Markdown cheatsheet

Markdown is a brilliant way to write content for the web. Here’s a quick overview of the most commonly used Markdown, for your reference.

Let’s start with headings

To make a heading, all you need to do is use # symbols before the heading itself, like this:

# Level 1 heading

## Level 2 heading

### Level 3 heading

#### Level 4 heading

##### Level 5 heading

##### Level 6 heading

If you’re like me and you want something that looks a little bit more like an actual heading, while you’re writing your article, you can also pop a line of = or - symbols underneath the heading to make it a level 1 or 2 heading, like this:

Level 1 heading
================

Level 2 heading
----------------

### Level 3 heading

#### Level 4 heading

##### Level 5 heading

##### Level 6 heading

My problem with doing it this way, aside from the lack of consistency, is that I can never remember which way round they are: using #s starts with one # and works up to six, but underlines start with two and goes down to one. Also, underlines shouldn’t be used for anything other thank links on the web, so there’s a bit of a disconnect.

General in-paragraph highlighting

What about bold, italics and what-not? Easy! Here’s how:

Here’s some *italic text*.

Here’s some **bold text**.

Just wrap the word or phrase you want to italicise (emphasise) or embolden (strongly emphasise) in either single or double asterisks!

You can also use underscores (_) for italics if you prefer.

Lists

Bulleted lists

Bulleted lists are for when you have a list of items and there’s no particular order to them. Just type a dash with a space between it and each item, like this:

- an item
- another item
- yet another item
- one more item

Don’t like dashes? You can also use plus signs (+) or asterisks (*). I used to use pluses as they stand out better, but I wrote an article on why I’ve decided to switch to dashes.

Numbered list

If there’s a definite order to your list items they should probably be numbered, rather than bulleted. All you do is type a number and a full stop, followed by a space and anything you write after that will be part of a numbered list:

1. first list item
2. second list item
3. third list item
4. fourth list item

Links

Links are a hugely important part of the web. Here’s how to link to other web pages in your articles:

Sentences [containing links](https://twitter.com/tempertemper) are great.

Surround the text you want to be the link in square brackets and—without a space—write or paste the link to the page you’re referencing in normal brackets. Piece of cake!

There’s also a special way to link to other pages in your site.

Digging deep

If you really want to get into Markdown, a great place to start is with John Gruber’s Daring Fireball website – he’s the guy who developed it and his documentation is extremely thorough!

And, by the way, in case you’re curious, I write all of my blog posts in Markdown. Any questions, just ask!