Markdown (warning: mildly geeky post)

I've been a fan of John Gruber at Daring Fireball for a while because of his incisive and (mostly) accurate analysis of all things Apple.

However, what he is less widely known for is his work on Markdown, which is a very useful set of simple codes that can be used to write in a way that plain text can easily be converted into fully formatted HTML without remembering all the coding.

Now, I am absolutely no expert in this. Indeed, I only started playing around with it seriously this weekend. For an overview I really urge people to check out Don McAllister's excellent video tutorial on it at ScreenCastsOnline.

But its simplicity is very attractive, as is its speed and the fact that the textual output will flow properly into almost any blog platform with all the formatting intact.

Anyway, this may be of interest only to the 1% of my readership who actually care about this sort of thing and don't know about Markdown already.

PS. Props to the fabulous fork of Notational Velocity called NValt for being a great markdown writing environment and also a wonderful ubiquitous capture tool for notes which can then sync (through Simplenote) across Mac, iPhone, iPad and even Android.