Zone: Web Dev
TLDR: Writing in Markdown is more enjoyable than writing in HTML, and Markdown files are easier to version control and backup than content in a CMS.
As a Zone Leader here at DZone, I try to contribute as many interesting articles as time permits. So I spend a lot of time writing with a Web page as my target.
By the way, there are a lot of fun parts to being a Zone Leader, including getting to know the great people at DZone and in the Zone Leader Program. If you’re someone with an interest in writing and some expertise to share, it’s worth checking out. If nothing else, we have a great set of Slack channels.
Like most web sites focused on content, DZone has a Content Management System. It does a lot of really nice things, including full page import of articles from a URL, which helps us post content from all the great Most Valuable Bloggers out there. It also handles image import, sizing, and reflow, and other nice things.
But most of my work is text content, and I prefer to have a backup copy of it, in case I suddenly lose my Internet connection. I also like to be able to version control it in a Git repository. And it may seem strange, but I really prefer writing article content in Vim, both because of the reduced clutter, and because I like to reserve my browser for searching for all the random links I include.
At the same time, I don’t want to just write a wall of text and upload it. I like to be able to embed format, especially for those articles that have lots of code samples. So I cast around for a while and settled on Strapdown, a JavaScript library for rendering Markdown in a browser.
Part of this was the desire to write in Markdown. As I started using GitHub more, and especially as I started a blog using Jekyll and wrote a book using GitHub pages, I grew to really like slamming out content in that form, to the point that I switched all of the courses I teach to using Remark, as I described in a previous article. Writing in Markdown allows me to render to HTML with formatting included, which then copies and pastes nicely into a CMS, whether the DZone CMS or something like Atlassian Confluence.
For a while, I used Jekyll to write DZone articles, but I wanted to get away from having to have a separate process running while I was writing. Strapdown answers the need. With Strapdown, I keep every article in its own HTML file, starting with a basic HTML template that wraps the content and is the same for every article.
For example, the template in which I’m writing this article started out like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<title>DZone Article</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/mermaid.css" type="text/css"/>
<xmp theme="united" style="display:none;">
---
layout: post
title: "content here"
description: ""
category: articles
tags: []
---
< /xmp>
<script src="assets/strapdown-0.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="assets/mermaid-0.5.3.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
mermaid.initialize({startOnLoad:true});
</script>
</html>
I had to sneak a space in there, since the “xmp” end tag marks the end of the Markdown content. However, I didn’t have to escape any of the rest of the HTML. This is a big deal since code and XML tends to be full of characters that would cause issues if the browser tried to render them.
Strapdown supports GitHub-flavored Markdown, including fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting. Things like embedded image tags work, so I can include content and see how it will render in the article. Best of all, starting a new article is just copying a template file, and I can give the content one last review in the browser before pasting it into a CMS; writing in Vim is nice but for some reason some grammatical issues don’t come up until I read it in the browser.
Overall I’m pretty satisfied with this approach, though like all good software developers I’m always interested in new tools, because yak shaving is always more interesting than getting real things done. So I’m interested to see if anyone has suggestions in the comments.