Posterous And Its Markdown Awesomeness

Warning “ this post is going to be about something incredibly geeky, so unless you too are a closet nerd, or you own a skinny fit shirt with “Talk Nerdy to me” written across it, it’s probably best that you skip this post. I discovered a little while ago that Posterous supports “markdown”. If you have no idea what markdown is, there’s a good writeup at the link below; daringfireball.net/projects/markdown The explanation is all well and good, but what significance does markdown have for the average blogger? It lets you dictate exactly what HTML to render based on some simple rules. If you’ve ever wrestled with a supposedly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor in a website (that will be all web based editors), you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Web based editors are famously bad at turning out clean HTML “ the Google Mail editor is perhaps the worst of the lot. What does this mean in terms of your content though? It means a disaster. Modern search engines use “semantic tagging” to make sense of what you have written “ this means paragraph tags, titles, emphasis, bullets, and so on are interpreted as meaning something. You would be surprised how many webpages look fine, but are in reality no more than a bank robbers note “ cut and pasted into something approximating meaningful content. The worst part is that very few people know “ and even fewer care. Perhaps it speaks volumes about my character make-up that when I discovered Posterous supported markdown, a huge grin spread across my face. Finally a way to guarantee the outcome of an article posted to the blog a way to have control over the outcome.