The tutorial for markdown language was excellent as it taught us how to separate content from container. StackEdit was a neat tool to use to test out and become familiar with the use of markdown. I had experience using some html in the past, but had never heard of markdown. As great as HTML is, it is a little complex to use when trying to write webpages from a text editor. Markdown has the added benefit of having very little syntax or code. It also has the extra benefit of being able to easily transform your markdown files to a pdf, word document or an html webpage. The use of Pandoc makes this transformation painless and easy to do. In addition to Pandoc, users can post their markdown files in Github and have them quickly served to a webspace.

I held off writing about markdown after having played with it for a few months for the following reasons. At first, I found markdown slightly clunky to work with simply because I didn’t know the syntax. I was used to html syntax, which is quite different. It also took me a while to find an application to properly write markdown files. I’ve settle on Atom, because of its look, its use of a spell checker and because it allows for quick previewing of markdown files.

One of the annoying parts of markdown is that Github uses a slightly different version of markdown then what is used in Atom. Some of the text that I’ve written and previewed in Atom don’t look the same when uploaded to Github. This slight annoyance though is easily rectified after trial and error.

Over the course of this class, I’ve been using markdown when writing my open notebook. At first, I had to slightly force myself to open my Atom program to keep notes on my progress for this class. As time went on, I found myself using markdown and publishing other notes in my open notebook (sorry for those extra posts) about work or other school items.