Welcome to Scrivener

Abstract

Begin typing your abstract paragraph here. This paragraph should not be indented. It should range between 150 and 250 words. This should be accurate, nonevaluative, readable, and concise. The reader should know exactly what this blog post is about.

Scrivener

Scrivener is a powerful writing tool which can be used for all kinds of writing. Originally developed for writing novels, Scrivener is now used for short stories, plays, scripts, theses, and lots of other kinds of writing including blogging.

Scrivener separates the content of what you write from its output format. Compiling is how to get the output format. For bloggers, Scrivener supports the markdown syntax. Let’s take a look at markdown.

Markdown

Markdown is a markup format for writers that’s easier than HTML, but is ultimately turned into HTML. A cheat sheet shows just how simple it is. Scrivener compiles a markdown formatted writing into HTML. After that, copy & paste the HTML into the HTML Editor of your blogging platform.

NOTE The HTML generated is quite simple. Your blog’s CSS will need to be updated to present it nicely. Typically somewhere in the settings you’ll find a spot to edit the contents of the blog template. It’s here you can add custom CSS to format the markdown-generated HTML.

Code

All technical blogs will need to show code. There will be int inlineCode = 1; examples. And there will be block code examples referred to by listings. Listing 1 is a Java block code example.

Listing 1 - Java Hello World

public static final void main(String [] args) {
  System.out.println("Hello world!");
}

Images

Images are also essential. Figure 1 is an example of an image. This image is not embedded in the blog. It is referencing an image from another website. This is a bit dangerous to do because if the website removes the image, it will no longer appear on the blog. An alternative is to upload images to the blog and reference the URLs created for those images. Or host the images on a site like Flickr. Or save the images to Dropbox and get a shared link to the image.

Figure 1 - Duke

Java Duke waving

Summary

It is always good to wrap up a blog posting with a summary of the contents. Sometimes blog posts are small quick tips and a summary is not necessary. But if the blog post is presenting lengthy contents, then a summary is good to help remind blog readers what they just read.

References

And don’t forget your references! People contribute a lot of information online, so it’s good to cite your sources.

Pritchard, A. (2016, February 26). Markdown Cheatsheet. Website Title. Retrieved from https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet