Scrivener to Marked 2 to WordPress
I’ve written about this already, but in the past year I’ve used this technique almost every day. It’s worth sharing in more detail.
Here is a short screencast of how it works. I write in Markdown in Scrivener. I have it customized with the pretty colors and pretty fonts I want. BUT — I know that when I publish it, it will follow the design of the site I’m writing for, not my preferences.
That’s fine.
Watch in the video how I drag it from Scrivener and drop it into Marked 2. Marked 2 warns me of bad links and shows the formatting.
From there I copy and paste the whole bit into my WordPress editor. Did you notice how the H2 title was in there? I figured out that if I title every entry in Scrivener, I prepare for the future. Scrivener allows me to export the whole document to an ebook and use the titles as section breaks.
A friend of mine is preaching through the entire Gospel of Luke. I have been writing an almost daily devotional through the Gospel of Luke for the past year. I was able to output a single pdf of every entry straight from Scrivener’s compile feature. If I take the time, I could export the whole thing via Marked and customize the styles even more.
Organization Of What I Write
I’ve tried keeping named folders and then backing them up to Google Drive or One Drive. That works fine but depending on how you recall your writing, those can be a real chore. I’ve been labeling my Scrivener files by year and quarter. Right now I’m in 2021Q1. Within that, I make folders for my writing and arrange it as needed. That makes recall and searching easy.
The whole project does the local folder sync to my Google Drive so that I can back up everything I write in .txt files. I’m still burnt by the demise of my favorite writing program ever – Journler. My files were unreadable after the demise of that program. Now I make sure to have .txt file backups of everything I write.
With .txt files saved to the cloud with version control, I will always have a backup. Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive, and other cloud services would work for this. (Version control is a definite bonus if you mess things up!)
Use What Works for You
A lot of people write about how this or that tool is the one ultimate machine for this or that. Don’t feel like you have to be that guy. Use the parts of the tools that work for you, even if you have to use a few different programs. This works for me in my continued writing, and it works for recalling stuff later.
(I noticed when I published this post that this is almost identical to an article I wrote a year ago! Well, I guess it still works, right? None of these companies give me anything, I have a good setup and Markedwas having a sale so I felt like sharing.)