The Markdown markup language is perfect for writing system administrator documentation: it is lightweight, versatile, and easy to learn, so you spend your time writing instead of fighting with formatting.
The life of a Linux system administrator is complex and varied, and you know that documenting your work is a big time-saver. A documentation web server shared by you and your colleagues is a wonderful productivity tool. Most of us know simple HTML, and can whack up a web page as easily as writing plain text. But using Markdown is better.
Markdown is designed for writing text articles for the web, a writing tool rather than a publishing tool. Markdown files are designed to be easy to read, with a minimum of tag clutter, and with tags that flow naturally with your text. Blockquotes look like quotes, lists look like lists, and I think everyone is familiar with using *asterisks* for emphasis.
My favorite Markdown feature is its handling of special characters: there aren’t any. You don’t have to worry about using HTML special character codes for left angle braces and ampersands, which exist to make life difficult for people who write for the web, and a special nightmare when you’re trying to write a web document to teach HTML.
If Markdown is missing some HTML formatting that you want, no worries, just use the HTML tags right in your Markdown document.
Markdown Quickstart
Check out this example Markdown document:
# A Nice H1 Heading
## A Nice H2 Heading
### H3… Get it? This goes up to H6.
Paragraphs are easy! Just start typing, then separate them with a blank line. No muss, no fuss.
Who uses Markdown? Students, teachers, scientists, GitHub, Stackoverflow, Drupal, WordPress, Doxygen… It is supported in many programming languages, including Python, Perl, JavaScript, Haskell, Awk, C, C++, and many more.
Several Markdown extensions support advanced formatting, so if you want all kinds of fancy tables, image management, math equations, and multiple output document formats check out [PHP Markdown Extra](https://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/) and [MultiMarkdown](http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/). See the nice way of creating hyperlinks? No hassling with wrapping multiple tags for a single link.
> Blockquotes are paragraphs that start with an angle brace.
>
>> Go wild and make nested blockquotes.
>
> Then return to your first level.
> You can create a multiple-line blockquote with a single angle brace, and then load it up with as much text as you want, being all verbose and windy and everything.
> Or, use hard line breaks and
> start every line with an angle
> brace for more formatting
> control in your Markdown file.
> This won’t affect your HTML conversion.
Making bulleted lists is so easy you will weep with happiness. Unordered bulleted lists use hyphens, plus signs, or asterisks, whatever your whim desires. After conversion to HTML you get nice bullets no matter which one you used:
* You can
– even mix
+ them up.
Numbered lists use numbers followed by periods:
1. Like this
2. Numbered
3. List
List items can span multiple lines. The easy way is to not worry about identation:
* If you’re still reading this and thinking “Oh gosh, I know that keeping a sysadmin notebook is a good idea, but I never have time! And nobody will ever use it anyway, not even me!”
* I fear you are sadly mistaken. Tis true that many bosses are sadly impressed by drama and emergencies, rather than calm, smoothly running systems. It is also true that keeping everything in your head is faster than consulting documentation.
Or you can use indentation and line breaks, although when you convert to HTML it looks the same as without indentation and line breaks. But it’s more readable in your source Markdown file:
* But relying on memory becomes chancier
as your systems become more complicated,
and your memory is no good to anyone else
if you’re not there.
* I think that being indispensable is a
bad idea if you ever want any time off.
Wrapping words with *single asterisks* make italics, and **double asterisks** make bold. My favorite Markdown feature is not having to hassle with pairs of tags as much as in HTML. Mostly you just tag ’em once and move on. Paragraphs need no tags at all, which is glorious.
Easily Test It Yourself
You can quickly test an HTML conversion by copying the above example document into a plain text editor, and name it with an .md extension, for example “testmarkdown.md”. Then convert it to HTML with Python:
$ python -m markdown testmarkdown.md > testmarkdown.html
Open it in a web browser and behold! A simple, nicely formatted web page.
There are many converters and Markdown extensions. Start with John Gruber’s Markdown documentation, because as one of the inventors of Markdown he ought to know a thing or two about it. Then to find information about extensions and Markdown implementations with expanded features, try a Wikipedia search.
Then be a good sysadmin and start writing things down.
To learn more, check out the Essentials of System Administration course from The Linux Foundation.
