Some Markdown Things

I’ve recently started to think about doing another book (or three if I’m to be believed). As part of that, I thought long and hard about my current workflow. What worked, what did not, and started to make some changes. One of those changes was to start writing “the things” in Markdown.

Why Markdown?

Mostly because it lets me do a lot of the writing part in a very simple (easier than wiki syntax) way. It also allowed me to move away from using MS Word and heavy heavy word templates designed for publishing. Finally, there are lots and lots of tools that support export from Markdown into HTML, PDF, EPUB, etc.

My Current Workflow

Currently, I start writing in a full screen Sublime Text 3 window with spellcheck turned on. From there, I have the following additional Sublime plugins installed:

• MarkdownEditing
  — This has a number of really handy keyboard bindings. It also has some decent highlighting and what not.
• Markdown Preview
  — This one allows me to go from Markdown into what it’ll look like on the web.
• Markdown TOC
  — This lets me go from a basic set of sections and files into a more full fledged table of contents.

Once sublime is set up and good to go, the process generally goes:
1. Start a new file.
2. Change syntax highlighting to MarkdownEditing > Markdown
3. Write, write, write a bit more. Delete some, change some stuff, etc.
4. Check it into git
5. Publish

Publishing is a special case, and depends on the platform. For something like a blog post, I have the “Markdown on Save” plugin for WordPress installed. For publishing to a book… well, I’ve not made it quite that far as yet.

Note, the WordPress plugin necessitates that I copy/paste from Sublime into said post. While non-optimal, there is work underway on a Sublime -> WordPress plugin that should help.