How I discovered MarDown
I discovered Markdown one-morning reading SmashingMagazine. The top article of that day was this article, Thoughts On Markdown, by Knut Melvær on. Believe it or not, with close to 10 years in tech, I had never heard of Markdown. So I googled "What is Markdown."
I fell in love with Markdown in that moment seeing the syntax. As soon as I understood the purpose of markdown I knew that it would make doing things like writing blog articles and taking notes on my machine much more manageable. So I started using it the same day.
What is Markdown?
I prefer JOHN GRUBER, of daringfireball.net explanation of Markdown the best.
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. - //daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
John continues to define Markdown by stating that it is essentially two things.
- a plain text formatting syntax;...
- a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
What markdwon means to me
Although accurate, John's definition could use more clarification for those new to Markdown. For example, it helps me to think of "markdown" as an alternative markup language to HTML. Looking at this markdown page, you will understand more clearly.
Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web.
Two of my favorite characteristics about Markdown are one, Markdown saves me time, and second, Markdown is versatile.
Before I discovered Markdown, doing two essential activities took a lot of work. The first was to take notes on my machines, and the second was to write HTML articles. Unfortunately, these challenges with digital writing left me with little motivation to write.
After learning Markdown taking notes in notepad++ or Visual Studio Code became more effortless. For example, I could quickly review and edit my work because headers are much easier for my eyes to spot in Markdown. In addition, identifying titles made seeing a visual hierarchy in my content easy. Another thing I could do more conveniently was to create a list of links for my writing.
Also, converting Markdown to HTML for blog articles became automatic with Markdown. Once I discovered online tools like thisfakesite.com and the "content" module for NuxtJs, I no longer had to convert to HTML in my workflow.
In Addition, Markdown is very versatile. For example, you can write HTML in Markdown. Markdown's versatility allows me to use it with other 3rd party applications/tools. For example, all of my "README.md" files for my GitHub repositories are in Markdown. Likewise, my bio description on GitHub is in Markdown. Another example of Markdown's versatility is I can use Vuejs components in my Markdown on my NuxtJS with the "Content" module.
Now I can keep a folder titled "Notes" on my laptop. Whenever I need to take notes, I can effortlessly open my text editor to write in Markdown. My ideas get recorded fast as they appear in my mind. The best part is it is only a click and drag to use my Markdown notes for an article on my site or to publish/store somewhere else as HTML.