I’ve just started using MarsEdit1 again (in combination with my TextMate2 blogging bundles), but I’ve run into a couple of issues. First, I can’t assign thumbnails to my posts directly. This is the result of poor API support in Wordpress for handling attachments on a specific post, and not Daniel’s fault at all. Fortunately, I’ve set my blog up to search for an image with a specific class, remove it from the post and use it as the post header if a thumbnail isn’t assigned. That works.
Second, my blog uses PHP Markdown Extra3, and a lot of the “extra” functionality was messing up my carefully-crafted preview in MarsEdit. Fortunately, a little searching on the Red Sweater forums yielded exactly what I needed4: you can add your own text filters with a little editing and some luck.
Markdown Extra shares most of the functionality I need with MultiMarkdown5, such as footnotes and quick, semantic tables. By copying the bin
folder from ~/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/
to ~/Application Support/MarsEdit/TextFilters/
and renaming it from bin
to MultiMarkdown
(the exact same name as the executable), I was able to add the text filter without breaking a sweat.
Now, between MarsEdit and Edit in TextMate, I can do all of my blogging in Markdown Extra, offline, with full previews. I can manage categories and tags, excerpts and add media. Spectacular.
-
MarsEdit: http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/ ↩
-
TextMate: http://macromates.com/ ↩
-
PHP Markdown Extra: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/ ↩
-
Red Sweater Forum Post: http://www.red-sweater.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1211 ↩
-
MultiMarkdown: http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ ↩