Where the MacBook is concerned, I’m looking for reasons to do things. I want to really try using Blender, and would try Resolve if I didn’t own the Pro version on PC, but one thing I’d really like to get around to trying is writing. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written anything other than blog posts, and because I have this weird hang-up about the tools I use with my hobbies, I went looking for something on the Mac that would fit my personal bill. I do have a license for Scrivener on the PC (knowing that it was a Mac native app first), but didn’t want to take that route again. Instead, I am writing this post in an app called Ulysses.

Ulysses doesn’t seem to be more than a structured organization tool that supports Markdown, but it’s got a few nice features that I can understand might be attractive to writers. One side-project bullet-point that it advertises is the ability to connect to a WordPress blog for the purpose of publishing.

Way Back When, Microsoft offered a tool called Windows Live Writer. This app could hook into WordPress (and other platforms) to serve as a local and, more importantly, offline means for composing blog posts. I used it for a while because, well…I like tools…but eventually the overhead of the app and the always available convenience of writing via a web page meant that I didn’t stick with it for long.

Now, though, having blogged for over 30 years, I know the kinds of things that can go wrong when managing a blog. I have lost more posts to technical issues and my own rampant stupidity than I currently have available, for instance. WLW and Ulysses, in my mind, have that as their singular hero feature: the ability to keep posts local and “safe” should the blog host — or my desire to continue the project — self-destruct and take all of my posts with it.

So this post isn’t saying much; I’m really only publishing it to see if it works, and how it works, considering how much I rely on tools embedded into the WordPress publishing pipeline to do things like auto-advertise on Mastodon, set up tags and categories, and add a banner image and blurb. I don’t think that Ulysses will handle these things, but I hope that it will at least allow me to publish to my site as a draft, at which point I can complete the elements I need on the website proper before publishing.