> Disclosures: I highlight and "suggest" a few sites because I think they are good examples that illustrate my point about the emerging importance of simplified, human friendly notation systems. A couple of these organizations charge to use their services. I however do not receive any compensation for mentioning them... just good vibes and friendship for helping out. ##Whatever Happened to...? (Simple, beautiful text?) So here I am, in what seems like an eternal repeat loop of a situation. I have a great idea to share via my media-content-crafting (mcc), and what do you know? I'm entangled in a universe of the next generation of **WYSIWYG** (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) purgatory... the every-person's web-based editor tool... ![How Quickly People Forget][1] ##Throw Down for Markdown... I'm not hating on all you markdown unable blogging sites, but I will have to say, the days I spend working on your un-upgraded systems are numbered. Most very popular services, like "Blogger" have an HTML button so you can fudge the raw html code to get simple formatting features. This is a clip of one of my Blogger posts. The WYSIWYG toolbar sucks because all it's doing is auto-generating html on the background... ![WYSI-What? Blogger's Browser Text Editor][2] ***WYSI-What? Blogger's Browser Text Editor*** If you hit the button too many times without paying attention, your content is buried within the same formatting start and end tag over and over and over thousands of times deep... and if you want to edit that HTML, you go blind because the editor conveniently removed all the white-space... browsers dig it for efficiency... but can the humans? **Take a look for yourself:** ![A Common HTML Editing View Experience][3] ***Are you kidding me??*** [Markdown][4], for any of those who don't know, is a reduced formatting standard used mostly by wikis and progressive community hosts such as the folks at [Stack Exchange][5], [Ghost][6], ***Tumblr!!*** (right-on guys!). You should try your hand at it... if all you want is a simple taxonomy for organizing and presenting your thoughts, *MARKDOWN* is the ticket. *You can enable your Tumblr editor for markdown notation like this:* ![Configure Your Tumblr Editor for Markdown Syntax][7] This is an example of the simplified markdown syntax: [Pastebin Example][8] The text in this link is all I needed to get the formatting you see in this very same content post. This includes text formatting, headers, external image links, etc. It even encourages a very organized approach for notation, citation and content curation. Simplified attribution syntax is something that makes markdown shine. Now get going and see what you can do better with markdown!! ----- **Resources:** I put my links at the bottom for those who want to find my references, so those that don't care can conveniently ignore them more easily. They aren't affiliate links. I'm just a happy user and nobody at these organizations know who the heck I am... tell them I sent you anyways :) 1. **Stack Exchange** is a network of Q&A Expert sites covering LOTS of different subject areas and topics. See if you can find which site I spend the most time on... 2. **Ghost** is a recently arrived open source project on the scene. It's a multi-user blogging and content management system (much like a next-gen Wordpress) If you don't want to download their source to stand up your own install, there's a hosted service at ghost.org. Their hosting isn't free, but it looks like it's helping to keep their project vision alive. 3. **Markdown**: What the discussion is all about. The project is a pared down notation system which is interpreted to HTML output for browser display, but the content-crafter does not get entangled with the more complicated nuances of HTML, css style-sheets and other web-designer intricacies... [1]: http://i.imgur.com/Lb6k0kyl.jpg [2]: http://i.imgur.com/IYfbJIwl.jpg?1 [3]: http://i.imgur.com/pX6MU3el.jpg [4]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics [5]: http://stackexchange.com/sites# [6]: http://ghost.org [7]: http://i.imgur.com/DNOyO4Ql.jpg [8]: https://pastebin.com/mBW6kTrb