I've been writing a lot of github markdown recently and wanted a way to preview how it'll look in a browser as I'm writing it.

With github-markdown-preview and live.js I put together my first ruby gem: github-markdown-server.

Just fire it up pointing at a markdown file and it'll covert it to html and serve it. It'll then keep monitoring the file and if it changes on disk, it'll refresh the browser.

In the contrib directory I added emacs lisp code to automatically fire it up and reuse/manage servers for multiple files. So now when I'm editing a file in emacs I just hit control-f1 and that file opens up in my browser. The control-f1 command also opens up source files on github if you are in a github cloned repository.