- edit DEVONthink records in terminal vim – I’m in the midst of planning my Fall seminar, which happens to be a course titled “Digital History in Theory and Practice.” Given the large number of online resources I’m… – (markdown notetaking vim DevonThink )
- DEVONthink: evangelicalism and geekery (I) | a historian’s craft – twelve days since my last post. alas. I can only half blame Marco Polo; the remaining culpability must be roughly distributed between (a) manic funding and fieldwork administrative tasks, which I… – (DT notetaking DevonThink )
- Students as Contributors: Digital Learning Farm | November Learning – Aimed at HS, this is a pretty good bullet list of ideas for class involvement. – (secondary_ed participatorymedia )
Tag Archives: markdown
bookmarks for September 28th, 2012
can you get more minimal?
Yes, probably, but this template and its surrounding files – svbtle by ricardorauch – is as minimal on the admin and posting side as it is on the viewing side.
it’s all markdown back here.
That makes text fast and easy to work with. In svtle itself, the editor is not visible: no visible text field, no scroll bars, just type in the white space. And that’s not disconcerting. Because it’s all markdown, I should be able to compose in a plain text editor or markdown editor, and then copy and paste without conversion. The entry page allows previewing – almost unnecessary. Idea is a draft. Public is what it says.
limitations
The limitations are minor. Can place images inline but can’t set alignment or set image size. Can’t set or view tags, categories, or manage the post with respect to other posts. Just edit and format.
workflow
Svbtle is a text editor at root. Go to the wp-svtle page, enter the text, save, preview, whatever. Even publish it to get it out there. Then, now or later, go to the standard wp-admin page to refine image formatting, add categories, tags, manage. The only trick involves saving in svtle before moving to the standard editor so that the markdown conversion is preserved.
and so
While markdown text entry is a charm, I’m used to having some post management tools close to hand – to add a tag and category as I write, to get a sense of how an image will work with a text. If I really want pure markdown, it’s easy enough to use an off-line markdown editor. And the svtle template sacrifices navigation and sidebar information, which is what I use a weblog for.
Still, it’s good to have an option for. say, a special project.
quick post on markdown in markdown: letting go of the formatting
markdown and workflow
Now that NV and loads of other iPad and Mac apps support markdown, I’d be best learning to use it. The syntax is nothing new (except that link tag), but what is new is how to move from a markdown editor to, for instance, a weblog.
- Looks like writers format using markdown in whatever app they like to write in (NVAlt, IA writer, whatever). They then move the html code generated by the markdown app to their publishing space. Some copy and paste, others email and open. Here for instance, Chase moves from Scrivener to TextMate. He basically just writes in markdown
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because it’s so simple to get used to and can be converted to HTML in a click or two. I highly recommend getting familiar with markdown if your a blogger or digital note taker.
- fletcherpenny starts in OmniOutliner, and moves towards markdown. Why?
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I really enjoy the benefits of being able to create one master source document, with minimal, easy-to-remember formatting, and then being able to use it to create a wide range of final document types. For me, this is much easier than having multiple versions of the same document, and having to hand synchronize them. Additionally, I like the fact that I can write a complex document without paying much attention to formatting, and then let LaTeX fix it up into a nicely formatted pdf.
Rob McBroom wrote an app to convert from markdown to html. He also draws on a tool that renders to pdf.
As more apps include the ability to work with markdown, it’s becoming more and more useful to learn it – and to teach it as general markup language rather than html or xml. An additional aspect of markdown is getting a sense of how composition – and to an extent, design – is separable from production. Markdown can deepen the separation of text from formatting – for good or ill, I guess.
Dairingfireball is the source for markdown.
Looks like my workflow of choice will start in DevonThink. For blogging I would move in MarsEdit or directly into WP. For the wiki, a copy and paste will do it. For moving to rtf or formatting into Pages – I’ll need to look into that. And, of course, this post was written in markdown in NValt, copied and pasted into MarsEdit, uploaded to WP. And while writing in markdown is easy, working directly in MarsEdit can be even easier. It’s a matter of sitting down and working.