I started blogging in Tumblr a few weeks ago and I was still using the Rich Text Editor. I tinkered with the settings and switched my editor to Markdown. I’ve only known Markdown a little because I was trying to push my website using Static Site Generator but the caveat is, you really can’t edit your website you don’t have NodeJS.

Despite my little experience with it, I guess it’s time to familiarize myself with Markdown

What is markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain-text-formatting syntax. Its design allows it to be converted to many output formats, but the original tool by the same name only supports HTML. Markdown is often used to format readme files, for writing messages in online discussion forums, and to create rich text using a plain text editor.

Wikipedia

Markdown combines HTML and plain text editing which makes it non-distracting. You don’t need to enclose words with tags like in HTML. You also don’t need to memorize HTML tags as well.

Almost all platforms support Markdown. Tumblr has markdown and WordPress has the Markdown block in Gutenberg.

Ever since I started writing in Markdown, I totally forgot that the “post title” exist in Tumblr. I’m using the two pound (hashtags) sign to create a title for my blog. In WordPress, however, a post title is very important.

What I also liked about Markdown is it behaves like Notepad. Text will not change formatting whenever you copy from a different website, unlike in a Rich Text Editor.

Markdown is not that hard to memorize. If you’re familiar with Slack, the text formatting option is the same with Markdown. Notable cheatsheets in markdown are located in John Gruber’s Daring Fireball website and Adam Pritchard’s Markdown Cheatsheet in Github.

However, if you’re not comfortable writing in markdown, you can always use the Rich Text Editor.