Let's markdown

If you have read my blog for a half year, you might notice that the update rate has slowed down for a month. The main reason is I switched to Ubuntu and I don't have Post2Blog. Post2Blog is very powerful and it helped me to blog as fast as I expect. In Ubuntu, I have Performancing for Firefox which is a cool stuff but not comparable to Post2Blog in any criteria. Today, I have just decided to try another solution. Back to basic. I will try to not rely on WYSIWYG editor anymore. Instead, I should write content in pure text. As I said, this post was written in pure text.

There are so many solution to programtically format pure text into well-formatted form like HTML. Let me show one by one.

  1. StructuredText - If you know what is Zope, you might know about StructuredText.
  2. reStructuredText - reStructuredText is aka the second version of StructuredText designed to fix several problems in StructuredText.
  3. Textile - Textile is just a stripped down version of HTML. You can still assign tag and attributes without < and >.
  4. Wiki - Wiki is one of the most popular format in this decade. However, Wiki format is not standard. There are so many Wiki implementation. The most famous one is MediaWiki. By the way, I don't like its formatting especially listing item. It is too simple, unreadable, and too many design flaw.
  5. Markdown - Markdown was designed for maximum readability. It is very similar to write an e-mail.

Personally, I like reStructuredText because I'm a pythonian. Unfortunately, there is no implementation in PHP so I can't use it in Drupal directly. That's why I choosed Markdown. Anyway, I often embed codes in my post so I combine Markdown with GeSHi. For example, my mplayer config file is as follow.

# Write your default config options here!

ao=esd
#vo=x11,xv,sdl
vo=xv,sdl,x11

The most excited of Markdown and GeSHi is when I placed codes in list item, e.g., installation procedure.

  1. Extract the archive

    tar xzvf xxx-1.0.tar.gz
    
  2. Configure the package and make

    cd xxx-1.0
    ./configure
    make
    
  3. Install

    make install
    

I still get readable content which is very easy to edit later. Below is the source of this post.

If you have read my blog for a half year, you might notice that 
the update rate has slowed down for a month. The main reason is 
I switched to Ubuntu and I don't have [Post2Blog][1]. Post2Blog is 
very powerful and it helped me to blog as fast as I expect. In Ubuntu, 
I have [Performancing for Firefox][2] which is a cool stuff but not 
comparable to Post2Blog in any criteria. Today, I have just decided to 
try another solution. Back to basic. I will try to not rely on WYSIWYG 
editor anymore. Instead, I should write content in *pure text*. As I 
said, this post was written in pure text.

 [1]: http://www.bytescout.com/post2blog.html "Post2Blog - Blog Desktop Client"
 [2]: http://performancing.com/firefox "Performacing for Firefox - Blog Client for Firefox"

There are so many solution to programtically format pure text into 
well-formatted form like HTML. Let me show one by one.

1. [StructuredText][1] - If you know what is Zope, you might know 
   about StructuredText.
2. [reStructuredText][2] - reStructuredText is aka the second 
   version of StructuredText designed to fix several problems in 
   StructuredText.
3. [Textile][3] - Textile is just a stripped down version of HTML. 
   You can still assign tag and attributes without < and >.
4. [Wiki][4] - Wiki is one of the most popular format in this decade. 
   However, Wiki format is not standard. There are so many Wiki 
   implementation. The most famous one is [MediaWiki][5]. By the way, 
   I don't like its formatting especially listing item. It is too simple, 
   unreadable, and too many design flaw.
5. [Markdown][6] - Markdown 
   was designed for maximum readability. It is very similar to write an e-mail.

 [1]: http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles/STX "StructuredText"
 [2]: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html "reStructuredText"
 [3]: http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ "Textile"
 [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki "Wiki"
 [5]: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing "MediaWiki"
 [6]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ "Markdown"

Personally, I like reStructuredText because I'm a pythonian. Unfortunately, 
there is no implementation in PHP so I can't use it in Drupal directly. 
That's why I choosed **Markdown**. Anyway, I often embed codes in my post so 
I combine Markdown with [GeSHi](http://geshi.org). For example, my mplayer 
config file is as follow.

    # Write your default config options here!

    ao=esd
    #vo=x11,xv,sdl
    vo=xv,sdl,x11

The most excited of Markdown and GeSHi is when I placed codes in 
list item, e.g., installation procedure.

1. Extract the archive

        tar xzvf xxx-1.0.tar.gz

2. Configure the package and make

        cd xxx-1.0
        ./configure
        make

3. Install

        make install

I still get readable content which is very easy to edit later. 
Below is the source of this post.

Post new comment