# Markdown all things

Whilst blogger.com provides a fairly good blogging platform for regular writing, I've found that it's rather painful for technical blogging. In particular, code blocks are a mission. In the past, I've wrapped code in <pre><code> ... </code></pre> and let [highlight.js](https://github.com/isagalaev/highlight.js/) do all the heavy lifting of making that actually look readable. HighlightJs has been fantastic at that, but it still hasn't been as smooth a process as I would have liked _overall_. I still tended to write the non-code parts in the WYSIWIG html editor, and had to switch the source view to work on code parts. 

When I blog, I literally want to get out the information as quickly as possible, in a readable format. I'm not here to fight with styling.

So I was quite happy to stumble across [showdown](https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown). A little Javascript in my template and suddenly I could write in possibly the simplest format ever: markdown. I had quick and easy access to simple styling elements (lists, headings, etc) as well as code blocks. All good, but not automagick out of the box. 

I thought to myself, _"I'm sure I can't be the only person who wants this"_, and _"It would be nice if that auto-bootstrapping of markdown+code could be done anywhere, not just from within my blogger template"_.

So, as is so common within the open-source world, I stand upon the very tall, very broad shoulders of [highlight.js](https://github.com/isagalaev/highlight.js/) and [showdown](https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown) to present [auto-markdown](https://github.com/fluffynuts/auto-markdown): a script you can include on any page to convert any element with the `markdown` class to be rendered as markdown. It can even be configured (script versions and code theme) via some global variables, so you don't have to fiddle with the code if you don't want to.

I trialed it with my last post and It's how I'm writing now -- I just add a shell `pre` tag with the `markdown` class and get on with the writing, without any more fighting with the html editor. As a bonus: even if the script fails for some reason (such as if the user has Javascript disabled or GitHub doesn't supply my script in time), the blog is still in a readable format: markdown.

If you're interested, follow the instructions in the [README.md](https://github.com/fluffynuts/auto-markdown). Feel free to open issues if you encounter some - for instance, I encountered some stickiness with generics in code blocks. Also, bear in mind that markdown requires html-escaping for chevrons (ie, embedding xml). 

Feel free to share it as much as you like. If you don't feel comfortable referencing my code directly, fork my repo and keep your own copy (:

Now, if only blogger's html editor had a vi mode...