wordpress initial impressions

###Markdown

After getting this blog up and running, I immediately enabled the Markdown plugin. It works! Except – it doesn’t work everywhere. For instance, not in the RSS feed or in trackbacks (apparently). Unlike how I expect blojsom does this (take your Markdown post, run it through the perl filter, and save the result as the entry), WordPress with the Markdown plugin actually saves the entry in Markdown format. Which is a good thing, really. It is lovely to be able to edit the post in Markdown format rather than html. But it really ought to be html everywhere else. Particularly in the RSS feed.

Update: Some fiddling and switching to a full content RSS feed has fixed the formatting issue for the RSS feed, at least. See for the gist of this.

###MarsEdit

Even though you cannot get MarsEdit to autodetect anything, you can get it to work. You can get it to work well (although I haven’t tested this much) by patching WordPress’s xmlrpc.php file. I don’t think that you can get MarsEdit to preview using Markdown, however, so it is sort of difficult to tell if you’ve done something wrong until you’ve actually posted.

Update: a little bit more experimentation has shown that WP’s solution of storing the comments in original Markdown format has a downside: if you are ever tempted to turn the Markdown plugin off, you will have to go back an reformat all of your previous posts.