Markdown
From a post on the Asylum I discovered this wonderful Perl script called Markdown. It takes in plain text like this and turns out XHTML valid markup like this.
From their website:
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)
It certainly looks most interesting. I intend on testing it… sometime soon. When is a different matter, but, still. Give it a try, if you wish, and drop me a comment letting me know how you go.