Wordpress still, to an extent, rules the blogging world. Its longevity is testament to…something about it ;) However, it’s not my favourite platform in which to write a blog by a long way. It doesn’t support Markdown to the extent that I want. Yes, I’ve tried the plugins; no, they didn’t do what I needed.

I like to write all my content in a structured format - ideally Asciidoc, but I’ll settle for Markdown too. Here’s how I stayed [almost] sane whilst composing a blog in Markdown, reviewing it in Google Docs, and then publishing it in Wordpress in a non-lossy way.

Why? I’ve been blogging for quite a few years now, starting on Blogger, soon onto WordPress, and then to Ghost a couple of years ago. Blogger was fairly lame, WP yucky, but I really do like Ghost. It’s simple and powerful and was perfect for my needs. My needs being, an outlet for technical content that respected formatting, worked with a markup language (Markdown), and didn’t f**k things up in the way that WP often would in its WYSIWYG handling of content.

Markdown is a plain-text formatting syntax. It enables you write documents in plain text, readable by others in plain text, and optionally rendered into nicely formatted PDF, HTML, DOCX etc. It’s used widely in software documentation, particularly open-source, because it enables richer formatting than plain-text alone, but without constraining authors or readers to a given software platform. Platforms such as github natively support Markdown rendering - so you write your README etc in markdown, and when viewed on github it is automagically rendered - without you needing to actually do anything.