Test Post from Classeur

Mostly nothing to see here folks, move along, move along…

This is just a test post from Classeur, which is a very slick in-browser Markdown editor with support for some popular blogging platforms.

I usually compose my blog posts here in Markdown first, then copy the generated HTML, then make a few corrections to get around Blogger’s buggy HTML-to-HTML converter, then paste it into the blogger UI.

Cumbersome, to say the least. Maybe this is a better way.

Also, maybe it’s an easy way to collaborate on content creation. Well, for open-source stuff it would be pretty easy to come up with a workflow, and the price is way right: $5/mo I believe.

But what if you’re, say, the editor of an online newspaper, and you want your writers to compose in Classeur?

The web site suggests you can publish to DropBox, which might be a solution, but that seems to not be implemented yet. Or you can share documents as read-write among Premium users, which would be a solution for getting it as far as the editor. The editor would then need to export it somewhere.

Yes, I realize Real Newspapers would have online workflows for all this, but first: I’m not a Real Newspaper, and second: I bet their workflows really really suck. Oh, and yes, I realize most online publications don’t employ editors, but humor me please.

So let’s assume this workflow is OK and will actually work:

1. Reporter, who has a Classeur Premium account, writes a story.
2. Reporter sends its link to the Editor, who also has a Premium account.
3. Editor edits, if necessary sends it back, and so on until it’s ready.
4. Editor exports the Markdown source and sticks it in a database, or source control, or whatever.

I like this so far. Not perfect, but the editor is really quite nice, and in my experience it’s not an easy thing to get non-techies to use plain text editors, much less parse Markdown in their minds.

The problem, though, is in the pictures. I can add a nice picture of a squash ballsquash ballsquash ball here:

The problem is that it’s on Imgur, an image hosting site very popular with the young and bored. And not a place I want my internet-breaking Paparazzi shots of the Donald.

But hey, if I’m a literary editor maybe I don’t need pictures. And if I’m just running some random click -baiting Bored Wombat site, maybe I don’t care.

Again: nothing to see here, test post mostly, &c., YMMV, E&OE, and the like. But I think Classeur is pretty interesting, and I will keep it in mind for future use.