A short guide on tools to help you get more interesting content and formatting into your Steem posts.
Adding images and formatting to your Steem posts the easy way
Steemit supports formatting and links on both posts and comments through a system called "Markdown".
Markdown is a way of marking the text you write so it can be interpreted and displayed as you intended, with bold bits, italics...
Headers
- Lists
- ...
Images...
Horizontal...
...Rules
and various other ways to make your posts more readable and interesting.
Markdown without marking down
Its not difficult to learn markdown but when you're presented with a small blank space in the 'Post' or 'Reply' section on Steemit it can be daunting at first.
One very simple way to get confident and get going though is to grab a Markdown editor.
Markdown Editors
Markdown editors are available for free on any major desktop operating system and can even be had for iOS and Android. Markdown editors like Macdown on MacOS and MarkdownPad on Windows (both can be used for free) provide you with a two-pane editor and highlighting to make it clear when you've done it right, and when you haven't and give you a large workspace to work in and see how your edits look when they are rendered on the site.
You can work away in a nice spacious area, saving your work as you go and picking it up later to work on larger posts and when you're ready to go you can just hit Edit-Select All, copy the markdown and paste it in as your post.
Other (paid) Markdown editors like Byword on MacOS and Texts on Windows and MacOS even let you type as if you were using a word processor, selecting bits of text and making them bold or italic, setting lines to headers just as you would in MS word or a similar app.
Markdown is easy to learn though and with a Markdown editor and a few resources you'll be posting in no time.
More Markdown Resources
The simplest and most important thing you'll want is a cheat sheet for Markdown. Editors make Markdown easy to use but they don't necessarily tell you when to use hashes, stars or dashes. This cheatsheet though gives you a simple reference to all the options.
The next thing you'll need is a site to host images you want to upload so you can put links to them into your content. I've had problems with imgur so I'm currently using Imgsafe.org, postimage.org is another option. Once you upload an image to these sites you can get a short link that you can use in your markdown to make the image appear in your posts.
For the more adventurous among you, this online Markdown table generator can easily set up a table structure for you to use.
If you have any other good Markdown tool or resource suggestions leave them in the comments...