Oh I didn’t realize that you were reformatting it. I just saw the post change format after doing a refresh and assumed that Rohin did it. I was going to suggest that in the future Rohin try pasting in the HTML version of the newsletter that’s available at https://mailchi.mp/3091c6e9405c/alignment-newsletter-48 (by following the “view this email in your browser link” that was in the original post), but actually I’m not sure it’s possible to paste HTML into a LW post. Do you know if there’s a way to do that?
We are using the RSS feed that Rohin has set up, the HTML of which automatically gets crossposted to LW, so Rohin doesn’t actually need to do anything on LW directly. Would be cool to have an RSS feed that’s more cleaned up, but not sure whether that’s easy to make happen with the mailchimp interface.
Admins can directly post HTML, but for obvious security and styling reasons we don’t allow users to do that.
Ah ok. What’s your suggestion for other people crossposting between LW and another blog (that doesn’t use Markdown)? (Or how are people already doing this?) Use an HTML to Markdown converter? (Is there one that you’d suggest?) Reformat for LW manually? Something else?
For doing manual crossposts, copy-pasting from the displayed-HTML-version of your post into our WYSIWYG editor actually works quite well, and works basically flawlessly about 90% of the time for everything except tables. I’ve put a bunch of effort into making that experience good.
Ok, I had the Markdown editor enabled, and when I tried to paste in HTML all the formatting was removed, so I thought pasting HTML doesn’t work. Can you implement this conversion feature for the Markdown editor too, or if that’s too hard, detect the user pasting HTML and show a suggestion to switch to the WYSIWYG editor?
Also it’s unclear in the settings that if I uncheck the “Markdown editor” checkbox, the alternative would be the WYSIWYG editor. Maybe add a note to explain that, or make the setting a radio button so the user can more easily understand what the two options mean?
Implementing the same behavior for Markdown is doable, though a bit of annoying engineering effort. I created an issue for it. It’s about as much work as detecting the user pasting HTML, so I think I will try to just do that instead of asking the user to switch to the WYSIWYG editor. (Edit: After checking, the library we use to convert html into markdown is actually server-side only, so that means it’s more work than I expected and maybe the correct choice is to present the user with a dialog. Will have to play around a bit.)
And yeah, it does seem like we should use a radio button instead of a checkbox. Also added an issue for that. We will probably rework the user-settings page at some point in the next few months since it’s been getting pretty crowded and confusing, and so we will probably get to that then.
Basically, my recommendation is to set up crossposting (by pinging us to set up crossposting) and to make sure that your RSS feed contains non-styled html, which is the case for all the other RSS feeds except this one (like Zvi’s and Sarah Constantin’s). When you go and edit the post on LW after it’s been automatically imported, we automatically convert it into Markdown or our WYSIWYG format (depending on your user setting) to allow you to edit it (though some styling might be lost if you save it, and we warn you about that).
Oh I didn’t realize that you were reformatting it. I just saw the post change format after doing a refresh and assumed that Rohin did it. I was going to suggest that in the future Rohin try pasting in the HTML version of the newsletter that’s available at https://mailchi.mp/3091c6e9405c/alignment-newsletter-48 (by following the “view this email in your browser link” that was in the original post), but actually I’m not sure it’s possible to paste HTML into a LW post. Do you know if there’s a way to do that?
We are using the RSS feed that Rohin has set up, the HTML of which automatically gets crossposted to LW, so Rohin doesn’t actually need to do anything on LW directly. Would be cool to have an RSS feed that’s more cleaned up, but not sure whether that’s easy to make happen with the mailchimp interface.
Admins can directly post HTML, but for obvious security and styling reasons we don’t allow users to do that.
Ah ok. What’s your suggestion for other people crossposting between LW and another blog (that doesn’t use Markdown)? (Or how are people already doing this?) Use an HTML to Markdown converter? (Is there one that you’d suggest?) Reformat for LW manually? Something else?
For doing manual crossposts, copy-pasting from the displayed-HTML-version of your post into our WYSIWYG editor actually works quite well, and works basically flawlessly about 90% of the time for everything except tables. I’ve put a bunch of effort into making that experience good.
Ok, I had the Markdown editor enabled, and when I tried to paste in HTML all the formatting was removed, so I thought pasting HTML doesn’t work. Can you implement this conversion feature for the Markdown editor too, or if that’s too hard, detect the user pasting HTML and show a suggestion to switch to the WYSIWYG editor?
Also it’s unclear in the settings that if I uncheck the “Markdown editor” checkbox, the alternative would be the WYSIWYG editor. Maybe add a note to explain that, or make the setting a radio button so the user can more easily understand what the two options mean?
Ah, yeah. That makes a bunch of sense.
Implementing the same behavior for Markdown is doable, though a bit of annoying engineering effort. I created an issue for it. It’s about as much work as detecting the user pasting HTML, so I think I will try to just do that instead of asking the user to switch to the WYSIWYG editor. (Edit: After checking, the library we use to convert html into markdown is actually server-side only, so that means it’s more work than I expected and maybe the correct choice is to present the user with a dialog. Will have to play around a bit.)
And yeah, it does seem like we should use a radio button instead of a checkbox. Also added an issue for that. We will probably rework the user-settings page at some point in the next few months since it’s been getting pretty crowded and confusing, and so we will probably get to that then.
Basically, my recommendation is to set up crossposting (by pinging us to set up crossposting) and to make sure that your RSS feed contains non-styled html, which is the case for all the other RSS feeds except this one (like Zvi’s and Sarah Constantin’s). When you go and edit the post on LW after it’s been automatically imported, we automatically convert it into Markdown or our WYSIWYG format (depending on your user setting) to allow you to edit it (though some styling might be lost if you save it, and we warn you about that).