Ulysses and Ghost

The new Ulysses feature really adds so much value to my “ideal blogging setup” that I hope to actually start writing more again.

A few years ago, I got started with editing in Markdown or a flavour thereof. Once you go there, it’s hard getting back to anything else. I still have a problem with writing Word Documents. Markdown is not perfect, but it helps me a lot writing structured documents and being quite fast in that. A little sideway to reStructuredText (IT! IS! ONE! WORD!) ended in tears, and I will hate making tables forever.

I’m using Ulysses, although I have also tried iA Writer and found this not too bad. But as I’ve had a beer or two with some of the good people behind Ulysses and I really like their attitude towards their product, and their general work ethics, I shifted and (almost) never looked back.

In the beginning I struggled with the application contained library (I like my files), and I wanted Dropbox support, as I did not trust Apple with anything that has to do with networks, leave alone syncing. I still find it a little odd to have links being represented in non-clear text, and images to be inline, but I do appreciate the beauty of it – and I constantly confuse that syntax anyway.

Around the same time, I discovered Ghost as a beautiful and very promising blogging solution, opposed to the then-already starting to bloat Wordpress. It looked minimalistic, yet thought through. There was also some promise in the admin panel that I haven’t seen yet but hey: aim high.

I’ve installed Ghost in version 0.3.1 as a test, and loved it. Although I rarely had time to write – or something to write about, but I duly installed the updates and saw what changed. I even had a Medium theme installed once… The writing experience was straightforward but beautiful. I’m still not sure how I feel about the blocks, but again: it makes life so much easier for non-technical users. And those who are can always add functionality.

Ghost lacked an API for a long time, and probably for a good reason – and I still ended up copying and pasting things from Ulysses, if I couldn’t export them as PDFs or needed them in the web. Not so much in this publication, as the posting frequency is rather low.

But yet, all of the time, I’ve had the “ideal setup” in mind. A clean web interface, text based articles formatted in markdown, and something that enables me to easily post “on the go” without logging in, uploading images etc pp. But also not a native app of the publishing platform, as these tend to suck at some point.

When I read the news about Ulysses integrating with Ghost, it seemed like I finally found what I was looking for. Now it’s time to take this for a spin, and produce the first content with it. I’m looking forward for more to come, and this time more frequently than yearly.