How to use Markdown in Blogspot posts

If your blog is hosted on running Blogspot and you want to use Markdown for your posts, here’s how to do it and future-proof your writing in the process.

1. Write your posts in a text editing program on your computer and save them on your computer. (I use a yyyy-mm-dd post title.txt format)
2. Then copy and paste the text into the online Markdown processor and click Convert to generate HTML. (Set “Filter” to “both” for extra typographic goodness.)
3. Finally, copy and paste the HTML into a new post in Blogspot.

This has two advantages. First, it future-proofs your blog. No matter what happens, if Blogger ever gets shut down or becomes undesirable to use for any reason, in ten years you’ll still have a very useable copy of all your writing. Second, a text-editing program is much less likely to crash than your browser. This approach eliminates the risk of a browser crash causing you to lose large amounts of work.

Getting Blogspot to play nice with your Markdown-generated HTML

This is the area people seem to have trouble with, but it’s really quite simple.

1. In Blogspot, go to Settings tab, then the Formatting section. Set “Convert Line Breaks” to No.

2. In your New Posts,

   • Make sure you are using the “Edit HTML” tab

   • Under “Post Options” (at the bottom) make sure

     • “Edit HTML Line Breaks” is set to Use <br /> tags
     • “Compose Settings” is set to Interpret typed HTML

It’s that simple really. Now you can paste in your Markdown-generated HTML without getting extra linebreaks or other wierdnesses.