July 15, 2008

GitHub Enables Markdown Documentation

I have been desiring to have the documentation that I write for my various projects on GitHub render to HTML when using a .markdown extension, just like they support doing for special files like README.markdown.

At first, I thought they'd eventually get around to it and that is the best I could hope for as surely they are too busy to respond to a non-paying customer like me. Then I learned they the used the Lighthouse ticket system to manage their project and took public submissions for features.

Before logging a feature request I did some searching and found a ticket alre ady out there requesting exactly this same feature that I wanted. So I just added my own comments to the ticket to give it a +1.

After a little back and forth I learned it was implemented tonight (just a week after my first comment). Good to see such responsive development.

An example of this feature can be found in my django- aws project which is simple app to provide some template tags to provide Amazon Web Services information a la boto.