#Markdown

I’m in the terminal, reading some documentation, and I come across a Mermaid diagram. I want to quickly understand the flow, but instead I’m staring at a bunch of arrows, brackets, and text. The table below it stretches beyond the edge of the screen, and the image is just a filename.

This happens quite a bit. I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and most of my Markdown files aren’t just text anymore. They have diagrams, tables, images, and other things that don’t translate particularly well to cat or less.

Back in the Web 2.0 days, RSS and Atom feeds promised a better way to consume content. No more jumping between websites just to catch up on what’s new. You could open a single feed reader and get everything in one clean stream. It felt like the web finally worked for you instead of the other way around.

As the ecosystem grew, new tools appeared around it. One of the biggest was FeedBurner, which Google later acquired. It helped publishers track subscribers, manage feeds, and even monetize them by inserting ads directly into the feed. It was an early version of what we now call native advertising - ads that blended right in with regular content.