I Write Everything in Markdown and Then Paste HTML Everywhere
My whole writing workflow starts in Markdown. Notes, documentation, blog drafts — everything. And then I spend five minutes converting it to HTML every single time I need to post it somewhere. This tool exists because I was tired of that five minutes.
Markdown was designed by John Gruber in 2004 to be a lightweight syntax that maps directly to HTML. The problem is that most places on the web — CMSes, email tools, API documentation systems — take HTML, not Markdown. So you write in Markdown because it's fast, and then you need a conversion step before you can actually use what you wrote.
What Gets Converted
The converter handles all standard Markdown syntax. Headings from # through ###### become h1 through h6. Bold text wrapped in double asterisks becomes strong tags. Italic with single asterisks becomes em. Inline code in backticks becomes code tags. Fenced code blocks with triple backticks become pre and code blocks.
For structure: unordered lists with dashes or asterisks become ul with li elements. Ordered lists with numbers become ol. Blockquotes with the greater-than sign become blockquote tags. Links in the standard bracket-parenthesis format become anchor tags with href attributes. Images with the exclamation mark prefix become img tags with the alt text preserved.
There's also a live preview tab so you can see how the HTML will render before you copy it. I find this useful for catching formatting mistakes — especially nested lists that sometimes don't render the way you expect.