Markdown is a nice way to write blog type articles, providing a balance between readability and functionality. I flirted with dedicated blog editors, but as usual, fell back to my favourite editor, jEdit. Unfortunately, getting the markdown formatted post into the blog itself was cumbersome. So, I wrote a beanshell macro that called a markdown shell command that copied the markdown->HTML formatted post into the clipboard.

Now my workflow is:

1. Write blog in markdown.
2. Press keyboard shortcut bound to markdown macro.
3. Paste into blog.

To do this, download the markdown perl script here. Create a shell script called markdown that calls Markdown.pl with the first argument as a file and copies the results into the clipboard (Mac only sorry):

The markdown script:

#! /usr/bin/env sh

Markdown.pl --html4tags $1 | pbcopy

Add the markdown script to your $PATH, and make it executable.

Then, in jEdit, create the macro:

runCommandInConsole(view,"System","markdown " + buffer.getPath());

and save it as e.g. Markdown2Clipboard.bsh. Now you can bind a shortcut to the macro, and it will apply the markdown converter on the current buffer in jEdit. Then you can just paste the HTML into your blog.