The Kyle File

As some of my readers may be aware, I am a huge fan of Markdown, because it makes writing much easier, and because it is human-readable. After all, people have been writing email using something very similar to ([Markdown syntax]https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) since before Markdown was created, so the transition is quite natural.

I never would have moved my blog to WordPress if not for the Markdown On Save Improved plugin, because I was quite accustomed to writing my posts using Markdown. A big thankyou goes out to Matt Wiebe for putting all the pieces and parts together that make this version of the plugin truly rock!

Now for the good stuff for everyone else. For the first time in it’s 4-year history, The Kyle File now supports Markdown in comments, thanks to Evan Solomon's GitHub-Flavored Markdown Comments plugin, so everyone who reads my posts can easily write comments using Markdown syntax. If you have been writing your comments in plain text or HTML, don’t panic, nothing has changed for you. This is just a third option that can make adding links, lists, headers and other nice formatting to comments much easier. Go ahead and try it out by adding a comment on this post. Have fun!

My heart is on fire,
A burning desire,
God's love takes me higher,
Lifted from the mire.

The Word of God is true,
Shows me what to do
When I’m going through
Trials, temptations too.

LORD I praise Your name,
For you took the blame,
All my guilt and shame
I no longer claim.

I worship You alone,
Who sits upon the throne,
And when my life is done,
You'll welcome me home.

~Kyle

Between the two thieves
Our LORD died to save us all
But death lost its grip

Markdown Test

Well, I saw a post from Tumblr that said I can use markdown in an email post by using the !m code placed anywhere in the subject or body of my email. Just testing if it works. So now I can definitely use Posterous for my audio files, since they have a download link Posterous died and took some of my audio files with it and Tumblr for everything else. This rocks!

Tumblr Suggestion

Please give me the ability to show download links for my audio files. Then I can post them to Tumblr as well. At this time, it is impossible for people who use screen readers to listen to mp3 files that I make and post on Tumblr.

Update

Markdown works great! Thanks @Tumblr for letting me use it in email posts. Now for the audio download link.

Update

I can continue to use Posterous to post audio files and just drop in their link here along with the copy of the file, but I definitely prefer to use Tumblr alone. It just works so much better for me. I have sent a message to Tumblr support asking them to include a download link for audio files and explaining how impossible it is for screen reader users to listen to my files. I hope anyone who reads this will do the same. Just click the word message above and send your email to the support team. Thanks.

Update

Just hours after my email to the support team, I got a response. Pretty quick, but it was a rather terse response that simply apologized that the feature I requested isn’t supported at this time. There was no indication that Tumblr plans to implement audio download links at any time in the future. I would recommend persistence in sending messages requesting this feature for screen reader users. For now, though, it seems as though their now deceased competitor Posterous already does implement this feature along with some very nice autopost features as well. The only problems I’ve had with Posterous so far are the fact that I can’t post javascript code for a poll that I want to post because the code is ignored, and their current lack of support for markdown which just saves a lot of typing, since I have to use html tags to create links. But for me, these are very minor problems compared with the problem I am facing here. I will continue to update this post if anything new happens, and I will continue to post my experiences both with Tumblr and Posterous. Meanwhile, I have imported most of my other posts into my own Posterous, now gone with the wind, and most of my posts there will also show up here thanks to their autopost feature.