to confess it’s pretty minimal compared to the support for hosted blog services such as WordPress and Blogger. MarsEdit support is all built around the old “Blosxom” publishing convention. If you’re interested, Dan Weeks has a good write-up about how he used this support to connect MarsEdit with Octopress.
Although static publishing isn’t a top priority for MarsEdit today, I’ll be considering enhancements that would give more flexibility and power to these setups. In the mean time if MarsEdit doesn’t fit your needs, I strongly encourage you to check out Gus’s new stuff in VoodooPad!
August 29th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
Wonder if you could handle static sites just by having an optional “pass to script” sort of output. That way people with static sites (which tends to be run more by techie people already open to scripting) can create their own interfaces without you needing to worry about it.
August 29th, 2012 at 1:06 pm
@Clark – Yeah, this is crudely how the current Blosxom support works. It writes a post to disk and then runs a script. The limitations are mostly in that it doesn’t support most additional metadata apart from title and content, and you’re forced to use Blosxom’s directory hierarchy method of implying category.