Jan
2
2010
One of the things I have enjoyed about cloning Stackoverflow is that I have an opportunity to use technologies I probably wouldn’t have bothered playing with before. Getting openAuth up and running was simple, the jQuery plugins I have been experimenting with have been fun, and today I was fooling around with markdown for the first time.
I have always enjoyed the markdown syntax, and found it quite natural to use. When the SO team announced MarkdownSharp I figured it was a good time to implement “Ask a question”. Honestly, I had no idea where to begin so I Just downloaded the library. I don’t think they could have made it any easier to use: string foo = new Markdown().Transform(value).
I googled for a little bit looking for an editor that I liked. The one I settled on is WMD editor. I’m not certain, but I think it is the one that Sackoverflow uses. There isn’t much to say about it other then I like it. I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t find anything decent with built in syntax highlighting, but I can always jerry-rig something. If anyone knows of something pre-built please, let me know.
I am actually surprised at how smoothly this project is going. The biggest snag I have had is my UI design skills, but that was quickly solved with a clean site template. Maybe all is going well because everything has been built for me so far, and I just have to piece them together. Yet another perk of cloning a site that documented the technology used to build it.