I’ve just added John Gruber‘s excellent text-processing plugin Markdown to the site, and enabled it for comments as well as for my own use when writing posts.
In short, this means that any of you that are familiar with Markdown’s syntax can now use that when entering your comments, and they will appear on the site properly formatted.
Those of you unfamiliar with Markdown can just type normally, using HTML if you want.
Those of you unfamiliar with HTML can just type your little hearts out. :)
A very brief summary of Markdown’s most common syntax patterns follows behind the cut…
Emphasis/italics: Surround your text with underscores, _like this_, to get italics, like this.
Strong emphasis/bold: Surround your text with double asterisks, **like this**, to get bold text, like this.
Links: Bracket the text you want linked, then follow that immediately with the URL in parenthesis. For example, [Google](http://www.google.com/) becomes Google. If you want to, you can add a title attribute (the text that appears when you hover over a link) by including that in quotes after the link: [Google](http://www.google.com/ "Google") becomes Google.
For more options, see the Markdown Basics or the full Markdown Syntax pages.
(Geek note: As a nice side effect, since Markdown watches for special characters such as ampersands and automatically properly escapes them, this means that barring any goofs on my part when writing a post, every page on my site should now validate as valid XHTML, even if someone leaves an unescaped ampersand in their comment. Nifty!)
“Mad About You” by Hooverphonic from the album Magnificent Tree, The (2000, 3:43).