Writing for the web with Markdown: Alternatives to HTML

I'm just writing about this on the odd chance that someone here can use it, although I recognize that this post will probably resemble one of those unpopped kernels of corn that gets discarded, and that's ok.

Markdown is this simple little language that can be auto-converted to HTML, but is much easier to write than HTML and uses a lot of email conventions. Italics are like *this* for example.

So there's a free Markdown editor for the Mac called "Mou." http://mouapp.com/

It shows your text on the left, how it is rendered on the right side, and it can auto-export in HTML when you're done. In addition, a lot of wikis support markdown. Here's a screen cap of Mou:

Anyway, it's terribly convenient if you have to create a lot of text for the web, it's free, and you don't have to mess around with the wackiness that is Dreamweaver.

There are a number of tools out there that will automatically convert Markdown to html, I just use Mou because it is so painless.

Oh, I just discovered that Textwrangler (also free) will convert Markdown. Neat.

Markdown in Textwrangler From Wikipedia:

Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz allowing people "to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)".[1] The language takes many cues from existing conventions for marking up plain text in email.

Markdown is also a Perl script written by Gruber, Markdown.pl, which converts marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML or HTML and replaces left-pointing angle brackets ('<') and ampersands with their corresponding character entity references. It can be used as a standalone script, as a plugin for Blosxom or Movable Type, or as a text filter for BBEdit.[1]

The Eagleman Stag

This was definitely worth eight minutes of my life.

aggregating student blogs

I'm using student blogs in a hybrid American lit course, and am trying to figure out the best way to read their work. While writing this query I came up with a solution so I thought I'd send it to the list. Some of my initial attempts at reading student blogs in one place included:

1. Making a wiki page with links to each blog

2. Placing the blogs in a folder in Google reader (this is proving to be surprisingly difficult and counter-intuitive). In addition to folders Google Reader has something called "bundles."

 What I eventually ended up doing was combining their RSS feeds into a single feed and place them in a widget on the course home page. This is proved more difficult than I thought, and took about 2.5 hours of messing around. Chimpfeedr appears to create a useable aggregated feed, but it was difficult to find an rss-->widget creator that actually works, hasn't gone offline, etc.

 Eventually (while drafting this note) I ended up googling around and using this service to create the embedded html widget that shows all of the blogs at once:

http://www.rssdog.com

 So to recap, this is how I cobbled everything together:

1. Asked students to create blogs

2. Copied their blog RSS feeds and used http://mix.chimpfeedr.com to turn them into a single RSS feed.

3. Took that feed over to http://www.rssdog.com/ and created html that I then pasted in a wiki page within Canvas-Instructure. 

Here is the sample feed I created: http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/d503a-amlit-2520 (note: I have since added a late student and created a newer feed)

 I wonder if there is a more elegant solution for aggregating student blogs that I've overlooked. I also don't like depending on free services that could disappear tomorrow.