Blogging with Markdown in Blogger
tl;dr - Use Dillinger and paste the formatted content directly to blogger
Recently, I tried many techinques, which will allow me to write blogs in markdown. The available choice in broad categories are,
- Use makrdown aware static blog generator such as Jekyll or something based on it like Octopress
- Use a blogging solution based on markdown such as svbtle
- Use a tool that'll either enable markdown support in blogger (see this post) or can post to blogger (like StackEdit)
First is the obvious choice if you need total control over your blog, but I didn't want to get into too much trouble just to blog because it involes hosting the generated static html pages on your own - not to mention the trouble of enabling comments. I like the second solution from and went the distance to even move my blog to svbtle. It's pretty simple and straightforward, but after doing a post or two I realized the lack of comments is a showstopper. I agree it's good for posts intended for "read only" use, but usually it's not the case for me.
This is when I started investigating on the third option and thought StackEdit to be a nice solution as it'll allow posting to blogger directly. However, it doesn't support syntax highlighting for code blocks - bummer!
Then came the "aha!" moment. I've been using Dillinger to edit markdown regularly as it's very simple and gives you instant formatted output. I thought why not just copy the formatted content and paste it in the blog post - duh. No surprises - it worked like a charm. Dillinger beatifully formats everything including syntax highligting for code/scripts. Also, it allows you to link with either Dropbox or Github where I use Github.
All in all, I found Dillinger to be the easiest solution and if you like to see a formatted post see my first post with it.
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thank you sir.
ReplyDeleteGreat post... I tried Dillinger and Stackedit but when I pasted it into my blog the formatting was not working out. Stackedit also has an option where you can publish directly to Blogger from their page, but that also did not work.
ReplyDeleteI eventually found http://markable.in/, and it works for me.
Thanks Victor. markable seems nice too!
DeleteThanks for the great post. It gives a structured overview of the possible options.
ReplyDeleteI personally choose to use Jekyll + poole hosted on Github pages. As a guide I used this post: http://joshualande.com/jekyll-github-pages-poole/
This is what I was looking for. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteAmazing! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteAs a suggestion why not just use github gists, and not blogger for posting code related stuff...
ReplyDeleteGists are good, but I wanted to use md for everything, not just code snippets.
DeleteGood post! Spent some time trying this and Dillinger did the trick.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post! I also struggled (for hours) and I stumbled on a solution: when I upload markdown documents I make in R to bitbucket, I can copy/paste that code to Blogger. My guess is that this works in GitHub as well.
ReplyDeleteYes, that works. I like medium.com now over blogger
DeleteFantastic information. Thanks a lot.
ReplyDeleteSee https://github.com/cs905s/md-in-blogger and https://js-react.blogspot.com/2017/01/using-markdown-in-blogger.html to create Markdown directly in Blogger. The conversion to HTML happens on the client side.
ReplyDeleteThank you for a great post! I'm looking for a blogging platform myself where I can unload helpful links, screenshots of my WIPs, write articles of projects' progress, post code snippets etc. If google decides to close Blogger, will you be able to transfer all your posts with images to another hosting? And which would you chose?
ReplyDeleteI tried wordpress.com but can't find a theme I'd like, it also looks too huge as for me.
Just found a post about Poole(based on Jekyl): http://erajasekar.com/posts/blogging-platform-hackers-octopress-docpad-poole/
It looks promising.
I'm also looking for possibility to be able to narrow post by multiple tags, not just by one tag as most blogs do. And it seems to be a hard task to find one.
I now moved to medium.com. Even if Google takes away the blogging platform I think they'll still keep the old blogs
DeleteMay be or may be not. Google didn't keep their SVN hosting at code.google.com, but they gave 2 years for people to migrate.
DeleteWhy did you move to medium by the way?
I moved to Medium because it's simple and clean. I didn't have to worry about all this typing in markdown and pasting the formatted text back to blogger. Also, with the app they have, it's very easy to follow the topics I like
Delete