Write with Markdown

Writing for the web isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. There’s the ugly necessity of writing out HTML which, while not in any way difficult, makes your writing less readable during the editing process.

Markdown is the answer and the best way to explain Markdown is to show you what it does.

Let’s look at a standard HTML tag: <strong>Bold text goes here</strong> and now the Markdown equivalent: **Bold text goes here**. Doesn’t that look much nicer?

Every common HTML tag has a Markdown equivalent, allowing for improved readability while writing. On a small scale you may not notice much of an improvement, but click here to see a screenshot of this article written in Markdown.

For use with Wordpress, install the Markdown for WordPress plugin, which converts the syntax to HTML for your reader but maintains the original syntax for editing.

There’s the added advantage that writing Markdown syntax is quicker than writing out HTML and, in combination with TextExpander (more on this in a second) the time spent formatting your posts will be cut down to seconds.