You Don't Need Markdown to Blog—But It Makes It Easier

I originally posted this post on my blog.

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These days, Ben, one of my email subscribers, asked me a question about blogging using Markdown.

Here's an edited version of his email:

I have been on a journey to start a coding blog over the past couple of months but just cannot get behind Markdown blogging in an IDE, which seems to be the most common or popular way to create a blog. I find it far easier to use some web service that essentially amounts to a rich text editor.

What would you recommend in this instance? Am I missing some obvious solutions or is getting the hang of Markdown just the way everyone recommends doing this?

Well, I'm a plain-text fan. Writing posts using Markdown on a text editor is my favorite way to blog.

Do you have to use Markdown? Short answer: No.

You could write HTML files and publish them directly to the Internet.

I've even seen people blogging using GitHub Gist or public GitHub repositories. They simply share file URLs from the repo.

A Markdown-based blogging engine like Jekyll is convenient. You could try editors like MacDown or Typora. These days, I'm using Notable. Or you could try a Markdown extension for Visual Studio Code.

And by the way, these days, I found a guy who runs his blog with Obsidian, if you're looking for inspiration.

Now, if you're writing for the first time on the Internet, I'd recommend to start on a "social blog."

A social blog is a place for long-form writing with an audience and a distribution mechanism, like dev.to or Medium.

Social blogs are "slower" than social media platforms like Twitter/X or LinkedIn, but "faster" than traditional blogs or websites. It's easier to get traction on a social blog than on a personal blog, which sits behind search engines and their bots.

I'd recommend starting on dev.to.

Apart from my blog, that's my go-to platform for my coding content. It has a decent built-in editor with basic formatting, but still uses Markdown.

It has a large audience of mostly beginner coders learning web development. Of course, you can share any content related to coding there.

You have nothing to lose by starting a blog. Start writing, even if it's just one post. Start by writing TIL posts. Choose the simplest option so you can focus on writing, not tweaking tools or writing your own blogging engine.

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How do you write your posts? Are you a Markdown fan? What app do you use for blogging?

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Comments

[Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard]

Hola parcero !

I have been a markdown fan since it was published as a Perl script

• You need an universal format where you con copy paste from GitHub to Dev.to to Obsidian to Hugo to
• Plain text ASCII is the first iteration of that universal format but it's rather dull
• HTML is the other universal format you would naturally think of but it's rather verbose
• What if you used conventions for bold, italic, urls, lists, headings in plain text ? Well as it turns out, that's what people writing Plain Text Emails were already doing
• And voilà, the idea of markdown is born, plain text with conventions in place that has natural HTML view
• I like more the idea of markdown that what it actually is today. It's ridicoulous that there is no syntax for table of contents, or that the syntax for images or tables is worse than plain HTML. There are better iterations of markdown like asciidoc
• But it's too late to switch ecosystems, and the markdown ecosystem of markdown is amazin. I love Obsidian so much !

The other killer feature of markdown is that it enables distraction free UX in all websites.

I don't want each website to implement a bad custom UX à la Microsoft Word, and with markdown I don't need to.

[Cesar Aguirre]

Hola Jean-Michel,

You need an universal format where you con copy paste from GitHub to Dev.to to Obsidian to Hugo

You're right! That's a good point in favor of Markdown, specially since it's become like the de-facto syntax for text.

I don't want each website to implement a bad custom UX à la Microsoft Word, and with markdown I don't need to.

Truth is I haven't touched Word, probably since I wrote a paper for graduation back in college, a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

[Shayne Kessler]

Great question! 👌 You definitely don’t need Markdown to start a blog—it’s just one of the popular tools because it keeps writing distraction-free and converts nicely to clean HTML.

If you’re more comfortable with a rich text editor, that’s perfectly fine. Platforms like WordPress, Ghost, or even Medium allow you to write in a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) style editor and handle the formatting for you.

Markdown is more about flexibility, portability, and version control (especially if you’re using GitHub or want to keep your content future-proof). But if your main goal is to write consistently, the tool that makes it easiest for you is the best one.

I’d say: start where you feel comfortable, and if later you want more control or lightweight formatting, you can always learn Markdown—it’s pretty easy to pick up in small steps.