Markdown Scripts For MarsEdit

August 26th, 2007

Drew 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.

Markdown Scripts For MarsEdit

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!