This may be a very rude suggestion, but i would LOVE an ability to write my various ramblings in Scrivener in a Blog Project and when any given rambling is ready, post it to one of my blogs.
I own Marsedit for this reason, but because I expect my blog postings to eventually become part of a book I am writing, and I’d love to have one app for writing no matter the output. I respectfully wish for posting to blogs from Scrivener…
If not integrated, perhaps through Services and MarsEdit or other app…Thanks for great software. i just learned about Scrivener today and expect to buy it. It just feels write so far!
There’s no such thing as a rude suggestion (well, obviously if it comes with threats or something, that may be rude… ). All suggestions are welcome, even if, as in this case, I have to say that I don’t think it would fit in Scrivener right now.
The reason I don’t see posting to a blog fitting into Scrivener at the moment is simply that it is not really what Scrivener was designed for and - more importantly! - would involve a lot of work on my part to get it working. I have absolutely no idea how other programmers even go about this, in fact! It’s not the sort of thing I would rule out forever, mind you. If in the future I find that there is an easy way of doing this, or a framework I could just add to make it simple, I could imagine a File menu item, “Upload to Blog” or some such. However, I something like this won’t make it into a 1.x release simply because of the workload involved. This is why most blog programs are just that - dedicated programs. There is a lot of code involved (I imagine) in just uploading to - and then editing etc - a blog.
I’m very impressed you taught yourself osx programming. I did my masters thesis in NextStep but never achieved the skill for a real application. Your next novel could be about a protagonist that teaches himself to code…
I write my blog posts in Scrivener at times, and it’s easy to copy & paste right into the blog interface.
I’ve found I need to HTML later, as writing HTML in Scrivener makes it parse funny once I’ve pasted, but I haven’t taken the time to track down why that might me, I’m sure it’s the preference settings or something.
I’m perfectly happy with the current system, but then I just use Blogger, and so I’m used to workarounds.
Might be handy, sometimes, but I doubt it would be worth the time and effort needed to incorporate direct blogging from S. You don’t really want to become the Swiss Army App; keep on with what you’ve already done so well. There’s Ecto and MarsEdit and, if all else fails, direct posting.
We don’t need things to be easier or faster, only better. Sometimes, easier and faster is not better; it’s worse.
Actually, the developer of MarsEdit contacted me and he may be working on something that would make this easier with very little work my end (provided you own MarsEdit, of course). Nothing 100% definite, but promising - and he seems a cool guy (another Eddy award winner, too! ).
Best,
Keith
All good thoughts and I agree with most. I’m interested in this functionality because I have a goal of getting feedback on the book I’m writing via a blog. Not sure what the ideal work flow might be, but I pretty sure I don’t want to have duplicates in three places. Any elegant ways to shoot blocks of text to my blog would be great.
I guess I’m looking more for some inter-operation with Mars Edit rather than full blogging functionality. Which, in thinking and talking a bit more with the Mars Edit developer, is more of Mars Edit responsibility. Offering some services via scripting or standard API.
Now that would be absolutely fabulous. I just bought MarsEdit inspired by this possibility (I had been thinking about it for a while; have been testing the application for my teaching blogs and was very impressed). The developer is extremely responsive. The possibility of being able to integrate Scrivener and MarsEdit blows my mind.
Just wondering if there was any news on the Mars Edit integration front. I have to say, you’re adhering to your usual high standards in collaborating with the Mars Edit folk.
None as yet. I believe Daniel is working on a way for other applications to integrate with MarsEdit, and once that is done I hope to make Scrivener one of the first to do so, but there is no set time scale on this; it just depends on when Daniel has time to create the framework needed, which is no doubt quite a big task.
All the best,
Keith
Music to my ears. I’ve recently downloaded MarsEdit, like its blogging capabilities, but don’t want to write in it. A Scrivener->MarsEdit->blog pipeline would be perfect.
Not that I wouldn’t like such a pipeline myself, but having been a ME user for a couple of months now, I can say that actually, it’s a really nice app to write in. The preview (which you can set up to look like the target blog) is especially useful - being able to see live links, images, etc as I type them into the post is brilliant, and actually makes the whole writing process more enjoyable for me.
Agree with Antony. I used to fret and sweat with blog posts as much as with poems… well, as much as with op-ed pieces, anyway. Maybe then I needed to use SCR. Now, the blog is a less formal outlet. ME is all I need.
…not to discourage KB from any neat bells or whistles…
I have exactly the same situation that someone else mentioned: I write my blog posts Scrivener because they will become part of the book, so I want to keep things in Scrivener. I’ve been lifting things out into Ecto, usually with a cut and paste. However, all of the font, background and line space formatting is also copied. All I want is the bold, italic, etc. For long posts, what I’ve been doing is pasting into TextEdit, then exporting into an HTML file. One of the options there is to do so without any CSS formatting. It does a beautiful job of stripping out everything that I don’t want. Apparently, Scrivener will not do this, even though it seems to be based on the same platform as TextEdit. If that one thing were added, I’d be able to output from Scrivener direct into relatively clean HTML. That would eliminate a whole bunch of extra steps.
Scrivener 2.0 will have those extra TextEdit options available in its preferences, so hopefully that will do what you want. I’m afraid Scrivener 2.0 won’t be ready until around next May, though…
All the best,
Keith
Thanks. I’ll just have to live with the frustration in the meantime. It’s amazing that I haven’t found any way to go from RTF to HTML without adding all sorts of formatting. I was hoping from the previous posts that MarsEdit might do it, but I tried again to set it up for either of my two blogs, and its configuration is so convoluted that I was never able to get up and running. Just wasted another two hours trying.
MacJournal has an option in the Edit menu called ``Copy as HTML’’ which is what I use for blogging. I can capture and edit links a la Scrivener, and my posts look normal to my eye (links are blue and underlined). But when I go to post, with this copy-as-html deal, the text I paste into the blog is HTML code.
Maybe this special-copy feature would be an easily-implemented, no-hassle way to go some of the distance the blog-writers want?
I love MarsEdit but it has two limitations I can’t live with: First, you can’t search through all your previous writing (including versions of posts that changed before they went into the blog); second, the file system confines you to Drafts and posted items. You can’t organize the work by topic or versions or whatever. Both of those aspects became a problem for me as the posts started piling up.
I’d rather stay in my writing home and work in Scrivener, anyway. So unless and until the Scriv/Mars collaboration solves the problem, might ``Copy as HTML’’ do the trick?
I really like the idea of Copy as HTML - to the extent that I’ve spent a day coding it. Please try out the following demo and let me know what you think:
Just download, launch, and paste or type something in the rich text window. Then use opt-cmd-C or Edit > Copy As HTML to copy to the pasteboard as (der) HTML (the second window is there just for testing purposes - I was using it to paste the HTML into).
If you could try out a range of formatted text and let me know how it works out, that would be great. I have to use the OS X text engine’s HTML exporter to generate the HTML, which is often shoddy, but I’ve tweaked the HTML it generates to add to hold the font size, get rid of the font face, and to swap in a number of character entity codes that the default exporter doesn’t support (such as …, ” etc).
I opened your test app and pasted in some notes with lots of links. Then I pasted in a piece of a website that I had in a Scrivener project’s research file. These looked properly formatted in Window 1, and came out as HTML code in Window 2.
I then took those Window 2 results and pasted them into an HTML-translating box on the browser-based software that’s provided by my website host (the Authors Guild, a fine organization for writers, btw).
The results looked fine. IOW, your day’s work did turn formatted text with links and instructions about color, columns etc into code, and that code when dropped elsewhere did turn back into the formatted text. Based on my these first two tests, then, the transporter beam works.
I’ll try some other bits of text and let you know if anything weird happens. If you want to see the actual texts I can email them to you. Let me know.
). All suggestions are welcome, even if, as in this case, I have to say that I don’t think it would fit in Scrivener right now.