inessential by Brent Simmons

Matt + Octopress + MarsEdit feature request

Matt Gemmell is Blogging With Octopress. I think that’s cool. (Yes, that article is a few months old.)

This site is run by my own custom software, but the idea is the same: Markdown files are stored in a directory structure on disk, and a Ruby script generates the weblog and rsyncs it to the server.

I love blogging this way. I still get to use MarsEdit, even.

I can use MarsEdit because I run a local webserver that has a Ruby CGI I wrote that implements the MetaWeblog XML-RPC API.

But I wonder if it would make sense for MarsEdit to handle this situation natively: that is, it could read and write files directly on disk. The directory structure is simple, with relative paths like 2011/04/16/some_file.markdown.

If MarsEdit worked that way, then it would allow developers to write blog-generation software like mine and like Octopress, and still have MarsEdit support without having to jump through the hoops of running a local webserver and a CGI script.