MultiMarkdown in MarsEdit

I’ve just started using MarsEdit¹ again (in combination with my TextMate² blogging bundles), but I’ve run into a couple of issues. First, I can’t assign thumbnails to my posts directly. This is the result of poor API support in Wordpress for handling attachments on a specific post, and not Daniel’s fault at all. Fortunately, I’ve set my blog up to search for an image with a specific class, remove it from the post and use it as the post header if a thumbnail isn’t assigned. That works.

Second, my blog uses PHP Markdown Extra³, and a lot of the “extra” functionality was messing up my carefully-crafted preview in MarsEdit. Fortunately, a little searching on the Red Sweater forums yielded exactly what I needed⁴: you can add your own text filters with a little editing and some luck.

Markdown Extra shares most of the functionality I need with MultiMarkdown⁵, such as footnotes and quick, semantic tables. By copying the bin folder from ~/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/ to ~/Application Support/MarsEdit/TextFilters/ and renaming it from bin to MultiMarkdown (the exact same name as the executable), I was able to add the text filter without breaking a sweat.

Now, between MarsEdit and Edit in TextMate, I can do all of my blogging in Markdown Extra, offline, with full previews. I can manage categories and tags, excerpts and add media. Spectacular.