Introducing Tako Writer – Your next WordPress Markdown editor!

Here we go again! I know I’ve recently teased this project, but it’s finally live. The Tako family is expanding and today I’m excited to officially introducing Tako Writer – a lightweight Markdown editor for quick and easy Wordpress posting.

As I’ve outlined in my previous post, I do sometimes suffer from procrastination, especially when it comes to writing online.

Over the years, my personal blog went through many iterations, but one thing fundamentally always stayed the same and that was the writing flow: log online, create and edit the post directly into the online Wordpress editor and hit post.

You may say, what’s the issue there? At its core, it’s a very refined process, but also Wordpress keeps evolving and changing and I’ve found the writing experience to be getting more and more cluttered with distracting features. My writing needs have always been fairly simple: give me a Markdown editor and I’ll be king! Yes of course there are plugins to turn the online editor to a simpler Markdown machine (and I would recommend using this one with Tako Writer), but still the friction of having to go online can be a pain.

I find that inspiration strikes when you least expect it and therefore having an option to quickly capture ideas at any time was a very strong motivator for this app. As I type this, I’m on a train to London, with a very spotty connection – I had it already in the past where I ended up losing work and progress because it didn’t properly sync and I closed the browser session.

So, having said all of this, let me properly introduce Tako Writer to you!

As I mentioned already, the core function of this app is to be a simple, offline, drafting Markdown editor for your Wordpress blog.

It is specially designed for iPad (which is where I do most of my writing), but it works well on Apple Silicon Macs and of course it works on iPhone (which is where I’m writing this article). On iPhone of course the editing window is smaller, but everything is super functional, with a more compact interface.

When editing text, you can directly type in Markdown syntax for things like italic, bold, text quote or URL – or if you are not familiar with some of that you can select text and then apply the style with the toolbar.

You can of course upload images directly into your Wordpress library and they will be automatically inserted with the correct syntax in the body of the post.

You can pick or add a new category to your post, syncing the info directly with your Wordpress setup.

Now let’s talk workflow.

First of all, to make this app work you need to install and configure JWT Authorisation. It is super self explanatory and only requires a one line to be added to your Wordpress config.php file and you are good to go.

Once you are logged in, you’ll find 3 tabs: Local, Online, Published.

Local is your starting point. Here you can start a new post and write to your heart content while being offline. Progress is auto saved every few seconds and you can always trigger a manual save. The preview is a basic preview for the Markdown and images.

Online is the next step in the flow. If you are not ready to go straight from offline ideas to fully published post (which you can totally do), you can push your post to Wordpress as a draft. This step in my mind serves two purposes: first it can be seen as a sort of backup. Offline drafts are only saved local to your device. Logging out or deleting the app will remove offline drafts. The second function is to preview the post in your Wordpress theme. On an Online draft, when hitting the preview, you will be presented with the native Wordpress preview function, so you can double check that everything looks as you’d expect.

Published should be fairly straightforward to get. This section will list the last 20 published posts from your blog. I see this as a way to quickly check and adjust the last few posts on the go, it’s not really meant to be a full archival or history option.

And that’s it, that’s Tako Writer in a nutshell.

The final thing to mention is the price: £2.99 – I wanted to also use this app as a further experiment in my new journey on the AppStore. My first app is free as it’s super niche. This one I think it could have a bit more wider potential and I wanted to see how pricing would come into the picture. Given there aren’t recurring costs associated with this, a subscription would make no sense, so I settled on a one-time small purchase – I’ll report back on how it goes!

So now all there’s left to do is to point you toward the AppStore: go check out Tako Writer today and let me know on Mastodon any feedback! I’m already thinking about a few more features to build in overtime, today is just the first milestone on this new journey!