Rekindling My Love Of Markdown
Back when I decided I was going to start blogging again, I made a decision to change the way I wrote. I don’t mean my process, or the voice or tone I tried to use; I mean the way I marked up my articles. In all my other attempts at blogging, I made use of the WYSIWYG editors, and ended up with <font> tags galore.
I decided for the sake of future proofing my articles, I would give them the gift of proper markup. If I didn’t do this, any time that I redesigned, I would have ended up with mangled, nasty posts that didn’t fit my designs. Never mind the fact that its just bad practice to allow that type of code.
At first, it was perfect. I was writing like I never had before1, and I was furiously adding all the markup my articles needed with full on HTML. Unfortunately, this new found desire to use the right tools came at a cost: readability.
It turns out that its damned hard to read the unrendered version of an article when it is full of HTML tags and encoded characters, and its just as hard to edit those articles.
After writing this way for a while, I miraculously came across a tool that I somehow hadn’t heard of before: Markdown.
Markdown seemed like mana from heaven. It was easily readable, there were WordPress plugins that allowed me to publish untransformed Markdown, and it was easy to understand. Or so I thought.
Unfortunately, Markdown never really caught fire in my mind, and as a result I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle of constantly trying to learn the syntax, and constantly checking the dingus to make sure that what I was writing was correct, and would actually render once I published. I returned to the dark days of doing all my markup in HTML
Of course, the issues I had previously been struck with were back, but this time I noticed something new. I was writing less complete articles.
What was happening was a result of a failure to prepare. I would sit down with an idea in my mind, and start to write without doing any research or resource gathering first. Then, when I cam to the first place I wanted to put a link, I would have to hunt out the URL. By the time I found the URL, and added the link, I would have either lost my thought, or decided that I didn’t want to write about this subject anymore. I have a huge amount of files in my “Drafts” folder that fell victim to this; simply stopped at the first link.
Recently, however, I decided that I wanted to give Markdown another shot. I started by trying to type out all the required Markdown elements, and I was failing miserably, and just as I was about to give up on Markdown again. Then, there came articles from Minimal Mac, MacSparky, and One Thing Well, all about how to make writing Markdown more simple by using TextExpander.
TextExpander is a tool that allows you to set up “snippets” of commonly used text, and assign a hotkey to insert those snippets into anything that accepts text. Why I had never thought to use TextExpander to add markup to articles is beyond me. using TextExpander will make the insertion of the Markdown elements both simple, and reliable
I won’t go into detail about how I’ve set TextExpander up to expand snippets of Markdown, other than to say that I’ve set up a bunch of snippets based on those found in the above articles, and I’m giving Markdown another shot.
I do still want a dedicated Markdown Editor, as I think that the aspects I outlined in that post2 would definitely assist in helping to learn the syntax faster, and also allow me to see at a glance if I have made a typo in my usage of the syntax.
For now though, I’m focused on continuing to work on my writing, and integrating Markdown into my process so that one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, it will feel natural to use.
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