How to use local CSS with Markdown in DEVONthink To Go on iOS

Recorded on February 25th, 2018

It’s a gross process, and I probably won’t use it if it stays this way. You have to create a CSS file (like “devon.css”) somewhere in the database you’re using, and then in each Markdown file, you include this line:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="devon.css">

I’ve emailed them to see if they’d enhance the app to allow all Markdown files to render with a specific style sheet without having to insert that line of HTML in every Markdown file.

Using nvALT to Convert HTML to Markdown

Recorded on February 26th, 2016

I thought I had a good Workflow action in place to convert web pages to Markdown for storing as text files. But then I tried using it on this article from Medium and it barfed. All it generated was the [Title](URL) construction of the hyperlink.

Then I ran across Macdrifter’s old article about a couple of key tricks nvALT can do, one of which is to convert web pages to Markdown. If you have a URL in your clipboard and press Shift-Command-V, nvALT will create a new note, with the text being a Markdown conversion of the web page from the URL you copied.

Ahhhhhhh.

The difference is weird, because the Workflow action above uses Brett Terpstra’s awesome heckyesmarkdown service to do the actual conversion, and Brett is one of the creators of nvALT. But I blame Medium because Brett’s service works great almost everywhere else, and we’re all just lucky nvALT exists and has this feature. Since I don’t have a bulletproof way to do this on iOS, I’d rather do all of it on the Mac and know that it’ll work every time than wonder if the Workflow version on iOS is missing something.

I Don’t Get Text Encoding in Editorial/Python

Recorded on February 11th, 2016

For a week, I was using the Editorial FTP Upload workflow from Macdrifter, and then realized yesterday that the text encoding it was doing in this section was converting “>” characters to > entities.

encode_string = cgi.escape(postContent).encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')

I think this is what messes up Markdown blockquotes when Statamic renders a page. It also prevents passing any HTML through Markdown, which you’re supposed to be able to do if you need to.

I tried a bunch of stuff, changing the encoding from xmlcharrefreplace to replace or ignore, but I had no idea what I was doing, and tampering with encoding when you don’t know Python seems like a bad idea. In the end, I switched to Gabe’s alternative SFTP Upload, since it accomplishes the same thing but doesn’t confuse Statamic with the encoding.