{"id":153,"date":"2004-03-18T05:38:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-18T05:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/WebDev\/Blosxom\/Markdownredux.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"Markdownredux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/2004\/03\/18\/Markdownredux\/","title":{"rendered":"Markdown Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I’ve mentioned previously<\/a>, I’ve recently started using Markdown<\/a> to format my blog entries. After using it for a few posts, I honestly think it’s lowered the “friction” it takes to compose an entry. When I first saw it, my immediate reaction was, “Why? We already have Textile<\/a>.” However, Textile is a tool to “mark up” plain text to be formatted as (x)html, where Markdown is a tool to render plain text as (x)html. In other words, Markdown strives to remove the need to insert markup; instead it uses existing plain text idioms, especially from email. It doesn’t have as many features as Textile, but it has all the features I use. It also handles certain things much more easily; I’m not sure I ever figured out how to mark up multi-paragraph blockquotes in Textile.<\/p>\n

The Blosxom<\/a> interface in the current beta releases (1-3) apply markdown formatting to every post. In my previous post<\/a> on Markdown, I offered a updated version that used the Blosxom meta plugin and a “meta-markup” header to enable Markdown on a per post basis. John Gruber<\/a>, author of Markdown, stated on the Markdown mailing list that he’d rather make this behavior optional. I agreed, and have produced version 2 of my Markdown-Blosxom patch:<\/p>\n

Update 3-25-04:<\/strong> John Gruber has released Beta 4 of Markdown, which incorporates (and improves) these changes. The code patch below is now deprecated; go grab<\/a> a new (post-beta-3) copy of Markdown. :<\/p>\n

#### Blosxom plug-in interface ##########################################\n\n# Change $blosxom_always to 0 to use "meta-markup: markdown" story\n# headers to enable Markdown on a per-story basis\nmy $blosxom_always = 1;\n\n#don't change; auto-detects\nmy $blosxom_hasmeta;\n\nsub start { 1; }\nsub filter {\n    $blosxom_hasmeta = defined(%meta::);\n    1;\n}\nsub story {\n    my($pkg, $path, $filename, $story_ref, $title_ref, $body_ref) = @_;\n\n     if ($blosxom_always or \n         ($blosxom_hasmeta and \n          defined($meta::markup) and \n          $meta::markup =~ \/^\\s*markdown\\s*$\/i))  {\n        $$body_ref  = Markdown($$body_ref);\n    }\n    1;\n}<\/code><\/pre>\n
Notes:<\/p>\n