If you look through the archives of Savage Minds you will find a lot of posts that are seemingly unformatted. Most of these are by Rex, who was an early fan of Markdown, a “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers” developed by John Gruber. Unfortunately, the plugin we were using to make those posts appear pretty was sucking up a lot of server resources so we disabled it until we could find something better. There are probably better options out there now, but we haven’t looked at them. I personally write my blog posts in raw HTML and never saw the advantage of learning Markdown… until now.
Before I go on, a word of warning. Usually I only write my “Tools We Use” posts about software I feel confident about. That means it is bug-free, already has all the promised features, and can be easily used even by those who are less tech-savvy (with a bit of effort). However, some (but not all) of the tools discussed in this post aren’t really ready for prime time.
So what changed? Why did I come around to Markdown (MD)? Well, the main thing for me was my discovery of FoldingText. I know a lot of academics, Rex included, really like Scrivener (“the first and only word processing program designed specifically for the messy, non-linear way writers really work”), but despite trying really hard to like it, it just never “clicked’ for me. Mainly because I don’t like how it works as an outliner. FoldingText, on the other hand, is a great outliner. Yes, the current version is still missing some important features one would expect from an outliner, but I already love it. In this post I will write a bit about why I like FoldingText so much, as well as some of the other MD tools I’ve found helpful, including a way of writing powerpoint-style presentations in MD, and a new proposed syntax for annotating documents in MD. All this and more after the fold… Continue reading →