Lazy Markdown

No, this isn’t a new fork of Markdown. This is just a better way of doing things.

Jeff Mueller recently came up with a clever way to use Workflow to help pull in links after writing a post in Drafts. It’s seriously a fantastic idea that I wish I had thought of before.

After he sent it to me to check out, I thought of another use of Markdown links that I use: Blink affiliate links. After some quick changes to Jeff’s original workflow, I came up with a new one that allows you to select where the link is coming from: you can choose Search, Blink, or manual entry of the URL (note that this requires Workflow 1.5.1 to work).[^1]

This is extremely helpful for writing. As Jeff said:

“I love these workflows because they let me focus on writing. The research can come later.”

And he’s 100% right. Little hooks like this allow me to focus on writing, rather than doing all of the little things. It’s the reason why Drafts is my main text editor, and I keep finding more and more reasons to keep using it.


  1. I am hopeful that the same functionality will come with a future update of Associate and that Workflow will implement this quickly so I can incorporate Amazon links too.  ↩