The "What?" and the "Why?"

I've been a fan of the MultiMarkdown for quite a while now. I keep all of my important notes in this format, which is easy to write with just a simple text editor.

I wanted to be able to copy or sync my *.mark files to my web server and have them automatically be rendered as XHTML. I looked into a couple of ways of doing this. One of which is the Text::MultiMarkdown::ApacheHandler Perl module Apache handler. The downside is that this handler doesn't work out of the box in Apache2.2.

Read on to see my solution. I've also seen a cgi based apache handler done by reppep as chronicled here. The only problem is that he's using the original Markdown. I've long been a fan of the extended syntax, and output formats I can get from MultiMarkdown. So I've build a similar script to what reppep has done.