Why I Use Markdown to Write My Drafts

Medium is a good online editor, but it has limitations. Markdown also has limitations, but these are outweighed by its simplicity, ease of storage, longevity, and ability to convert to other formats.

What is Markdown?

Introduced in 2004, Markdown was created by John Gruber in collaboration with Aaron Swartz. The goal was to create a clear and intelligible formatting language that could easily be converted to HTML.

Despite its name, Markdown, like HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), is a markup language used to format documents. The name Markdown was chosen to emphasise its simplicity compared to HTML.

Simplicity

Markdown has a very simple syntax. Below, I have listed some examples with the HTML equivalents in A Basic Guide to Markdown. Some of the syntax in this article has alternatives, but I have shown the ones I prefer to use.

Ease of Storage

Markdown documents can be stored on a computer, an external disk, a memory stick or in the cloud.

Longevity

How many documents did you lose access to when 'doc' became 'docx', 'xls' became 'xlsx' and 'ppt' became 'pptx'? These changes happened when Microsoft Office 2007 was introduced and the formats were changed from binary to XML.

Markdown is a simple text document and will always be accessible.

Format Conversion

Some Markdown editors can export documents to HTML and PDF formats. Documents can also be converted to HTML and other formats using Python or Pandoc.

It is easy to copy and paste a story from Markdown's reader screen to Medium. If you are using Obsidian as your Markdown editor, simply pasting HTML onto the editing screen converts the document to Markdown.

Medium's Pros and Cons

Pros

• Intuitive
• Easy-to-use editor
• Automatic saving of drafts

Cons

• No tables
• No backup of articles
• Only two headings (T1 and T2)
• No superscript
• Scheduled drafts are not shown separately

What happens if Medium's site has an outage? Even a short outage can disrupt your work.

Even worse, what happens to your work if your account is suspended? Would you lose all your work?

You can download your Medium stories but you would have to do this regularly to protect your work.

Downloading your Medium stories

Profile Icon > Settings > Security and apps > Download your information > Click "Export"

You will receive an email with a link to download a zip file. Once the zip file has been expanded, your stories will be found in the Posts folder.

It's far better to store your stories on your computer and in the cloud where they are fully protected and you are in complete control.