Wordpress Throws in Built-In Support for Markdown

With the Ghost platform recently launched and proving to be a viable medium for easy publishing and a clean writing style, it comes as no surprise that Wordpress finally supports writing in Markdown. For those that are unfamiliar with the style, here's the definitely from creator John Gruber.

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

I've been learning how to write in Markdown and have installed awesome plugins for support in my Wordpress site such as Markdown on Save Improved and WP-Footnotes. Of course with this launching, I suppose I can turn these off now but I still have yet to find where to "activate" the setting.

You can find a quick reference guide here.

markdown in wordpress text editor

Ghost is a Go!

Today mark's the public release of Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform. After months of hard work, you can sign up and try it out for yourself. I'm excited to migrate and go full-time for this website.

Ghost 0.3 comes with the full, gorgeous Markdown editor which so many of you have been excited about using. It has a stunning post management interface, it has a simple set of settings which allow you to configure your blog, and it comes with a clean and simple personal blogging theme called Casper.

and from their Kickstarter:

Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customizable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even (gasp) fun to do. It's simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time messing with making your blog work - and more time blogging.

ghost_logo

Web 2.0 and the Posterous New Blog

Intro:

I recently signed up for a posterous site, http://adellelijah.posterous.com, to host both Adelle and I together in one cloud space and in doing so, I actually ended up creating two more different posterous sites, http://adellelisa.posterous.com and http://elijahnicolas.posterous.com so that we can post on an individual basis.  Adelle actually didn't like me posting my stuff to "our" site so I decided that we each needed a separate one for self preservation.  I'll just admit it already: I am a posting whore.

Over the last few months, I've been using the Thesis Wordpress Theme in order to help with Search Engine Optimization on elijahnicolas.com.  I love the simplistic layout of the Thesis Theme so much that I even ended up buying the commercial license to use on Peak Interest (www.whatspyi.com) as well as my fiance's blog (www.adellelisa.com) which she is very hesitant to update but at least it's there.  Over the years, I have graduated from the Blogger platform hosting a multitude of different sites, to trying out joomla for a hot second to finally settling down on wordpress as my choice for a content management system.  Of course, twitter came around along with friendfeed and now posterous all within the last year or so and I indulged.  All the while, I was only looking for that singular reasonable mean to have all my personalities talk to each other and reflect each other's status'.  With posterous, I think I may have found the perfect solution!

Body 1:

The basic idea of Web 2.0 was to forge a design template that allowed for an easy GUI interface for those that weren't code savvy.  It was to provide a simpler means to update ones' online mediums / personality sites and in doing so, collaborate with others in the virtual arena.  That's my personal spin in layman's terms.  If you want the "real deal," here's Wikipedia's here.

Posterous has done just that.  They simplified the entire process.  They have taken out the horrific means of uploading to an FTP site or Content Management System and instead substituted it with the easy medium we use everyday: e-mailing.  You can "attach photos, videos, MP3s and files" to your e-mails, send it off to space and boom...it's that simple!  You could always do that on Blogger.com with text and photos and use a not so great plug-in with WordPress, but with one touch, I can upload a picture with a small post to my posterous account directly from my email address, it detects where I want it to go and publishes instantly without a hitch not only to posterous, but to anywhere else that I'm connected to be it my facebook, blogger, wordpress or even twitter account.

I was thinking of having it update my actual wordpress blog, but that's when things started to come together in my head.  I finally drew somewhat distinct lines.  I have come to the definite conclusion that my posterous and mobile blog are one in the same.  That's almost a no brainer, with a slight difference that the blogger site has a black background and posterous has a white one.  Posterous and my trelijah mobile blog are just quick snippets of my life.  Twitpic and twitter are just even quicker moments that I deem "3rd class" per say.  Of course the hierarchy of it all would be a long post, such as this one, on elijahnicolas.com, a picture accompanied by a posterous moment then a tweet.

Conclusion:

It is however convenient to have one place to update every personality, but duplication starts to become rampant and I don't want that to happen.  For now, I guess I'll keep trelijah going along with elijahnicolas.posterous.com and maybe with time, just end trelijah.  But as I always keep on saying, you can always count on me for some type of update.  That's enough.

p.s.  I had to edit the template of trelijah to fit the new format of pictures.  I like them in the full form.  Nice stuff!

Offline Writing and the Future of elijahnicolas.com

Most of the time when I come across various topics that I want to write about, they usually pop into my head at the most inappropriate time. While I am in the middle of my commute, without an Internet connection and / or just too lazy to log in to a hotel wifi hotspot, my thoughts end up lost in the cloud. I also end up thinking about random topics while I am on an "off day" being a heffalump. The trend that looms... I end up writing a new entry publishing every 4-8 days wishing that I could update more often. With that, I'll have to admit that in order for my blog to stay current and lead to a more successful following, I'm going to have to update it at least quite a few more times increasing the average to at least 3-5 entries a week. It should be a lot easier than I make it out to be but in reality, there are just too many things on my mind to talk or write about and I hate writing multiple topics in one day. The post following this entry will mark the beginning of what I would like to call a more technical / review stance of where I want to take my blog. I've written a few articles and just ended up "sharing" my RSS News Feeds through Google Reader but I have yet to actually share notes, write my opinions and share my analysis of the current day to day.

More or less, it wil remain a mix of my daily activities but I will also gnaw at the various technology trends, rumors and what not posting as if I was an editor for a higher website. It should get a little more exciting here at elijahnicolas.com ... I promise!

WordPress & the Veritable Plethora of Plug-ins

phone-rev I just had to make a shout out and create a separate post on this awesome plug-in by BraveNewCode:WPTouch (Plug-In Website)/ WPtouch iPhone Theme (WordPress Plug-In Site)

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.

It's awesome as you can now visit simply elijahnicolas.com on your iPhone/iTouch/Android mobile device and load up a very friendly iPhone/iTouch/Android webpage.  Check it out, browse around and post a comment!

It was easy to activate as I don't feel the need to edit or do anything with it.  It's was way too simple as are many of the various plug-ins that are available on the WordPress Content Manager Platform.  Of course, if you want to view my website in it's normal site appearance, there's an option in the footer courtesy of the app's awesome interface options.

rating: Perfect 10!!!