Markdown Language

Posted by on September 21, 2020

There are things about being a developer you’ll need to know, things that aren’t essential to programming logic, database design or object-orientation, but make everything easier. Today’s topic is Markdown language.

Markdown is representational, like HTML, only simpler and easier. The learn.co blogging platform comes with a user-friendly set of commands, It’s what you’ll use to write blogs and to make your README.md’s look good; in fact, the .md extension stands for Markdown. That user-frendly bar in our blogging platform? Here’s the markdown that’s going on beneath all that. It’s definitley helpful when you want to create and edit entries from within your github.io page, or make your project README’s look good. Markdown is also helpful for when you want to make slides and put them on your github page, like Girl Develop It does for their classes, using …. (ADD — the GDI slides, … )

Here are some tips for getting started.

Headers

Headers use hashtags, or octothorpe, as they’re more formally known. # is an h1-sized header ## is h2-sized ### is like an h3

Just like HTML, you can go down to 6: An h6 header is equal to 6 hashtags..

Emphasis

Bold and Italics

Bold and Bold Italics Italics

Lists

Unordered lists

  • First Item
  • Second Item
    • First Inside Item
    • Second inside Item

Want an ordered list instead?

`1. First Item

  1. Second Item
    1. First Inside Item
    2. Second inside Item

That’s not a typo. Use “1”s.

Getting Fancier

Task Lists are a special Github Markdown feature.

  • [ ] Sinatra code
  • [ ] Video of me coding
  • [ ] Write blog about Sinatra project
  • [ ] make video that shows the video in action
  • [ ] commit often!

Github will also automagically change a url into a link. If this doesn’t work for any reason, wrap the text in square brackets and the link itself is parentheses. (And a big plus: you can use this pattern of square brackets and parentheses to make relative links inside your page, for when it gets long or if you use a Table of Contents.

### To make a cross out, use two tildes in a row. This code: ~~cross this out ~~ will show as cross this out. DO THIS

Oh, and block quotes, should you need them. Just stash an > at the beginning of the line. EXAMPLE

There’s another that comes in handy when you want to quote code, just like in AAQ, it’s three backticks. EXAMPLE.

Q. How’d you get those fancy show-boxes? A. Thanks to Seth… I used Carbon.

More

Most people use the header hashtags, and that’s about it. Here’s more.

Github’s Guide to Mastering Markdown: https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/ More: https://help.github.com/articles/basic-writing-and-formatting-syntax/ and of course, the Emoji Cheatsheet: https://www.webpagefx.com/tools/emoji-cheat-sheet/