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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

Every time I want to blog there’s lots of pictures, and it’s a pain to get then into a blog Post. In WordPress it takes forever to upload and fix them (and its generally cumbersome). I figured a static site generator could be nice, but you can’t paste images into a markdown file - creating separate image files and linking them in its even more cumbersome, even if the rest of the writing process is easier.

Sometimes the barrier to blogging is the technology. Ugh.

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You might like Typora, which will handle image pasting for you. Some other software to look up: Foambubble, Obsidian, Dendron, Neuron Zettelkasten

This looks really good, thanks for the tips!

IME if it's inconvenient to write, you'll never do it. My blog co-author and I do our drafting and editing in Google Docs for that reason. Once you're done writing, you're sufficiently emotionally invested that you can handle the hassle of porting the content to a public site.

We also only add images to posts if it's absolutely necessary. We probably get less engagement than we would if we had high-quality imagery, but we have wayy more engagement than if we didn't write at all.

About a decade ago I made a PHP scrip that would turn a Word XML file (back before docx) into a html file, including image extraction. It would convert the basic styles to appropriate elements etc, and pulled in some template files for sidebar etc. The resulting files (html + images) could then be uploaded as a blog post.

I never got around to actually writing much and so it never saw much use, but I've been thinking about reimplementing this idea lately.

I've been using makesite.py, which is ~200 lines of python, dumping the picture in a pics folder and then hand editing the markdown.

Maybe a few lines of code and template work would let you add a custom template that would automatically add a folder worth of images.

https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite

"Take full control of your static website/blog generation by writing your own simple, lightweight, and magic-free static site generator in Python. That's right! Reinvent the wheel!"

lol

> creating separate image files and linking them in its even more cumbersome

I've been working on making this the less-cumbersome approach for my own Jekyll site: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD

What would your ideal process look like? Don't you have separate image files from the start??

Sometimes. Occasionally the images are huge and cant be used as is (or still would have to be uploaded and then linked in). Sometimes the images are in some editor (e.g. inkscape), different layers should be turned on and off to get what I want - and exporting then uploading and linking is more cumbersome. Or Images are hand-drawn illustrations done on a tablet that make the way onto the pc as pdf.

Basically, I think the best workflow may be snipping whatever is on screen, then pasting it into the markdown. The Typora software benrbay posted in a sibling comment actually seems to fit the bill very well. Thanks for that!

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