The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

As I am finally wrapping my head around just how useful Gus Mueller's VoodooPad can actually be, I'm getting more interested in tinkering with how it can be extended and made to do my bidding. Dubbed as a "garden for your thoughts," VodooPad is a great place to jot down ideas, lists and notes with a wiki-like document format that makes it dead-simple to link one page to another. Out of the box VoodooPad comes with a lot of great features, but Gus also maintains a VoodooPad plug-ins page with a number of add-ons for making VoodooPad do everything from adding some handy keyboard shortcuts to more complex abilities like rendering math in your documents and allowing plug-in authors to use Python for writing VoodooPad plug-ins.

At the top of my list, however, is the HTML Tools plug-in which allows you to preview the current VoodooPad page as rendered HTML, Textile or Markdown, as well as copy the text you've written as HTML (with styling attributes and all) or Simple HTML with just the plain markup. It's a handy plug-in for anyone who, like me, prefers to compose blog posts (or of course websites) in desktop software in order to take advantage of all the power Mac OS X has to offer, then simply copy and paste the blog post as HTML into their blogging engine or CMS. This Simple HTML feature needs a little work, however, as it isn't creating entirely proper HTML just yet. Lists, for example, are created simply with <br> tags instead of actual <ul> and <li> tags, but it could do the trick for those who aren't exactly trying to pass every HTML validation test available across the web.

The VoodooPad plug-ins are provided for free, though some of them are still PowerPC-only. Demos of the $29.95 VoodooPad are of course available, with a $49.95 VoodoPad Pro version that offers a few key features for power users, as well as a free VoodooPad Lite version for those who don't need quite as much.