Markedstyle: Managing Styles for Marked With Laravel

What are Markdown and Marked? See the footer.

TL;DR: I just wrote an app called Markedstyle, a centralized repository for custom Marked CSS styles.

I've been looking for an opportunity to rapidly prototype a simple web app using Laravel 4 (the best way to learn is to practice), so when I saw Brett Terpstra's recent post on collecting styles for his app Marked I knew I had a perfect opportunity.

I wish I had run an actual timer, but within a few very brief evening programming sessions I had a basic REST-ish app allowing me to create, view, and edit styles and users. I used Bootstrap for rapid front-end prototyping, but followed the tips at Bootstrap without all the debt to save myself the pain of Bootstrap classes in the HTML.

The ease with which I can prototype an app in Laravel is incredible, but even more important is that I feel confident that I wouldn't have to change much to consider this a production app. Getting the basic resource routes and controllers up and running, as well as database schemas and seeds prepared, was incredibly simple. Suffice it to say that I'm in love with Laravel.

I filled the app with the styles currently available at Brett's Git repo, and made a wishlist for features I hope to develop soon--voting, Sass/SCSS style upload, etc. I then deployed it to ArcusTech, so it should be incredibly fast.

The site is online at markedstyle.com and the source code is publicly viewable at github.com/mattstauffer/markedstyle. I know this isn't a login-every-day kind of thing, and that it'll be a lot more useful once I'm tracking clicks and votes, but I figured I'd put it out there for now and see what the Marked and Laravel communities think of it.

Thanks! Please share any thoughts (or if I totally screwed up the code, pull requests).

What are Markdown and Marked?

Markdown is an incredible tool for formatting text in a light, clean manner; text written in Markdown is legible before it's processed, easily written by hand, and easily processed by computer.

Marked is a simple, clean program that monitors local Markdown files and actively updates a preview window every time they change.