Markdown Scripts For MarsEdit
August 26th, 2007Drew Thaler has put together a pair of scripts for streamlined use of Markdown in MarsEdit, when the blog server is not configured to automatically process Markdown for presentaton.
With Drew’s scripts, you can write a post entirely in Markdown, then easily convert it to HTML before sending it to your weblog. He also provides a reverse script so you can edit existing posts by first converting them to Markdown, editing them, and converting them back before republishing. Nifty!
This is a really cool example of a MarsEdit user taking good advantage of the scripts menu to extend the application’s functionality. As you might imagine, I get a lot of requests from users who want to see a particular feature added to MarsEdit. I love it when the feature can be sort of “prototyped” as a proof of concept with AppleScript. I could see functionality like what Drew has put together being incorporated into the standard distribution of MarsEdit at some point. As development moves forward for 2.1 and beyond, I am going to aim for making the app even more user-extensible, because that’s where the most exciting ideas comes from. It’s ideal when users can not only come up with the idea but also implement a working example!
If you’re interested in Markdown but not using a weblog server that supports it natively, Drew’s scripts might make a nice addition to your MarsEdit configuration!