Letterpress

This is a sample post to demonstrate how to write a post in Letterpress. You can see the rendered result here.

Updated on 02/21/2013

With the release of Letterpress 0.0.2 I can have fun with math easily. Simply attaching a “math” tag gains me the power of math: $E=m*c^2$.

I'm writing this post in iA Writer on my iPad while cozily lying in my recliner after lunch. I'm writing it in Markdown, not messy HTML. The first half was typed in on my MacBook Pro, also in iA Writer. I can publish it from my iPhone later by moving it to a special folder in my Dropbox when I'm out.

To make this whole writing and publishing experience possible, I built my own blogging system — Letterpress.

I've been using WordPress since July, 2009. It is almost good enough. I encountered several downtimes when MySQL hung. I don't know a thing about database so I had to reboot the whole machine. I even wrote 1 or 2 small WordPress plugins for my own use, which further consolidated
my aversion to PHP. RSS/Atom feed generating is meaningless to me since I'm not famous and no one subscribe to my blog except myself. Comments are also just ego feeders and I guess I got more VIAGRA spams than sensible comments. Most importantly, the writing experience is not good, neither in its web editor nor in its mobile apps.

I just want a minimal blogging system with good writing experience. Only static text files, no dynamic HTML generated from database. No RSS/Atom. No comments. And no PHP.

That's how Letterpress was conceived and built. I believe you can guess how it is named.