18 Apr 2025

Morsel #19: a Marimo notebook as a blog post editor?

Filed under: Python | tech | blogging

Links

• GitHub link
• Try the notebook!

For when an IDE or Markdown editor doesn’t quite cut it.

This is a Marimo notebook that functions as a blog post editor.

It works best in app mode with a grid layout to mimic the UI of a minimalist post editor but you can follow the usual flow in edit mode too. I use Astro for my website so I built this to make blog editing more visual. It comes with a section to add my metadata and the body text, view a preview (which renders the Markdown), and when I click the “Post” button, it generates an MD file with all the correct Markdown (so far)

Why did I make this

After reading about Vincent Warmerdam’s cool blog post editor made with Flask, I tried it myself. But I soon realised that my version didn’t work as well and I know nothing about Flask so rather than debug someone else’s concept, I’d make my own. I use Sublime Text normally but I’ve also tried Obsidian and other Markdown editors in the past. This was a nice idea because it gives more immediate feedback after I’ve written something rather than saving and switching to my browser (which doesn’t always update immediately).

Things I could do

• At the moment the blog editor just saves the Markdown file in the directory that your notebook sits in so I will add a file browser to select the folder my blog post should go in.
• This only works for regular posts but I have different post types such as shorter blogs called recortes, posts that are just lists, morsels which are code-based blogs and others. I could add a dropdown of different frontmatter options as they all require unique metadata and then I won’t have to manually edit anything.