Markdown

How NGX-Ramblers uses Markdown

For websites designed a few years ago, the website author would have to create static html pages in their editor of choice and then upload them to the website in order for changes to be seen. However this approach is cumbersome, slow and complex for webmasters that are not technical.

All of the dynamic content pages on the site you are looking at, use markdown as the method of adding content to the site and none of this requires the website administrator to go near any html files or write any code at all. There is a separate section on how the different page structures can be created in the Editing Content page, but this page explains how the various text areas within those pages can be formatted with markdown.

Learning Markdown

Markdown is a way to write content for the web. It’s written in what people like to call “plaintext”, which is exactly the sort of text you’re used to writing and seeing. Plaintext is just the regular alphabet, with a few familiar symbols, like asterisks ( * ) and backticks ( ` ).

Unlike cumbersome word processing applications, text written in Markdown can be easily shared between computers, mobile phones, and people. It’s quickly becoming the writing standard for academics, scientists, writers, and many more. Websites like GitHub and reddit use Markdown to style their comments.

Formatting text in Markdown has a very gentle learning curve. It doesn’t do anything fancy like change the font size, color, or type. All you have control over is the display of the text—stuff like making things bold, creating headers, and organizing lists.

If you have ten minutes, you can learn Markdown!

Tutorials

Paste HTML or a URL Directly

The easiest way to bring content from another website is to paste it straight into the text editor. The system automatically detects HTML content and offers to convert it to markdown for you — with the option to split it into separate rows for a well-structured page. You can even paste a URL and the system will fetch the page and convert it.

See the Advanced Content Import guide for full details.

Tools for Converting HTML to Markdown

If you have an existing site with html pages and you want to migrate to ngx-ramblers there might be some content that you want to lift from the old site to the new site. In this situation, it can be helpful to use an automated conversion facility. Whether you need to convert a simple snippet quickly or automate the conversion of huge amounts of scraped HTML, there are a number of Markdown conversion tools available.

The Best Web to MD Converter: CodeBeautify

CodeBeautify's converter stands among the best online tools for HTML to Markdown conversion. This tool is not only convenient but also efficient and reliable, ensuring that users have a smooth conversion experience.

Like most online converters, CodeBeautify lets you directly paste HTML into the tool's text editor. But one key feature of CodeBeautify's tool is support for loading HTML from a URL or file upload.

CodeBeautify uses client-side technology to perform conversions entirely in your browser without sending your code to a server, ensuring data privacy and security.

The Best HTML to Markdown Browser Extension: Copy as Markdown

Copy as Markdown is a practical browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that streamlines the process of converting HTML to Markdown.

Copy as Markdown provides a convenient, user-friendly interface for converting content to Markdown from the browser. It's available as both a Chrome extension and Firefox add-on.

Examples

See buttons below for examples of pages copied from other sites and converted into markdown!

Cotswold Outdoor

Example of how the Ramblers Cotswold Outdoor discounts page was copied into markdown and added as a new page to this site

Ramblers Route Example

Example of how a Ramblers Route page was copied into markdown and added as a new page to this site