Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make italics bold and other silly effects easily.

• Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
• Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
• Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
• A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
• I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.