This is Steva Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

These days, most of our writing life is now online. And because, of course, you listen to my previous

episode on using Markdown, you obviously use Markdown so that you can keep your writing flow

while still writing formatted text. There's a link to the Markdown

episode in this episode's transcript. Since writing that episode, however, I've come up with more

super secret advanced ways that Markdown can improve your productivity even more. Grandma

Cuddles is sending an email to her little kitty's parents about a field trip. It was a community

service trip. Grandma

Cuddles was going to teach the tots about the value of hard work through cleaning up their community.

She needed to send a liability waiver to each parent because, well, picking up pieces of trash

might involve sticks with a very sharp point that could accidentally pierce tiny feet and hands.

Grandma Cuddles uses an online mass mailing service to send these emails. She had sent emails like this before, so she just cut

and pasted chunks ripped from previous letters right into her web-based email composer. But every

time she sent herself a test email, the text that she had pasted in was in a different font.

Joker Man? Papyrus? Comic Sans? She couldn't send it like this. Use Markdown to get

great formatting when web-based editors won't cooperate. If you work on the web,

you may have a web-based email composer or a list manager. The primary function of a list

manager is to manage lists. That

means composing and sending messages. But every single online message composer I've used doesn't

quite work right. The message looks great in the editor, but the test message arrives, purple.

Yes, purple. Use Markdown to save yourself from these broken, half-working unreliable programs.

The purple text happens because the HTML that the editor generates is really quite messy.

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