Writing & editing content with Markdown

You'll write most of your posts using Markdown, which is a very simple plain-text formatting language. It's easy: type certain symbols to create certain kinds of basic formatting. It's a fast way to write because you can format your content without ever having to take your fingers off the keyboard. John Gruber (Markdown's inventor) wrote some great documentation here, but here's the essentials to get you started:

# Top level header
## Subhead (level 2)
### Subhead (level 3)

This is a paragraph of text.

This is another paragraph of text. 
Note there's a blank line in between. 

And here's a [link](http://pettingzooplush.com/news/).

To add emphasis use _underscores_ or *single asterisks* 
and to make something bold/strong use __double underscores__ or **double asterisks**.

This is how you add an image: ![Alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Optional title").
(Note that it looks just like a link, but with an exclamation point in front.)

Note the "/path/to/image.jpg" part can also be an absolute url: 
![Alt text](http://domain.com/yourimage.jpg "Optional title")

- This is
- a bulleted ("unordered")
- list

1. and
2. this is
3. a numbered
4. list

Note that you can also use regular HTML tags in markdown and it will pass right through:

This is _emphasized with markdown_ and this is <strong>bolded with HTML</strong>
 and both work equally well.