Markdown My Words

Background

When it comes to blogging, each blogger has his or her preferences in regards to the CMS (Content Management System) to use and his or her process for creating content. One of the things that I have done is to start writing more blog posts and documents in Markdown instead of using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.

Reason 1: Converts to Other Platforms

Markdown is used by several other platforms. One of the most noted platforms that uses Markdown is Github Pages. When using WYSIWYG, it allows you to make well formatted documents using a plain text editor, but allows you to convert them to another editor so that it looks like you typed them in a word processor (like MS Word). Why is this useful?

Reason 2: Allows You To Type Faster

For me, markdown allows me to type faster. I'm able to type two asterisks (**) faster than I am able to shift my hands to be able to process Ctrl+B for bolding text. In addition, you do not have to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse to click the corresponding icon for the text modification that you are trying to perform.

Reason 3: No Need For WYSIWYG

Many bloggers use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors when writing their content on their website. The problem those editors, is that they add a bunch of extra HTML formatting such as paragraph, span, and div tags. Some add special characters in their paragraphs as a way to make those formatting changes. Then if you change the appearance of the website, the content of the page also changes. In the worst case, it changes uncontrollably because of the new styling (CSS) that you have in place. By using markdown, the extra formatting is not added in the field of the post.

Conclusion

I have decided that using Markdown is the way to go. Now sometimes, I will still have to use the older way of doing things, like when editing a document in Microsoft Word.

These are just my thoughts.