Writing is a way to clarify thinking as well as learn and communicate, and not only in written format, better. And as is true for any skill practised, with time the writing ability is improved. Blog articles have an attention lifespan of several years, and if you improve and update them even longer. Social media posts have a lifespan which can be as short as only a few days but will depend on the platform. This is some of the reasons to why there is a long-term value in writing your development blog (dev blog).
Content creation
For a dev blog, you need a comfortable way to write text and add elements such as code snippets, images and tables. If the text editor has a good workflow and yet is powerful to use, writing becomes distraction-free and easy.
With Cradle CMS two of the three body text editors are suitable for writing articles: the rich text editor (RTE) and the markdown (MD) editor. Both of the editors has a minimalistic UI but with enough buttons for formatting and inserting elements such as tables, images and quotes.
RTE
A Rich Text Editor (RTE) allows users to create and edit text and content in a user-friendly interface, similar to word processors, without ever seeing the HTML syntax generated. The editor in Cradle CMS has a block structure and each block can easily be moved up and down to change the order.
Markdown editor
Markdown syntax is a widely supported format and a preferred choice for writing dev blogs. The text is written with a lightweight markup that handles common formatting in writing. It is the syntax that makes it fast to write in, as you rarely have to leave your keyboard when writing an article or blog post.
This particularly applies to inline styling of text, for example, adding <code> tags around a single word is done by encapsulating the word with backticks and <strong> tags with an asterisk*. The format is widely supported, which makes imports and exports easy.
The markdown editor in Cradle CMS uses an extended syntax and includes, for example, aside blocks, inline subscript and superscript formatting, captions on figures, tables and code snippets.