• April 9th, 2008
• • Blog
  • Shameless Promotion

This blog is powered by WordPress. Wordpress is a solid blogging platform, but it has its flaws. Blogging with Wordpress is a time, consuming, process.

I wish I blogged more often but it’s hard to find the time to do it. The bottleneck for me was creating and editing posts via WordPress’ backend. Loading, refreshing, uploading pictures, and double-checking the blog post to make sure everything was lined up correctly, etc. The time I would spend writing a post was compounded by the back and forth between the front and backend until I found MarsEdit.

MarsEdit to the Rescue

Simply put MarsEdit is an OSX application that interfaces with the Wordpress backend of the blog via XML-RPC. MarsEdit allows me to edit/post/upload images with ease. If I wrote for multiple blogs (I don’t yet), then I could do it all from within MarsEdit and life would be that much easier. Now I can post/edit/upload much faster. The next step to making things REALLY fly is my use of Markdown.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). daringfireball

Essentially Markdown is shorthand HTML that makes it faster bang out blog posts.

If you’re blogging or thinking about blogging I highly recommend adding these tools to your repertoire.

You’ll notice since I implemented these tools back in the beginning of March there has been a serious uptick in the frequency of posting here at somedirection. A large part of that is leveraging MarsEdit+Markdown in this blog. There’s also another factor and I’ll be writing about it shortly.

Resources

• MarsEdit
• I use the WordPress Markdown Plugin to format the pseudo markup.
• Markdown CheatSheet PDF

This post was written in Markdown, you can view the syntax here.

Popularity: 7% [?]

• April 9th, 2008
• • Inspiration
  • Music
  • Review

Seems that many of my colleagues have created their own muxtapes lately. The concept is simple upload a dozen mp3’s of 10mb or less to create a mixtape.

Ever the music aficionado myself I took the time to make a simple list of some of the tunes that have been occupying my airwaves lately. Give somedirection.muxtape.com a spin, let me know what you think.

I love muxtape for its simplicity. It’s the kind of app that as a web developer you say to yourself - why didn’t I think of that?

Here’s a service that’s just begging for a widget you can embed on your blog/social network.

Looks like S3 is leveraged for file hosting - smart move.

Popularity: 7% [?]