How convenient: today’s suggestion for blogging from the The Daily Post is to ask yourself:

why not write a post about either: a) Your feature wishlist (what do you wish WordPress.com did?) or b) Your top complaints, especially as it regards being a frequent blogger

Now of course I have one feature that I really would love to see, and that is the implementation of Markdown, a lightweight markup language by John Gruber. In John’s words:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

This post is currently being written in Markdown and I write most of my notes in Markdown, precisely for the fact that I can easily type them and read them as plain text without the sometimes enormously long HTML tags getting in the way and at the same time being able to very easily convert them to a formatted version, such as HTML.

Now I know that plugins exist for WordPress to allow blogging directly in Markdown. And if you have a self hosted WordPress blog you can install these plugins, but for WordPress.com this is not possible. I brought up the question in the new ideas forum to find out if it would be possible after all and generated a number of replies by supporters. I even went so far as to say I would pay for this feature although I believe it would be a very nice addition to WordPress.com as such.

So what is my number one feature I want to see on WordPress.com: the ability to write notes, articles and blogs in a simple and easily learnable markup that is consumable by humans and not only by computers.