Month: January 2011

Using MarkDown In MarsEdit For MadMimi Emails

I have just been watching one of Don McAllister’s screencasts from his series of very useful tutorials at ScreenCastsOnline on how to get the best out of your Mac.

This week’s show is about John Gruber’s Markdown and about various text editors that can use it.

What Is Markdown?
Markdown is both ‘plain text markup syntax’ and a software tool that converts plain text markup to HTML.

In plain English, it is a simple way of writing an article that contains the code to make text that displays with formatting and that can also be displayed as a web page.

For example, it can make bold text and italic text, as well as headings and links.

MarkDown is built as a plug-in for the Moveable Type blogging platform and as a script that is built into various text editors.

About Text Editors
Text editors are small programs that run on your computer.

That means that you can use them to write an article for the Web and save the article as a draft on your machine. Then you can come back to it later, work on it some more, and then publish it online.

And all the HTML formatting needed to enable the article to be read by web browsers is already built in.

I could write HTML coding in a text editor, but – and this is a crucial ‘but’ – Markdown text is easy to read, whereas HTML code is not. This is a major attraction of Markdown.

But Why Do I Need Markdown?
Many blogging platforms enable you to write articles with a Visual Editor. This blog uses the WordPress platform, and it is very easy to write and edit posts directly in this blog using the built-in Visual Editor.

That means that I can write text and format it to make headings, bold, and other kinds of text formatting – and I can see all the formatting without having to see the HTML, which is tucked in the background.

So When Is MarkDown Useful?
Well, until I saw Don McAllister’s screencast I didn’t think I had much use for MarkDown.

Therefore, I had never really looked at the code syntax.

However, when I saw the MarkDown code today, I recognised it as the code that MadMimi uses to make its email newsletters.

This is relevant to us because use MadMimi for our email newsletters.

Until today, I thought the markup language in MadMimi was its own proprietary language.

Working Offline
Being able to work on email newsletters offline is very useful to us because it opens up a whole new dimension for composing newsletters with MadMimi.

And using easy-to-read Markdown, makes it even more attractive to use.

Now we can write drafts in a text editor on the computer without having to work directly on the Web in MadMimi.

Text Editors
As I said, there are a number of text editors that can use Mardown syntax.

One free one is Notational Velocity and I am experimenting with using that at the moment.

I am also trying an alternative fork development of this program, called Notational Velocity Alt which has a separate preview window that I like. That means that I can see the markup in one pane and the formatted text in another pane.

MarsEdit
However, my preferred editor is MarsEdit.

In fairness, it is much more than just a text editor. MarsEdit also can send articles directly to a number of Web platforms, including WordPress.

Madmimi (like Notational Velocity Alt) has a preview pane in which the formatted text can be viewed when the Preview pane is set to Markdown.

This makes it very easy to see and check formatted text ready to paste into Madmimi.

Here in this screen grab you can see an earlier draft of this article written in Markdown and shown in formatted text in the Preview pane.

You can see that the formatted text at the bottom is easy to read, but so is the Markdown text at the top.

Markdown Code and Format Preview
Markdown Code and Format Preview

Conclusion
It is much more relaxing to work in a text editor because we can just turn on the editor, type something, save the draft and put the article on one side.

Then when we are satisfied with our draft, we can paste the Markdown-formatted text into MadMimi.

Then all we have to do is check that everything looks OK and then send out the newsletter!


Our Email Newsletters
We hope you have enjoyed this article and gained some benefit it.

If you would like to sign up to receive our email newsletters with information about updates to Quillcards and articles on a range of subjects from environmental matters to technical topics, just complete the form below.