I used to very infrequently and very inelegantly write reviews for a web site that had many contributing authors. The site is Mac-centric, so the writing workflow revolved around TextEdit. Essentially this meant that getting the articles into WordPress without messing anything up became a bit of a pain and often required much more work than simply pasting the documents into the WordPress form.

Recently I ran into this problem again with show note production for my podcast, Pocket Sized Podcast. I was using a TextEdit file to keep my show notes for each episode in, and then would paste those into WordPress for the episode blog post, as well as for the ID3 meta data for the MP3 files. At some point I began having troubles with hyperlinks causing weirdness in my show notes with respect to formatting and line spacing. I would have to fight with my show notes in the WordPress editor for 5 to 10 minutes after pasting in the show notes, depending on how many links I had.

Stu Helm of International Mac Podcast suggested to me on Twitter that I use a WordPress plugin called Markdown on Save. Markdown on Save essentially lets you write your blog posts in the WordPress editor using Markdown. Markdown was originally created by John Gruber to allow easy text to HTML conversion. The benefit of this is that, rather than having to style everything in a WordPress text edit box, or in some other rich text editor, you can write plain text with some simple markdown syntax added that will indicate how the text is to by styled. It’s portable, unlike any text that you’ve formatted in WordPress or another blog editor or rich text editor. It completely eliminates all the weirdness that happens when your workflow is to write articles in a rich text editor like TextEdit, and then paste them into a WordPress text edit box.

Markdown is one of those things that I could not wrap my head around the need for when I first learned about it. My attitude was “ok, that works for you guys, but I don’t get it.” Of course, I initially had the same response to Evernote, and as anyone who listens to Pocket Sized Podcast knows, I live in it daily now.

Markdown can also be used for things like generating pdf files and other types of output in addition to HTML, thanks to a huge number of third party editors that support Markdown. This means that, using an editor that supports Markdown and various export formats, you could write something that is then output to HTML and different ebook formats, all from the same plain text source.

Rather than using Markdown on Save, I use a combination of a plain text editor and a program called Marked, which lets me view the output from the text with Markdown written in my text editor. This way I can save my show notes in plain text with Markdown already included, and then just copy and paste the output from Marked right into the WordPress text box. It works great, and there are never any formatting issues with this workflow. I also paste the output from Marked into the appropriate file information boxes in Fission with the podcast mp3 file loaded, so that show notes and other ID3 tags will be applied to my mp3 file.

Because I was already using iA Writer for iPad, I purchased copies for the Mac and iPhone, and use that as my plain text editor. iA Writer only supports a subset of Markdown, so it will not correctly render the output from all Markdown tags in its preview. Not a big deal, as opening the file created with iA Writer in Marked shows everything as expected. That’s the beauty of Markdown – it’s plain text, and it will be correctly rendered by applications that support it.

Rich text editors probably still have their place, but frankly, using plain text with Markdown and the right third-party applications, you can get the output you want with far less hassle, maintain far better compatibility, and make your work highly transportable. With rich text editors, you fight the formatting whims of your software, and lock yourself into one solution for editing and publishing your text. Most importantly of all, it remains eminently readable to the author, and that can only help create better writing because it lets you focus on your words rather than how it looks.

If you’re intimidated by or irritated at the thought of yet another learning curve, don’t be. Markdown was created to be simple and accessible, and there are excellent resources like the MacSparky Markdown Field Guide. If you’re using Markdown or plan to, you need that book.

If you have a web site that multiple people create content for, I’d strongly recommend looking at using a work flow with plain text and Markdown, regardless of whether you’re inputting the results into a WordPress form or a custom CMS.