I recently switched this blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. I really liked the idea of a pre-compiled web site that I can edit offline and upload with a simple git push (using GitHub’s pages) command. My editor of choice for the site is Emacs. Emacs has major mode for editing markdown and I am already well versed in it, so it was a natural choice.
One problem however, I wanted to open *.md files and have both the the markdown-mode (marjor mode) and flyspell-mode (minor mode) activated. It turns out that this was as simple as adding this to your ~/.emacs file.
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.md$" . markdown-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook (lambda () (flyspell-mode 1)))
And while you are at it, you might want to add
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)
to inhibit the startup message.