Sunday November 21

markdown

I absolutely love no-nonsense technologies that just work the way they should, and Markdown is a fantastic example of one.

For years I've been had my own conventions for readable plain-text formatting when writing notes and documentation, but I have never gotten around to writing a parser to convert all my text files to HTML. It was an easy decision to replace my own conventions with Markdown after looking at it for two minutes, and now I have a script to convert them all to HTML.

I've been trying to put together a bunch of scripts that all add up to a desktop development and publishing environment that work with existing applications instead of re-inventing them all. With Markdown and some Python glue, I can use BBEdit to edit pages on my "Wiki" and post them to my website. Hopefully more Wikis will start adopting Markdown as a convention so I can take my typing habits with me on the road.