Yet another Chrome1 app idea:
A minimal, no-frills blogging app with markdown editing2, inline tagging support3, and draft auto-sync4 to WordPress and Medium
I find WordPress‘ editor too cluttered (despite the distraction-free mode), and Medium‘s too fiddly-gimmicky. In fact, I write most of my posts these days in another Automattic product – Simplenote, and then copy it to my WordPress blogs, or Medium for final editing, formatting, etc.
My WordCounter Chrome app already supports Markdown Extra. Reusing that code, adding Medium & WordPress API support, and adding a #tag parser shouldn’t take long. The only question is do I care about it enough to prioritise it over all the other stuff that’s on the backlog?
For the last couple of months that I’ve had this idea, the answer has been no.
If anyone is interested in picking this up, I’m happy to provide my notes, thoughts and maybe help with code
- Or Android. ↩
- Of course, also including previews – behind a toggle button, similar to Simplenote and WordCounter. Ideally, I’d like WP previews to be decorated with the blog’s theme’s CSS. That may be a stretch too far, though. ↩
- I hate having to type post tags into a separate box. Specially when several social media have already popularised a simple template – parse all #tags at the bottom of a post, and add the non-# bits as tags to the post automatically. ↩
- I really intend to keep the app minimal – just a plain, distraction-free writing platform. Which implies that most posts will need a finishing touch before they are actually posted. So, the plan is to automatically save the post at Medium/WordPress in the background. From the first save, show a simple link to the draft that opens in the user’s browser where they can finalise and publish the post. ↩