This post will be brief. As you may have guessed already, I am not a web developer and I am far from having a refined taste for web design. Nevertheless, I try my best and I hope it does not look that bad!

How to properly write in markdown?

A fresh start

This site was built using Hugo Framework. It is a well known solution for building a variety of static web-sites, including but not limited to personal portfolios, landing pages, wikis and documentation pages. Static web-sites are simple, fast and cheap to host. With the help of modern hosting engines and server-less functions, it is also possible today to add not-so-static functionalities to these websites. We will hopefully talk more in depth about this in the future.

This was the perfect tool for my scenario, someone looking to create a personal site without much web design knowledge nor the intention to dive deep into it at the moment. The truth is that at some point you will need to spend some time learning the basics of the framework and how to tweak your theme. Even though most themes work out-of-the-box, you will always want to understand the specifics of the configuration and what features you can enable. There are plenty of well documented tutorials and the community is also very active and helpful.

Coming back to the main topic, content and posts for Hugo are written in Markdown language. We are well familiar with this language in the industry, as it used in a variety of scenarios ranging from configuration files to Readme’s and Wikis. That being said, we may not be that familiar in using Markdown for writing long and high quality texts. My point is that you don’t probably use it to write extensive and rich texts, like blogs, documents and even book chapters.

What is the catch?

It is true that many tools (such as Wikis engines) provide a visual design view where you can write rich content which at the end will be translated to Markdown. This is good, but will not practically work for our case. I personally enjoy writing. I acknowledge that writing in Markdown is convenient, fast and reliable but we will agree that may not be the most engaging approach for those who enjoy writing. When writing extensive texts, I like having more advanced features and the experience of writing itself should be pleasant. Popular text editors extensively support Markdown and there are several plug-ins and extensions as well. Again, this is great for day-to-day working with configuration files and repositories. But I don’t find appealing writing content from my blog like this.

What then?

I simply decided to pick a rich text writing tool for creating the posts content, which I can then simply export as Markdown and add to the site. There are several tools that may serve this purpose, and I believe note taking applications are well suited for this task. You may have already a note-taking app of your choice, which you would like to use for this as well. This can be convenient.

In my case, I decided to use a specific and dedicated note taking application, Quip. Quip is a very powerful tool for document writing as well as sharing and collaborating. It is excellent in case you need to write content and collaborate with a team, as it has advanced features for commenting and live editing. Among all the tools I have tested, I must say that for these specific collaboration tasks is one of the best in its class.

The tool is free for personal use, having some dedicated paid plans in case you require more advanced features. I am of course not related at all with Quip, I just appreciate the tool.

I hope this was useful and we will see around!

P.