Renren-Markdown

Markdown-based blog editor for http://blog.renren.com/ .

http://blog.renren.com/ uses a modified version of TinyMCE as its rich-text editor, with extra server-side clean-up. This is supposed to block possible XSS attacks, but as a result, formatting is severely limited. Renren-markdown circumvents this by converting arbitrary Markdown, alongside with embedded Gists and MathJax into TinyMCE, with almost all formatting/styling preserved.

NOTICE: Renren-Markdown will OVERWRITE existing content in the TinyMCE editor!

Features

• on-the-fly markdown conversion and previewing (through TinyMCE)
• retains markdown source for editing
• github markdown styling
• autolinks to gists are embedded (e.g. https://gist.github.com/gist/4344334)
  • markdown content in gists are automatically unwrapped
• LaTeX-like math formulae support through MathJax (NOTE: Size limited. See below for reasons)

Install (userscript)

1. Install your favorite userscript environment (GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey/NinjaKit...)
2. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/154555

Install (Chrome plugin)

Use chrome store link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/renren-markdown/iiabjaofopjooifoclbpdmffjlgbplod

Chrome store entry was not managed by me (although built by Grunt) and is out-of-date, so for now, use the userscript version.

Build

Renren-markdown is built using Grunt.

npm install
grunt clean
grunt prepare
grunt

Chrome plugin: dist/chrome (unpacked)
Userscript: dist/gm

On MathJax support

Math is pre-rendered locally into PNG then stored within blog content as Data URI. However, as Renren server filters out references to Data URIs, renren-markdown uses a trampoline server base64-server/base64.coffee to "convert" the Data URI to a regular image URL. I've limited the size to 8KiB (hard-coded in the server side) due to HTTP Get limitations, but this should be sufficient for normal usage.

Revision History

(before v0.4.34: not kept)

2014-02-27 : v1.2.0

Core rewrite -- correctly handling corner cases in deeply-nested lists and a few other issues.

There might be some regression -- please post such occurrences in issues. Thanks.

2013-12-10 : v1.0.0

Major rewrite. Didn't have the time to polish it (esp. the UI) so it wasn't released. Now that the old version is mostly broke...

• lots of bugfixes (against new Renren filters)
• new (but still primitive) UI
• MathJax
• major performance improvements (lag-free editing even with "heavy" content)
• modular design (Gist & MathJax are all "plugins", see src/postproc/*)

2013-04-05 : v0.5.5

• workaround: firefox update broke compatibility

2013-03-28 : v0.5.4

• workaround renren blog site update

2013-03-16 : v0.5.2

• unified build for chrome and greasemonkey
• FIX: now circumvents blog.renren.com "@-mention" implementation bug

2013-03-14 : v0.5.0

• migrate to Grunt
• more non-standard-browser-behavior-resistance (against FireFox)
• better css handling

2013-03-10 : v0.4.34

• FIX: \t handling (hardcoded as 8 spaces)