Get 'Down, make love!
I'd seen references to [John Gruber][]'s [Markdown][] plugin on the Blosxom [mailing list][], and I hadn't been too impressed. *Woo-hoo,* I thought, *another "simplification" of HTML syntax.*

His manifesto, <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2004/03/dive_into_markdown" title="Daring Fireball: Dive Into Markdown">Dive Into Markdown</a>, though, made me interested enough to try it. To summarize: HTML source is easy to write, but it can be a pain in the ass to read. Markdown sets out to use traditional e-mail and Usenet formatting conventions for basic text markup functionality, allowing any web text--but particularly blog entries--to be edited as intuitively as e-mail, and to be stored and transmitted in an easy-to-read plaintext format. It's elegant, it's well thought-out, and it handles mixing HTML with Markdown gracefully. I'm particularly impressed with the cool and flexible syntax for [hyperlinks][]

I've been using it for a few days now, and I'm now an eager convert. As of last night, the comments form also uses it, thanks to Greg Vario's [miniscule patch][]. Feel free to play with it and try it out. You may want to start by viewing the source for [this very post][].

And yeah, Jarrett, you no longer have to do your own `<p>` tags.

[John Gruber]:http://daringfireball.net/
[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[mailing list]:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blosxom/
[hyperlinks]:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.php#link
[miniscule patch]:http://greg.vario.us/software/writeback.patch
[this very post]:http://sebbo.org/blosxom/diaries/diary/geek/markdown.txt