I’m doing a end-of-year refresh on my blog and part of that has meant taking a look at the different blogging sevices, themes, and text editors I have active. I want to narrow down the ones that I’m using and make the whole writing->publishing process as simple as possible. (Another thing that comes with it is a bunch of ideas for blog posts about blogging.)
For every blog post I’ve written over the two past years I’ve used a markdown enabled text editor, and when I looked at all the markdown text editors apps I have installed either on my Mac and on my iPhone, I was annoyed that none would support the “publishing” half of the workflow.
In almost any application nowadays you can find a “Post to Twitter” or a “Share on Facebook” function. You can find these sharing features everywhere, you’ll see them in games for sharing your high-score, sharing what article you’re reading, posting photo you’ve taken, and more. Share features are common in mobile applications and sharing buttons or badges used in excess on websites. It was only in Elements though, an iOS text editor, that I found a “Publish” option. Elements was the only application to support publishing what I had written directly to to Tumblr as well as to Facebook.
On iOS and on the Mac, markdown support is common in many of the best text-editors. Almost all These same editors support Dropbox sync, and let you email or export your notes to HTML, but support is non-existant for publishing notes directly to major blogging platforms like WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous or Facebook. I found this really odd, especially considering the audience using apps like Elements, iA Writer, ByWord, and Ulysses (naming a few of I have installed).
These apps all help make the writing experience more beautiful, and they all support markdown to simplify the creation of html formatted text, but each app stops when it comes time to get that information onto the web.
Open Mode 