When you are setting up your Postach.io blog for the first time you'll notice there is a tickbox for using Markdown. If you don't know what Markdown is or why you should use it read on.

What Markdown Is

Markdown is a lightweight markup language, which means kind of like HTML you can **Bold** words, denote Headings like H1, H2 and H3 (great for SEO) and do things like create [links](http://www.postach.io).

Why would I want to use Markdown?

First of all it's less work. Lets take a look at the formating examples from above shall we.

It's Clean, Easily Edited, Flexible

Markdown translates easily and quickly to HTML and you don't have to worry about the usual problems of missed closing tags, improperly nested tags and the rest. There's also no styling done inline which means it can't possibly break a sites design.

Use any text editor you want and never worry about formatting issues with PDF's (XSLT)

Markdown can be used in a wide variety of applications, HTML for web of course and blogs like Postach.io, rich text emails or it can be edited in a ton of layout programs.

If you want to learn more about Markdown and the various syntaxes you should visit John Gruber's site Daring Fireball as he is the creator of it.