Markdown is a now widely used mark-up language on the web. It allows you to write plain text in a special format that can be programmatically converted to HTML. This can be especially useful when editing text from a mobile device where, for example, highlighting text to make it bold is significantly trickier than on a PC. You can see how to use the Markdown syntax at http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Of course, to get this running is quick and simple in Python. We install it as follows:

sudo pip install Flask-Markdown

Then we can apply it to our blueprint or app as follows:

from flaskext.markdown import Markdown
Markdown(app)

This makes a new filter available in our templates called markdown and that can be used when rendering your template:

{{ entry.body | markdown }}

Now all you need to do is write and save your blog entry content in Markdown...