Category: Words

Post by BBEdit

I’ve gone back and forth from static site generators, like Jekyll and Hugo, to hosted
sites like WordPress, which is the current platform. One of the benefits of static site
generators is the ability to write posts in markdown and keep my content in a git
repository. The advantage of WordPress is the ecosystem around it. There is a plugin for
just about everything, and good themes are easy to find.

This is my latest attempt to have my cake and eat it too. I wrote a script to turn a
markdown file into HTML and post the result to WordPress. I don’t have a good way to post
photos, and I don’t have a way to update the post. At this this will help me see if the
writing method was really hindering my posting, or whether that was just an excuse.

Churchwood at SXSW

One of the advantages of things like music festivals and SXSW is the chance that you’ll happen upon a band that you’ve never heard of before, but stops you in your tracks. Churchwood was one of those acts for me. A couple of years ago we were at the Yard Dog for the cheap Lagunitas and the Jon Langford show. We got an entire day of great music, including Churchwood. They had a great sound and put on a great show. So much that we now just spend our SXSW Saturdays at the Yard Dog and trust them to take care of us. Here are a few pictures from the 2017 and 2018 shows.

Churchwood microphones, harmonicas, set list

Churchwood Performance

Churchwood Performance

Churchwood Performance

Fixed Links

I’ve been moving around from one hosting provider to another, and a lot of my links have grown stale. Links to my own content were broken because they used URLs from the old site. If you looked at older photos, you probably would have seen a 404 if you clicked through to see the larger image. I spent some time with wp search-replace and hopefully fixed those issues.

Posting with Byword

ByWord is another app I’ve tried for posting. It works well on a Mac, and it has support for posting to a self-hosted WordPress blog (publishing to WordPress requires a in-app purchase, which I bought). I just realized that it has support for uploading local image files. It detects them in the markdown document, and uploads them to the server. This might be the thing I need to use. As a test, here’s a picture from onbaord the schooner Seaward

Schooner Seaward on the Sea of Cortez
Schooner Seaward on the Sea of Cortez

Posting Workflow

This post was written in BBEdit and rendered from Markdown to HTML using a custom script. It’s still manual in that I have to copy and paste the HTML into a WordPress edit form. I have scripts in progress that can read YAML front-matter and create a new post using the Title, date, category, etc. from the front-matter. So as a text-publishing solution, BBEdit is pretty complete. Or will be once I finish those scripts. The problem is with images. I don’t have a good solution for images, and I don’t have a good plan on how to deal with them.

One possible solution is MarsEdit. I’ve been a registered owner for years and have always wanted it to work for me. MarsEdit allows for a custom script to render markdown into HTML. The difficulty I’m coming against now is getting my Python markdown scripts to work. MarsEdit executes its scripts in a restricted environment, so it can’t load the libraries.