Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

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Sun, 20 Apr 2014

Testing for Blosxom

Up to now, I've been writing entries for the "Ramblings" blog using Kate and putting in my own html tags. This is my first attempt to use Markdown and Pandoc to produce the text for the blog. I've been experimenting with Markdown offline. The concept behind Markdown is to help let me concentrate on the writing, leaving as much of the issue of presentation to other software like LibreOffice or a web page. Pandoc is the tool I'm using to take the text written with Markdown syntax and to convert it to .odt output or html. Pandoc offers more options than that, but those two are the ones I've been using in my practice/experimentation.

The Markdown syntax for paragraphs is entirely transparent. All I need to do is type, leaving a blank line after each paragraph before starting the next. That looks good in Kate and the translation puts the appropriate tags in for paragraph display in html. Beyond the simplicity of paragraphs, markdown requires some "coding" which is as unintrusive as possible. To identify headings, Markdown uses hashmarks # at the left edge of a line followed by a space before the text of the heading. The number of hash marks, from one to five, is used to determine the level of the heading, one hashmark converts to a top level heading. In other words, Markdown syntax is not 'free' of coding, it is just not as much busywork as direct html coding which requires opening and closing tags for any block of text.

<h1>Heading 1</h1>
accomplished by
# Heading 1

So far, I am happy with the journal work. It is a piece of the day's work, not written after the fact, but mixed in with the other stuff throughout the day. I expect to make some sort of descriptive entry somewhere on the website at some point.

I just did a quick test. It is necessary to convert from the Markdown to html with Pandoc, otherwise, blosxom displays the Markdown syntax and does not give a very good-looking result.