macolyte.net

I use MarsEdit to post most of the articles (if you want to call them that) I write here. It’s a great application, but I don’t like writing draft posts in it because there’s no way for me to access them when I’m not on my Mac (at least not until Daniel gives us MarsEdit for iOS). I’ve tried to write my drafts in text files stored in Dropbox using vim, TextMate, nvALT and Byword and then mashing together some combination of AppleScripts, shell scripts, and TextExpander snippets to easily get the content into MarsEdit. Every “solution” was hacky and I grew dissatisfied with them all so quickly that I lost track of which one I was using at a given time. But since The Switch to Evernote, I’ve come up with what could be the One True Blogging Workflow for me.

I created a notebook in Evernote called @macolyte_drafts where I keep a note, written in Markdown, for every post I’m currently working on. Once I’ve given up on trying to make the post sensible, I hit ⌘ ⇧ M and the following AppleScript is run (thanks to another one of Daniel’s excellent applications: FastScripts) to turn the note into a new blog post entry in MarsEdit:

(Some bits of the code are from here and here

After the piece is published, the note gets moved to the @macolyte_pub notebook (sadly, Evernote doesn’t support moving a note from one notebook to another via AppleScript so I have to do it manually). And that’s it. My drafts are always with me and getting them published is not in any way hacky.