How to publish markdown content on wordpress.com

Please read update 2 below first to save some valuable time.

The workflow i am trying here is to compose in markdown on Markdownpad and just export the HTML into email and send it to my secret email id that will publish the post on my wordpress.com blog.[update:- now my blog is self hosted, but this workflow still works]

How i got around publishing is as follows.

  1. Enable posting by email on your blog. For more details read this post here
  2. Compose in Markdown on your favorite writing tool.
  3. Export/copy the content from the editor in HTML.
  4. Use a client like outlook or thunderbird or gmail etc and paste the copied content
  5. Use the code “[status draft]” in the email somewhere and send the email to your secret email id. Publishing directly doesnt work and shows up like this which is ugly.
  6. You should see the post appear among the drafts without much change in formatting, just “cut” the content and switch to HTML view and paste it there and preview should show your formatted post.
  7. Just publish it if everything looks fine.

This I think is the simplest and non geekier way to get markdown created content published on a wordpress.com blog,  incase you have a better way to do it feel free to share it in the comments.

UPDATE:

Here is a nice alternative method which you can try as well. Thanks to Alberto for pointing out.

UPDATE 2:
As of Nov 19th 2013 WordPress.com supports Markdown and you can enable it by following the instructions here. The above workflow is no longer required. Just enable markdown in your write setting on wordpress.com. If you still wanted to know how markdown worked on wordpress before it was enabled by default in WordPress.com, please read the full post. Thanks for reading

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2 responses

  1. Deb Platt Avatar
    Deb Platt

    Once you’ve finished writing your post with MarkdownPad, you can copy all the rendered text from the preview window and paste that directly into the visual editor at WordPress.com. All of the rich text stays rich, and you can then publish your post.

    I am also experimenting with the Firefox Add-on, “Markdown Here” by Adam Pritchard. That allows me to format my text using Markdown while I’m directly composing the post inside the visual editor at WordPress.com. When I’m done composing, I can select all the text in the visual editor, right click on it, and choose “Markdown Toggle” from the context menu. This will render my text that’s using Markdown Syntax as rich text right inside the WordPress.com Visual editor.

  2. Test Avatar
    Test

    Great blog post thanks for posting