September 24, 2020
PHP Markdown by Michel Fortin

Today I implemented Michel Fortin's PHP Markdown utility. This will help to drastically speed up writing these posts when I don't have to worry about embedding HTML for proper spacing of paragraphs, emphasizing text or inserting links. All posts on this site have now been converted to Markdown syntax. They're still being loaded from a database but all the syntax is Markdown.

I've been toying with the idea of converting the site to "static content" whereas all entries are .md files and eliminating the database, but have not convinced myself that's where I want to go just yet. If I were to do that I'd also have to get more creative with the cool search feature I talked about in the previous post.

If you're like me and have never used Markdown before, or are wondering whether it would be beneficial to you, here are some articles about the benefits of Markdown and here's a cool tutorial and a nice getting started guide.

I want to give a big shout out to Michel for developing the PHP utility and also for responding to my email within 10 minutes when I had questions about it. And of course a big thanks to Tim--from my wife most of all, I'm sure--for keeping my attention focused on my website at night instead of anything else useful. :D