I have only written a few posts using Silvrback, but so far the experience has gone well. Below is a quick list of things to keep in mind if you have decided to give Silvrback a whirl.

Username

At some point during the registration process, you will be asked to choose a username. Your username will be publicly visible as the subdomain that points to your blog. For example, my user name is "tim" so my Silvrback home page is "http://tim.silvrback.com".

Custom URL Slugs

For each post, you can set the "custom URL slug". While creating and editing a post, there is a gear in the lower right corner that allows you to change the value for the slug, which will default to a URL-friendly representation taken from the title of your post. The custom URL slug forms the remainder of the URL for the page, after the domain name, once the post has been published. For example, for this post, I have set the custom URL slug to "silvrback-getting-started" which means the URL for this page will be "http://tim.silvrback.com/silvrback-getting-started".

Preview Window

While creating or editing a post, you can press the Preview button. Doing so will open an additional browser tab (or perhaps window based on browser settings) that shows the preview. Since I have multiple monitors, I found it most useful to tear the tab off into a separate window. The really cool thing is that the preview window is "live" and updates very soon after you have made changes into the post editor. There is no need to manually refresh it!

Markdown

The Silvrback markdown is easy to use, and pretty rich. I have found a few references that are a quick read, and will let you hit the ground running:

• Frequently Asked Questions: Some tips and tricks for Silvback
• Darning Fireball

Syntax Highlighting

If you plan to include any source code snips with syntax highlighting within your posts, pay special attention that the markdown syntax uses the grave accent character, which is a single-tic, back-slant quote: `.

This character is Unicode U+0060, ASCII 0x60, ASCII 96 decimal. Since I have a US-English keyboard, I do not have access to this character directly from my keyboard. You can use Windows Character Map to copy it, or copy it from elsewhere if you prefer. But, my preference is to use the old trick that has existed since the early days of DOS on PC:

Hold down the Alt key, type 96 from the numeric keypad, and then release the Alt key.

If you want to know which languages are supported, just keep in mind that Silvrback uses Pygments, so the supported lexers can be found here:

Pygment Lexers