William Computer Blog

MT Plugin: Markdown

Introducing Markdown, a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Markdown is like textile by textism, but markdown works as a movable type plugin and a stand alone perl script — which means you can use markdown on other software written in perl (example: BBEdit).

I just installed it today along with the new version of smartypants and I’m going to use this entry to play around with markdown as a demo for you and myself. You can visit the Markdown web dingus to experiment with markdown.

The first test is to experiment with the markdown italic syntax:

*italic*
_italic_

Markdown will convert anything between the * and _ to italic with the <em> HTML tag. Wouldn’t it easier to use *stars* instead of typing <em>stars</em>. The second experiment is the bold/strong syntax:

**bold**
__bold__

Example:

The quick **brown** fox jumps over the __lazy__ dog.

Results: The quick **brown** fox jumps over the __lazy__ dog. Ordered list test: Example:

1. Item one
2. Item Two

Results. 1. Item one 2. Item two

Let’s stop the experiment right here, since I know markdown works and I hope you get the idea of how markdown work. I find this plugin very useful because it saves my time. Instead of writing down markup on my entries, I just write my entries as if I’m writing in a word processor software.

• March 12, 2004