This site was initially based on Barry Clark's excellent jekyll-now project, a great way to get a blog up and running.
My favorite markdown reference is:
https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet
Note that you must use github-flavored markdown, something it took me a while to figure out!
Then I decided to change the focus of my blog, so I got rid of the old content and wrote new content. I also went for a nicer look, using the Hyde theme based on Poole. But I got this wrong, and things didn't work too well. But I got disqus working!
So I scrapped everything, and rebuilt the blog from the bottom up using Poole and Hyde. And that's the version you see now. Hope you like it.