I'm  currently in the process of relaunching my blog. This requires me
  to convert all my blog posts -- manually. It's necessary because I was
  using  a  custom  markup  language  all  the  time (9 years). Now, I'm
  converting to Markdown and I try to use as little markup as possible.

  Keep it simple.

  I chose Markdown because it can produce  nice  HTML  and  it's  nicely
  readable in its raw form.

  The  new  blog is also going to be multilingual. English and German. I
  can't translate all the old posts, that's just too much  work.  But  I
  can write new blog postings in both languages.

  All of this was triggered by an e-mail of an asian user. He asked if I
  can provide an English feed. (Not exactly an English feed, but a  feed
  that uses Google Translate.) He was not the first one to be interested
  in an English version of my blog ... So it's about time.