The best Markdown editor plugin ever. Includes live preview, smart editing, and a smack of other brilliant features.

Now this Markdown cheatsheet is what a cheatsheet should look like.

A few more improvements for my SimpleLink WordPress plugin …

• Fixed _ parsing bug ([Markdown] was munging underscores, now plays nicer with Markdown)
• Added open links in new window for pkzip.

You can download wp-simplelink-0.4.tar.gz, or visit the SimpleLink page for more details.

I’ve been playing with WordPress 1.5 and the Markdown plugin that ships with it, and I’m impressed. The new version of WordPress adds several key features, including custom pages, improved comment-spam tools, theme support, and a really slick default theme. And while I’ve seen Markdown before (it shipped with WordPress 1.2.2, and was available for MoveableType) this is the first time that I’ve taken the time to really learn it. Both Markdown and Wordpress 1.5 are solid tools.

Markdown is good enough that I’m going to use it in place of my MagicMarkup tool. It’s similar to Textism and ReStructuredText, providing a natural markup syntax for writing weblog articles. So instead of maintaining my MagicMarkup tool, I’ll continue to write extension plugins for WordPress and other great tools, for functionality that doesn’t exist yet. It seems futile to pollute a solution space that’s arlready populated with many intelligent products.

The ‘pages’ feature in WordPress brings it closer to a Wiki, allowing you to add arbitrary pages to a website. They solve problems like project pages, archives, and other non-article content. I can see using this feature for extending my site to include other web tools, without having to hack pages in by hand, though I’ll still have to write a plugin or two.

As WordPress and Markdown are good enough for my purposes, I can cut out two of my larger personal projects (BenderBlog and MagicMarkup). In their place, I’m working on a few plugins: