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.

@scriptogram: take a look at the top group on http://t.co/7sCgmJgJ - the meta all looks right, but they don't publish correctly. Ideas?

@scriptogram it does seem to have unstuck. I do have a bunch of posts that seem to have right format but are not publishing right.

H, that was @calepinapp, which appears to be closing down soon? Bummer, it's pretty.

Have been testing @scriptogram, now testing @calepin. Dropbox-based blogging tools do seem to suffer from bad lag with lots of posts (2600+)

Kicked off Dropbox sync on @scriptogr.am for my 2600+ blog posts (14-ish years!). Hop I don't break it.

@daveg When I read it, your post had this many likes: http://t.co/qG86V8RD

My favorite disparaging name for R.E.M.: Whiny Michael and the Stipes.

I love Sublime Text, but even @barebones "free" TextWrangler can do multi-file replace and save the damn files. Wimp.

My son: "Dad likes that zhoomp-zhooomp computer music."

Clipped and Distant would be a good blog name.

Daughter looking for pics of Optimus Prime to draw from #winning #dadops

RT @evanpro: "twitter and the bitchwagon" http://t.co/AwRmCdBG #twitter #statusnet

@scriptogr.am - busted blog http://t.co/BnpUKgl0

@scriptogr.am I think I broke the site with my 2600 posts. User steveivy. Can had a look?

I think I broke scriptogr.am #2600posts

Got young kids? Live in the Southwest? Find Oscars Oasis on Netflix and watch them giggle.

@tapbots Tweetbot Beta I mean.

@tapbots Beta for OS X is crashing after 10.7.5 upgrade. Where to send log?

Tweetbot Beta on OS X 10.7.5 is crashing on launch. Without it I'll probably just not use Twitter at all on my Mac. Any tips?