Posting is never simple enough
I’ve decided to host my “make it simple” blog at Posterous because it is a simple yet powerful blogging engine with an enthusiastic user base.
I love the idea of using email to post messages to the blog and the way Posterous handles multimedia items.
But complexity always makes it’s appearance. How can I use markup languages like textile or markdown via email? Gary Tan, cofounder of Posterous, has promised to implement it one month ago. Meanwhile I’ll have to roll out my own solution (more on this in a future post).
Why having a markup language is so important to me? The response is, as always, simplicity. The next post will be about why I’ve chosen English as the language for this blog. When I’ve tried to write down the pros and cons of this decision in a table using standard email tools or even sophisticated pieces of software like Keynote, I’ve end up expending most of the time formatting the table instead of writing the actual contents and finally discarding the result because it didn’t match what I had in mind. To solve the problem it’s probably better to split it in smaller parts. First deal with the content and after take care of the form. HTML+CSS is a perfect example of this approach, but it’s too verbose to use it straight as a blog posting language. This is where textile, markdown or the powerful but unsafe haml come in to help.
I know I’ll have to explain it better if I want anyone to believe me when I say that it’s much simpler and efficient to write this post with textile inside haml, like I am doing right now, than using an ubiquitous email client with HTML formatting capabilities. But you’ll have to keep reading this blog if you want to find out why :-)
