Single source publishing
Now that I’m in the newsletter business, I had to change my publishing workflow a bit. In addition to crafting posts for this blog, I also write articles that I need to send to my mailing list as HTML-formatted emails. Moreover, I decided to publish those articles a couple days later on Medium for people who aren’t subscribed.
As a software developer, I don’t like to repeat myself. It’s in my DNA. I want to use the same source content multiple times, across different forms of media. This is called single source publishing, better known as The SPOT Rule in the programming world.
To my delight, Byword meets all of my requirements:
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Write a blog post in Markdown, then use Jekyll for generating this website from it.
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Write an article in Markdown, then use Byword’s Copy HTML feature to export it as HTML, which I can paste into TinyLetter (the newsletter service I’m using).
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Publish the very same article to Medium. This is a premium feature of Byword and it works exceptionally well.
Byword allows me to write everything once in Markdown and store the sources in a repository on GitHub. In a sense, it lets me treat prose as if it were code, which is exactly what I want.