An Example of StackEdit in Action

And now for something completely different

Editing and Blogging directly with StackEdit

This is going to be my trial case for using Stackedit.

First thing, you need to turn off ABP and other tracker blockers to get the Synchronization with Google Drive to work. StackEdit can't create folders in Google Drive, so make sure one exists where you are trying to synch. Unfortunately, since the files are synched as Markdown, you can't apparently access the files as text documents using the Google Drive viewer. This is kind of game breaking... In theory, you can always fire up StackEdit, but it would be frankly amazebalkls if you could actually move between the Google appearance editor and Markup seamlessly. But that is, admittedly, a pipe dream.

The strength here is obviously, obviously, going to be utilizing Markdown as an expedient formatting system. you can make a number of statements about the strengths of Markdown, and make comparisons to the way that LaTeX works, although there isn't quite the same level of compilation.

Two things of note: StackEdit offers a particularly useful tool, in that there's a button in the upper right which pops open a quick reference for markdown tags. So, yey for that.

So, Yeah. Also, recall that you need to double up on your underscores or asterisks in order to produce bold text as opposed to emphasized test with only one of those markings.

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I foresee markdown as being a fast way to include formatting while typing in real time, and also to properly format and name links without the need for a pass at a WYSIWYG editor to muck around with buttons. For Example is a link to Google Plus, which I typed inline without pausing in order to use any kind of buttons - Just a line or so of pure text with a simple way of marking what the link should look like. Images can be added in the same way, provided you have a particular spot in mind and know the URl off the top of your head.

Another fantastic feature

The ability of the ToC to manage itself, much like Google Docs, is quite welcome, although I suspect there is some way to embed these links into the document itself at the top. I would not be surprised with all of the other magic which Markdown seems capable of performing.

It would be nice if I could keep the Statistic window open, or otherwise force it to display the current wordcount somewhere visible. Then again, maybe that isn't the worst idea - Making me type to the completion of my ideas instead of agaisnt a solid wordcount target.

• Another nearly constant formatting headache
  • Nobody ever
    • Manages to
  • Get Lists
    • to Indent
    • exactly like
    • we want
      • but maybe this one will work right
    • or at least
  • be closer to
• what we imagine

• Actually, that is pretty close, once you get the finickiness of it down.

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• For our next trick...

  We turn towards a common issue when dealing with E-mail, and other types of systems

  Where we expect responses to be nested

  Or at least to have the quotes managed in some reasonable way And sometimes, it needs to be tolerant Of unreasonable inline additions to a long string of E-mails

Unfortunately, it won't show anything that gets out of nested order, so we lose some information here. Ohwell!

If (this_works == true) {
    //We know that the built-in editor for code works
    return true;
    }
//So, apparently it does.

So, what other features does StackEdit let us play with, aside from simply using MarkDown in our documents adn storing them in Google Drive?

Well, I don't have Dropbox on this PC, so I can't test that.

How about publishing directly to Blogger? Because, that sounds kind of cool.

Okay, that's pretty cool, but Blogger doesn't seem to like Markdown, absed on my test. Is that a problem? Well, apparently we can synch or republish things to Blogger once we've worked on them.

As it turns out, we can also delete them after we upload them in the wrong format. Okay, so this is actually pretty cool. Let's see what it takes to force an update to keep both copies aligned...

Written with StackEdit.