Did you ever stumble upon something so useful that it just blew your mind and left you wondering why nobody else you know uses it? That’s the special place Markdown holds in my heart right now.

Here is the problem. You have a corporate website or blog, but you don’t feel like writing HTML. Sure you have a CMS, but it’s a pain to format everything. Even when you do, the CMS doesn’t always produce valid code and you find yourself futzing with the HTML anyway. Heaven forbid you have an ampersand in your post.

Markdown is the solution for this problem. Markdown is a language but not a language. It’s really just a few extra characters you put in your text. After you are done writing your text, you run a script and markdown changes what you wrote to valid HTML. You can then just cut and past it right into your site or CMS. It’s a beautiful thing.

Let me give you an example. “#” is the character for header. So if I was to write “# This is a Header in Markdown,” it would look like this.

This is a Header in Markdown

Two #s would make it a “header two style.”

Like This

I would put a “>” in front of a line that I want in the block style.

This is an example of a block style layout.

I’m not going to get more into Markdown examples, but here are a few markdown links where you can a learn a bit about how it works.

The main Markdown page

Link to the Markdown wiki