OK, I've looked at this, and I'm afraid I am not going to take this on in its current form. If someone else would be so kind as to wrangle the markdown and grok the scripts, that's fine.
If after some time, no one else expresses a willingness to do this, then I will try to do some of it, but I hereby put the community on notice: I don't know markdown, and I'm not going to learn markdown.
If this is left to me, the markdown will go away, and HTML will gradually take its place. HTML is ugly, annoying, difficult, etc., but it has the immense advantage, to me, that I know it, and I know the toolchain (which is basically emacs + my browser).
So there it is --- anyone interested in taking this over? Best,
r