Blogging tools

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I use [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) for blogging. I love Markdown. It’s awesome. If I had my way, I’d use it for all my writing.

After spending years making web pages, I can’t be bothered writing HTML anymore. I hate WYSIWYG editors–they’re way too fiddly and distracting and it’s all too easy to end up with inconsistencies.

The way it works is I type up my blog entry into WordPress in Markdown and it saves it in Markdown, exactly as I typed it. It only converts it to HTML when it’s displaying it. This is sane and reasonable and obviously the way it should be.

I’ve been trying to find some sort of offline blogging tool. Web apps are great and everything, but I don’t trust them. I’ve lost too much work to closed tabs and browser windows.

I’ve always really liked [Semagic](http://semagic.sourceforge.net/) for Livejournal…

Uh, hold on, there goes the point of this post. Apparently (as I’m reading that link, having just retrieved it), Semagic supports the MetaWeblog API now. So I can use that. Or at least I’ll have to try it when I’m on Windows at work tomorrow.

Huhn.

Anyway, this was going to be a rant about how while there are many, many offline blogging tools on Windows, including and especially [Windows Live Writer](http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/), and most of them have an HTML code editing mode, they all very irritatingly strip the whitespace before saving.

Strip the whitespace! That’s outrageous! While HTML parsers have no need for whitespace, people coding HTML absolutely do. And it’s part of the syntax in Markdown.

Semagic doesn’t strip whitespace, though. So I’ll have to give that a try.

Well, that turned out better than I thought it would.