monkinetic the blog

Friction

This blog has been through a couple different names, many different publishing platforms, and many different designs.

Most recently, in a fit of nerd pique, I ported monkinetic from Typepad to Jekyll/Octpress. I had been writing almost exclusively in Markdown for years, and I decided to go full-Markdown, with a statically generated site.

However, I quickly found that I’m not a command-line blogger. There was simply too much friction in having to:

• open a terminal
• find the right directory
• run a script to start a post
• edit in my editor of choice and save
• regenerate and republish the site

This also meant that I couldn’t blog from my phone/tablet without a number of extra steps, and while I know I could have automated the process - with even more work - how I blog isn’t what I want to spend my time fiddling with any more. I want to be able to just write.

Scriptogr.am

Recently, a number of Dropbox-based Markdown editors have shown up on the iOS store, and subsequently a few blogging engines have popped up that render from Markdown and operateo from your Dropbox account.

I checked out Calepin, one of these services, but Calepin offers no way to customize your theme, and it looks like the service may not coninue.

My next stop was Scriptogr.am, and this looks promising. After a couple hours running and re-running my body of posts through a custom script to munge them into the flavor of Markdown Scriptogram prefers, and a few false starts with bad filenames(Scriptogram doesn’t seem to like filenames with “—” in them) I’ve got the blog ported over and it seems to be working pretty well. A couple things to note:

• I can write in an editor like Mou and then save to my Dropbox folder (Scriptogram creates an /Apps/Scriptogram/posts folder for you).
• Mou also supports posting directly to Scriptogram via their API. Haven’t tried this yet.
• As with all Markdown-to-blog generators, upadting the site takes a while, but I can push the button on Scriptogram and let it do the work.
• I wish that it would auto-update after I’ve saved the post in Dropbox.

I’ll do this for a little while, and if I seem to be writing more, I’ll move the main domain over.

5by5 is my new commute jam. I’ve got 6 or 8 podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. Favorites include Mac Power Users, Build & Analyze, and The Ihnatko Almanac.

A young boy’s ToDo list:

I was having some sorting issues on the blog here, and it took me a couple hours to realize that Scriptogram inserts 12-hour timestamps into new posts created in the dashboard: