About

The Way of Markdown is made by Rufus Pollock — economist, technologist, founder of Open Knowledge Foundation (the folks behind CKAN and much of the open data movement), and these days building Flowershow and Life Itself. I've spent twenty-something years on one theme in different costumes: information should be open, and you should own yours.

This site is that theme applied to everyday writing and knowledge. I kept explaining the same things to colleagues and friends — how to get out of Notion, why our team handbook is a git repo, how markdown plus a few tools replaces a stack of subscriptions — so I built the place that explains it once, properly. The manifesto is the short version of what we believe; the vision behind the site is the argument.

How this site is made

Exactly the way it tells you to make yours: it's a folder of markdown files in a public GitHub repo, edited in Obsidian and with AI tools, published by Flowershow. Every page has an "edit this page" link, and the raw markdown of anything you read is one click away in the repo. We eat the dogfood — even our roadmap is a plain-text data file rendered into a picture.

Full disclosure, since it matters: I build Flowershow, so the guides mentioning it as a publishing option is no coincidence — which is exactly why they always name the alternatives (Hugo, Jekyll, Astro, MkDocs…). The whole point of the markdown-based way is that the tools are swappable. Including ours.

Get in touch

• Corrections, ideas, arguments: GitHub issues — genuinely welcome, especially disagreement
• Anything else: [email protected]

If this site saves you from one proprietary format, it's done its job 🚀