Scrivener for blogging

I’ve found an excellent use for Scrivener - blogging. I’ve started doing commercial blogs, and scrivener is proving to be a great tool to keep everything organised. Folders for categories, and docs within folders for each blog as I do them. Easy!

Sounds great! What do you use for output, do you use the HTML?

No - my main client uses Wordpress, so I just copy and paste text from the Scrivener document into the post area one blog at a time. Copy and paste heading, then add urls, etc. The other client just wants text docs - up until now I used Word for them, but haven’t decided on best process for them, other than to export as Word docs.

Scrivener is set up with Markdown, that will let you define links, images, header and other formating right there in the plain text, and you can export things to HTML to be pasted directly into Wordpress, or export to txt/rtf/doc for your other client.

If you’re doing this professionally you might do well delving down into Markdown workflows. If you’re on a mac, you got a lot of good looking tools ready for use both with services and dedicated apps.

Yes, I agree with that. It is a little something extra to learn, but basic formatting can be picked up very quickly. Scrivener’s ability to generate proper Markdown headings out of your outline structure will save you a lot of time as it sounds like you are copying and pasting out of each individual section in order to retain header structure and all that. With this workflow, you would just turn on Titles in the Formatting compile option pane for the sections that need to produce them, then compile to MultiMarkdown->HTML to get a full document with h1, h2 and so on depth headers. The output is very clean and semantic, and so works great with Wordpress themes.

So, for the price of learning a little Markdown up front, you would end up saving a lot of time since the compiler produces a ready-to-publish result. No more reformatting everything all over again in Wordpress.

I’m a newbie at Scrivener and Markdown. I have a blog and a website which are both tutorial style with lots of images. Can you elaborate a bit on using Markdow with Scrivener?
And thanks for the tip. It looks like the workflow I have been searching for for soooo long. :slight_smile:
Maripat

For the images you shouldn’t need to do anything special. If Scrivener encounters a graphic during compile, it will replace it with Markdown image syntax, and then export the graphic alongside the .html file. But you should read through the introductions in the chapter on using MMD, twenty-one, starting on page 173 of the Win user manual. That says everything I would say here again. :slight_smile:

Thanks, Amber. I see your posts all over the place…you are quite the expert!
When you say WIN users manual, to what are you referring?

I’d better be, it’s my job. :wink:

Use the Help menu if you have a project open, and select “Scrivener Manual” at the very top of the menu (or just hit F1). If you haven’t opened a project yet, you can open the manual from the Getting Started category of the new project window. This is just a PDF, so you can save a shortcut to it on your desktop if you want.

(And incidentally our user manual is written in MultiMarkdown, so it will give you an idea of what it is capable of off of the Web, as well.)