John Gruber, in talking about his thought process behind the new Markdown plug-in he wrote, “explains”:http://daringfireball.net/2004/03/dive_into_markdown why so-called nerds will use blogging software even though they are perfectly capable of hand-coding a frequently updated website:
bq. The answer is convenience and flexibility. Weblog software takes away an inordinate amount of the monotony involved with updating a web site. I must profess — I personally didn’t figure this out until 2002, a few months before I launched Daring Fireball. The fact that I was capable of hand-coding an entire web site — and in fact considered hand-coding easy — blinded me to the fact that it involved an awful lot of repetitive monkey work.
He’s exactly right. I have no fear whatsoever of ugly, naked HTML and CSS. But for the first time ever I have a truly dynamic website (and by “dynamic” I hope you understand that I’m not talking about whether the pages are static HTML or PHP) and the traffic is starting to reflect that. Why? Because before if I had something to say I had to go through so many repetitive, boring tasks to get the pages updated that most of the time it wasn’t worth the effort. My portfolio and non-blog sections of this site are suffering from this neglect now as a matter of fact ( “recently updated”:http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/archivesnew/graphicweb_design/updated_portfolio.html ) and therefore my site redesign will move my portfolio to its own “blog” for frequent updating/editing. Now, using “ecto”:http://www.kung-foo.tv/ecto/ or any web browser on any platform I can quickly get my content online and let scripts & back-end magic handle the presentation and dull stuff. Right now I’m typing this through my browser on my PC because that’s where I read the article I’m commenting on. Most posts are through ecto. I may even post from my Mom’s house or a computer at the public library. I don’t have to be concerned about what editors are there or what I can use to log in to my server via FTP to upload revised pages. All I need is my MT username and password and something to say. This is extremely cool.
He then goes into a whole explanation of why “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ is needed, but I haven’t figured out why I should use Markdown over my text formatter of choice, Textile. Textile is the very first thing I install on any MovableType system. I want to teach someone how to log in to their website and edit/upload a post. Do I want to give them a crash course in HTML or just give them a link to the “Textile formatting cheat sheet”:http://www.bradchoate.com/mt/docs/mtmanual_textile2.html that’s so much easier to understand for a newbie compared to HTML. Easier to explain ==”What they want the world to see”:http://www.wherelinkgoes.com or *this is bold* _this is italic_== No worries about whether or not the fact that they forgot a closing tag breaks the page. He says that Markdown created entries preview more like the final version but I looked at the sample code and I don’t see much difference between that and Textile other than the fact that the syntax is different. Writing “in” Textile is already second nature to me so I don’t want to learn something new that does the same thing, but for weblog editors it’s nice to see that there are options. Options are good. 
*Update:* “Michael Tsai”:http://mjtsai.com/blog/2004/03/19/markdown_10b3.html explains why Markdown is different/better than Textile in a lot more detail. It makes sense in a “not all of it makes sense to someone who has a design degree and no programming training whatsoever” sort of way.
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Dan 05.05.04 at 12:35 pm
Mom,
Thanks for bringing this out. I have been searching for such insight but have found very little. Once I get my site up (yesternow.com exists, but not on the web just yet) I will point out what a great site you have. Regards.