The Markdown Rules MarkdownifierI was featured on MacSparky.com today. Well, the home screen of my iPhone was, anyway. He mentioned a project of mine that I haven’t actually had time to blog about yet, so here’s a quick introduction. It’s called MarkdownRules, and comes in two flavors: mild-mannered and salty. You can choose which you get from the main menu page at http://markdownrules.com.

The Markdownifier you’ll find there (his name is Marky), will take a url you provide and do its best to clean up comments and ads (using PHP Readability) and then convert it to Markdown (using PHP Markdown). It does a pretty decent job overall, and I’ve been tweaking as I have time to handle edge cases.

The fun is really in the bookmarklets, though, which you’ll find toward the bottom of the page in either version. The “API” that I set up will take a series of query arguments and return different formats based on your request. You can tweak the URL in the bookmarklet to do more than the four provided do, including returning JSON-formatted output.

Why? Web clipping mostly. I wanted to be able to quickly save articles and blog posts into nvALT in a format that would be workable. The next version of nvALT will include this capability internally, but this was something that everyone could, ostensibly, make use of.

To see updates as they happen, and to be somewhat entertained on an infrequent basis, follow @i_marky on Twitter.