I know, I know, WordPress is no longer cool, the boss is a dork and PHP is sooo 2000s. Unfortunately, life is often not a concert of wishes, and you have to make compromises.

One of the things that annoys me the most about the newer versions of WordPress is the ‘block editor’. (Yes, there is the Classic Editor. But Automattic has already announced that it won’t be around forever. And then what?) It may be useful for people in marketing who want to ‘design’ websites, but I just want to write prose on the Internet and not have to think about trivial things like paragraphs. But what do people who write a lot of prose use?

That’s right: WordStar. ;-)

A few years ago, Gerald Brandt published WordTsar - great name! -, a WordStar clone for modern systems that doesn’t necessarily require (nor even support) DOS. Writing Word documents with it is really fun. So why not blog posts too?

Like many people in this community, I use a Markdown editor that could also publish directly in WordPress. After a few years with Ulysses, I recently switched to iA Writer on macOS to minimise my software subscriptions. Alternatively, there are also a few WordPress plugins that directly support Markdown as an input format, which is probably still the cheaper option.

So my approach for WordPress blog posts that don’t necessarily require fiddling around with the HTML code (sometimes I fancy colour or specially formatted embedded photos, for example) is as follows: I write my posts in WordTsar, convert them with ws2markdown to Markdown and then upload the result to WordPress. I enjoy writing longer texts more this way and am therefore happy to recommend it to others. Maybe you like it too.