markdown2use

Here some possible uses of Markdown and the HumaneText Service. As an example, let us take the noncommutative geometry & algebra page maintained by Paul Smith.

If you copy the source of this page to BBEdit and use the html2txt.py script in the #! menu (see this post) you get a nicely readable Markdown-file which strips the page of all its layout and which is easy to modify, for example to include author and URL at the start, remove some additional empty lines, make relative URLs absolute and so on.

Applying the Markdown.pl script to it one gets a nice RetroCool version of the page. For starters, this gives a way to make your own collection of websites you like in a uniform layout (of course, later on you can add your own CSS to them).

More important is that the Markdown-version (see here for the text-file) is extremely readable and allows to mine all links easily (as you can see all links contained in the HTML-page are referenced together at the end of the file). So, this is a quick way to collect homepage- and email-links from link-pages.

Btw. there are different ways to include links in a markdown text, for example I like to write it immediately after the reference, so doing a Markdown.pl followed by a html2txt.py doesn’t have to reproduce your original file and fortunately you will always end up with a file having all links referenced at the end. So, this procedure allows you to have uniformity in a collection of markdown-files.

Equally important for me (for later use in an intelligent database using DevonThink ) is that the Markdown file is the best way to safe the HTML file in the database (as a RTF file) while maintaining readability (which is important when DevonThink returns snippets of information).