Tag: markdown

Twitter –> Markdown FTW!

Thanks to Jim Groom for sharing this post by Matthias Ott, my Twitter archive has now been converted from HTML to Markdown .

To do this, there is a Python script, created by Tim Hutton. As Matthias explains:

  • It converts the tweets in your archive to markdown with embedded images, videos and links.
  • It replaces t.co URLs with their original versions.
  • It copies used images to an output folder, to allow them to be moved to a new home.

I don’t know if I want to host my Twitter archive anywhere but having run the parser I know that it is now future-proof and far more portable, should I decide to host it publicly in the future. It is, after all, a significant part of my digital footprint from the last 13 years and nine months.

If you haven’t taken a copy of your Twitter archive yet, I recommend that you do. And if you do have a copy of your archive, it is definitely worth converting it into a more friendly format.

Now I just need to decide if I want to nuke my Twitter account completely? šŸ¤”

Drafts and Marked sitting in a treeā€¦

Thor Happy

Just found out, via Brett Terpstra, that Drafts, my favourite writing app1, works with Marked, allowing real time rendering of Markdown and HTML. And thereā€™s an action that can be installed to open Marked from Drafts directly.

This makes me very happy! šŸ¤˜

  1. Drafts, by Greg Pierce is the Swiss Army knife of writing apps. I use it for capturing ideas, notes, lists and drafting blog posts. Best of all, the built in actions allow me to act on my drafts right in the app.[↩]

Perfect ‘Simple’ Note Making – Revamped

nvALT, my preferred text editor, has been the constant tool in my writing and note making setup for more than a year now. There have, however, been a few changes to both the way I write blog posts and the way I create and sync notes with my Android phone. Therefore, I felt a brief update was in order.

Syntax

While learning HTML syntax has helped me to build and customise this blog, it is not particularly easy to use when writing blog posts. What I prefer, is to write in plain text. To avoid writing out lots of HTML, I would write posts in nvALT and then add links, formatting and images in the WordPress browser-based editor. This was not the worst workflow but it was not ideal.

Over the last three months I have been learning to write using Markdown. Markdown is both a software tool and a simple syntax, created by John Gruber, that allows you to maintain your focus on writing. It works by converting plain text, formatted with the Markdown syntax, in to valid HTML.

nvALT has Markdown support built in meaning that I can write a blog post using the syntax, quickly open up a HTML preview to check that everything looks as it should, then simply copy/paste the HTML source code directly into the WordPress browser-based editor. After adding a title and tags all I have to do is hit publish. A far more pleasing workflow.

If you are interested in learning Markdown quickly, this video by Eddie Smith is definitely worth watching:

Epistle

A couple of months into learning Markdown I decided that I should find a text editor for my Android phone that supported it. Being a very specific search I quickly came across Epistle by Matteo Villa.

Epistle

Like nvALT, Epistle has built-in Markdown support. Which means I can write fully formatted blog posts on my phone, using the Markdown syntax. It has an elegant and minimal user interface. Note creation involves a single click and they can be organised alphabetically or by date. Also, you can select from serif, sans-serif and monospace fonts. After a couple of clicks, I had Epistle working in exactly the same way as nvALT. I was completely sold.

Getting in sync

However, there was a problem. Epsitle does not sync with Simplenote. Instead it syncs with Dropbox. Fortunately, I remembered reading a blog post demonstrating how to sync your notes in nvALT with Dropbox and Plain Text for iPad. Re-reading the post it was clear that I could do the same with nvALT, Dropbox and Epistle.

In short I switched to saving notes in nvALT as plain text files. Then I created a folder called ā€œNVā€ and moved all my notes to this folder. Next, I synced the folder with Dropbox using MacDropAny. To complete the setup, in Epistle, I changed the Dropbox folder it was syncing with to the ā€œNVā€ folder I had created. And that was it, my notes were synced across both devices.

Perfect and ā€˜Simpleā€™

Itā€™s almost a year since I first shared an insight into my note making and writing processes. In essence not much has changed. My setup and work flow remain perfect and ā€˜simpleā€™; revamped but much the same.