I’ve been haunted by all the WYSIWYG editors of Wordpress, et al. Sure, these editors try and be as awesome as they can. But telling these editors exactly what you want is hard. It requires lots of clicks and edits. If you’re on a slow connection, you might even have to wait a couple of seconds here or there. Markdown is the perfect solution!

Why I like Markdown

The biggest reason for me to start using Markdown was the ability to write stuff offline. I can write - without every opening my website. I don’t need to login, select ‘Posts’ and click edit. I just do a vim … and I’m editing!

Second, I can do my own revision control. No funky databases to store drafts or revisions. I personally use git. A local repository that keeps track of any changes I make to my posts.

Third, you can convert Markdown into anything - pdf, latex, html. Since Markdown itself uses ‘natural’ symbols for formatting text - it is a truly portable document. You can open it up on any text editor - and you kind of see the formatting.

Fourth, I can simply upload the Markdown text file to my server. The server handles processing it automatically. This truly frees me of using any GUI/web interface like Wordpress. I’m really loving this!

Next steps

John Gruber released Markdown in 2004. I feel sad that I didn’t pick it up earlier! Well, now I have. Now I’m implementing it wherever I can. The first target being AI Shack. I already have a lot of it’s content inside Wordpress’ database. I’ll have to devise some method to translate those into Markdown.

Trek to Saavandurga My first skydive!