markdown2social 0.2

Converts Markdown documents to Google+ posts

# Markdown2Social

The Markdown2Social utility converts simple Markdown documents to Google+ posts ready to be shared on the social network. There is room for writing output plugins for other target sites, but at the moment only Google+ is supported.

This is not an official Google product.

## Why?

Long-form posts on social networks are more engaging than simply posting a bare link to the exact same content hosted elsewhere. However, composing long-form posts on social networks is not a pleasant experience because their editors are not designed to support long posts and because their formatting options are severely limited.

What if you could write that same content in a more durable and flexible format, say Markdown, and later export the text to the formats accepted by the networks of your choice? This would let you compose your posts using the myriad of editors that support Markdown, would let you store those posts in a version control system, and may even let you republish that same content directly on your site with ease.

This is exactly the goal of Markdown2Social: to let you store your articles’ master copies in a version control system while providing a mechanism to extract a simplified version that can be shared in a social network. Does this work? For the most part yes, but there are obvious limitations; keep reading.

## Download

The latest version of Markdown2Social is 0.2 and was released on December 10th, 2015.

Download: [markdown2social-0.2](../../releases/tag/markdown2social-0.2)

See the [release notes](NEWS.md) for information about the changes in this and all previous releases.

## Installation

Using pip:

` $ pip install markdown2social `

From sources after cloning the tree from GitHub:

`shell $ ./setup.py install `

See the [detailed installation instructions](INSTALL.md) for additional information.

## Usage

1. Use markdown2social as a filter or with explicit file names to generate a .gplus file:

   `shell $ markdown2social <doc.md >doc.gplus $ markdown2social -o doc.gplus doc.md `

1. Open the .gplus file in your favorite editor.

1. Copy the whole contents to the clipboard.

1. Paste them into a new Google+ post.

1. Hit share and voil&agrave;!

## Limitations

Because the formatting options supported by Google+ are extremely simple, this tool is very limited on what it can do with Markdown formatting. In particular, you should follow these guidelines in your Markdown documents for best results:

• Use a single first-level heading for the post title. This works best if the title is short enough and fits within a single line in the card rendered by Google+.

• Use second-level headings to separate the different sections of your post. You can go use further nesting levels, but you won’t be able to tell them apart in the final version.

• Links are supported by emitting the target URL after the link text. Do not be too smart with the link labels because they won’t be clickable.