Byword and Marked, WordPress blogging with Markdown – a review

Byword and Marked

Byword and Marked from the Mac App Store is a couple of great applications for Mac. I got them because I’m totally addicted to use Markdown when writing. I didn’t like the predefined fonts, but found a great typeface called Droid Sans that you can download for free here.

Byword

This is a really simple and nice text editor that handles Markdown like a charm. I really like the way it dims down the markup, making the text easier to read.

Marked

This is a nifty little application for previewing the live HTML output from your Markdown text. Great for catching mistakes. It updates everything you write in Byword as soon as you save documents. And it works with a lot of other programs. It can also be used to export in HTML and other formats when your done.

Images

I’m using a WordPress blog and I have found that it’s easiest just to upload the images using the WordPress Dashboard and then copy the link. There are shortcuts for most of the Markdown commands, so all I have to do is to press alt-command-i and paste the link to the image. Thanks to Marked I know that the images will look ok. This looks like a great way of writing blog posts.

iPad/iPhone

I store all my blog posts in a directory in Dropbox, so If I want to I can edit the post with my favorite iPad/iPhone Markdown editor Writing Kit. For me that’s an enormous bonus. Bored on the subway? Write on your blog posts.

Finishing

So when you are finished writing, you just need to export HTML to clipboard and paste it into WordPress.