I find other people’s workflows to be fascinating. It’s not because I necessarily want to do what they do, we all do things differently, after all, but because there might be a step in their process that would help me in mine.

Because I have read so many workflow stories, I thought I’d publish mine, in case others like to read them too.

The short version is that I start in Ulysses, move to Atom, switch over to PhpStorm (with a side trip to Tower), and it all ends up on my server at Site5.

Because Grav is the CMS behind this blog, I’m always looking for tools that work well with it. Grav’s Admin plug-in has a more-than-passable plain-text editor and my web IDE, PhpStorm, has a not-so-good Markdown editor. So, if I wanted a first-class Markdown writing experience, what would be the “best” Mac tool for the job?

It turns out that there are a whole bunch of Markdown editing apps for the Mac, many with iOS versions as well. They share a number of features in common, most notably live previews of the rendered HTML. But Typora has a little something extra — it shows Markdown as WYSIWIG.

It’s a new year, and I have a new CMS (Content Management System) running this website. Long-time readers will not be surprised; I change CMSs from time to time.

And it shouldn’t be a surprise to know that the CMS is Grav. I’ve written about trying Grav, the differences that distinguish Grav and what would make me change from Statamic recently.

When developing web sites on the Mac, we have a number of choices for serving the content and design we’re working on. The most basic is to use the Apache server already part of the Mac OS distribution. Perhaps the most common is to run the server within MAMP or MAMP PRO. But there is another way. You can run a complete virtual machine on your Mac and have it serve your site using Vagrant. I’ll discuss how I use Vagrant with Grav.