Blogging with Vim, Dropbox and StackEdit

The past

I have been using Blogger (formerly blogspot) for a while. It’s the obvious choice for any new blogger. It’s free, it’s easy to use and it’s from Google.

However, I have always sort of hated using the graphical user interface provided by Blogger. It doesn’t work offline so well. Sometimes it crashed and I lost some work. I couldn’t use my vim text editing skills. Jumping between the WYSIWYG and the HTML code mode sometimes caused erratic behavior.

The future

Given my distaste for Blogger’s given tools, I am trying out to find a new workflow. It’s a bit convoluted for now, but these are new steps that I am doing now to write posts:

1. Go to a folder within my Dropbox directory called Blogposts.
   I will be creating files locally, which will be synchronized (backed up) to my dropbox folder.
2. Write the original blog post in Markdown with vim.
3. As I write, I preview what the formatted post looks like with Chrome and the Markdown Preview Plus Chrome extension.
4. When I am done editing, use StackEdit to a) open this file (available through Dropbox) and b) publish to blogger.