Overview of Markdown

If you’ve never used it before, Markdown is a text-to-HTML converter that let’s you write text naturally in plain text format and then convert it to valid HTML. To learn more about it, read John Gruber’s post introducing Markdown on Daring Fireball.

The following passage:

# My main heading

This is my initial paragraph. In it I’d like to provide a link to the [Jekyll homepage](http://jekyllrb.com/ "Jekyll"). I want to add **bold** and *italic* formatting to text as well using the `strong` and `emphasis` tags.

This is another paragraph. I’d like to follow it with an unordered list.

* item 1
* item 2
* item 3

Would be rendered in HTML as:

My main heading

This is my initial paragraph. In it I’d like to provide a link to the Jekyll homepage. I want to add bold and italic formatting to text as well using the strong and emphasis tags.

This is another paragraph. I’d like to follow it with an unordered list.

• item 1
• item 2
• item 3

As you can see, Markdown frees you from many of the structural restraints that would make it difficult to author something like a blog post using HTML.