Many of us happily spend many hours editing text in our favourite blogging platform or CMS. In my case, and for many others this is WordPress. I love WordPress, but there was one big step backwards compared to my previous Plone CMS; the lack of a built-in markup language to make it easy to enter text without using HTML or fiddling around selecting formating and linking with the buttons using a mouse. I did check a couple years ago, but there were no suitable plugins for a multi-author blog.
But my problem is solved thanks to a tweet from Paul Boag (@Boagworld). Now I can edit without any distractions, without using the mouse!
What is a markup language?
Byword, the editor I’m using uses a syntax called Markdown. You can see it’s easy to add headings, lists and links and then in a couple of keystrokes and you can convert this…
to this…
and you’re ready to paste into WordPress and post. It’s like magic!
Which editors enable Markup support
I’m using BywordApp for Mac, but there are plenty of others including this Web service and WriteMonkey for Windows.
I hope this helps someone save a few minutes everyday. If you use something similar already I haven't worked out a way of inserting images really, but that's not a bother really!