basic Bearblog building blocks
I've been using raw HTML/CSS on here, which works perfectly fine — and reminds me of the good ol' days on The Free Radical, which I love.
But straight-up Markdown works just as well, which I'm employing here now on this post as a demonstration to illustrate. ::chuckle:: Herman included a Markdown cheatsheet, which is handy.
The Good Ol' Days
My students and I started blogging as veritable pioneers of the form, back in 1996, i.e. even well before the development of Markdown (by both John Gruber and the now-internet-sainted Jon Swartz).
I will be forever indebted to Dave Winer — whose company (Frontier Userland), software (Manila/Radio) and blogging platform (editthispage.com) my students and I used in our first forays into this new weblogging thing. It was such a revelation to be able to freely write and post online, sharing it all in a virtual community that first started locally... and spread globally, over time. And this was all well before social media. The halcyon days of the internet, as it were.
The Fresh New Todays
Fast forward 3 whole decades to the present, and that sort of web-writing has become hard to find, what with the corrosive consequences of said social media. There remain small outposts of it, of course, and I'm happy to have stumbled onto one such vector here.
Wonderfully, I'm able to actually use straight-up HTML/CSS in the writing of these posts, as I mentioned earlier. It's giving old-school frissons of nerdiness, a sensation of a throwback to simpler days online, but also a degree of freedom that's no longer the default in online spaces.
Long may Bearblog endure.
[ images from yesterday's walk ] <-- this is a tiny header in Markdown
