Every one of my sites runs on WordPress, and I write for six of them: the essays at Many Lamps, One Flame, the weekly post-transplant notes at One More Beat, the travel and reinvention pieces at Rogue Wayfarer, the leadership writing at At Ground Level, the home and hearth pieces at Rooted Hearth, and the studio news at Deep Dark Abyss Productions. For years the writing was the easy part. The hard part came after.
A finished draft has to become a post. That means pasting into the block editor, rebuilding the headings it lost on the way, uploading images one at a time and typing the alt text into a sidebar, hunting for the excerpt field, setting categories and tags, scheduling, and then doing the social rounds by hand. Multiply by six sites and a weekly cadence, and the last mile was eating the evening the writing had earned.
Post Friendly is what I built to get the evening back.
What it does
You write in Markdown. At the top of the file is a short block that says what the post is: the title, the site key, the excerpt, categories and tags, the featured image, a go-live time, and the lead-in you want on Facebook. Then you drop the file on Post Friendly along with its images.
The app does the rest. Images go to the media library with their alt text, captions, and descriptions already filled in. Categories and tags that don’t exist yet are created. The post goes up as native Gutenberg blocks, so if you ever open it in the editor it looks like you built it there. If you gave it a time, it’s scheduled; if not, it’s live.
The point was never to avoid WordPress. The point was to stop rebuilding, inside WordPress, the thing I had already written.
Then comes the part no plugin has managed to automate, because the networks don’t allow it. Facebook won’t let an app post to a personal profile, and LinkedIn has no way in for articles at all. Post Friendly does what the networks permit and hands you the rest: one button copies the article body and opens LinkedIn’s article editor, another copies your blurb for the share post, and once the piece is live, a third copies the lead-in and opens Facebook’s share dialog on the post. Paste, post, done. When you’re finished with a piece, you file it.
Built to sit beside an AI
Most of my drafting these days happens in a conversation with an AI, and Post Friendly assumes that. It ships with a format specification you paste into the prompt, so whatever drafts with you produces a file the app accepts as is: front matter filled in, slug derived the way WordPress would derive it, alt text written for every image, separators where they belong. There’s a plain-language guide for the same rules when you write by hand.
That was the real insight, in the end. The AI is good at the structure and the housekeeping. I’m better at the sentences. The app is the thing between us that makes the hand-off clean.
What it isn’t
It’s not a writing app, and it doesn’t try to be; use whatever you write in. It doesn’t update posts after they’re published; that’s still WordPress’s job. It doesn’t store any of your social credentials, because it never logs in anywhere on your behalf. It talks to your own sites through the WordPress REST API with an application password, and nothing leaves your Mac except the posts you send.
Where to get it
Post Friendly is on the Mac App Store for macOS 15 and later. It’s a one-time purchase, no subscription, from Deep Dark Abyss Productions, which is also the studio behind MailKP and the Aevora health-data apps.
Post Friendly requires a WordPress site on version 5.6 or later over HTTPS, with application passwords enabled. Facebook and LinkedIn steps open their websites in your browser; the app holds no account with either.