Scripting.com is a blog run by Dave Winer. Dave helped invent RSS which does a lot of behind the scenes things to make blogs work. Anyway Dave blogs, a lot, and has lots of things to say about blogging. He had a recent tweet talking about how he uses Twitter for first drafts. Its part of his ‘wordflow’.
I dig the term and idea of wordflow. Everything written starts in our heads caused by something else. Finding methods and ways of capturing those thoughts and bouncing them off of other people is a lot of what the web is about.
I am using WordPress to write my thoughts down and then publish them for anyone on the web to read. There is a lot of complicated stuff happening when I use WP to do this but I don’t think about much of it. I just write, add photos (which I spend time on optimizing), and click Publish.
Just over a year and a half ago WP pushed out an updated editor called Gutenberg. Before I started this site I had used Gutenberg, but not too much. Now I am using it daily and I have to say that I am sold on it, from a writing perspective.
For writing it is very fluid and easy to use. There are occasional issues where a selection acts strange, but I just have to click somewhere on the screen with my mouse and everything is fine. The layout looks much nicer than the old editor. I think this is something that a lot of people overlook/dismiss about writing software. If I don’t enjoy working in the editor I probably won’t use it as much.
Using Microsoft Word to write anything is annoying to me because the app itself is very cluttered. When I am writing I don’t need bold, italics, alignment, tab limiting, and all of the other options available in the tool bar. This is how the WP editor used to be. Now it is almost empty by default, and with the click of an ‘X’ in the upper right corner the screen is almost all writing space.
Adding a link is as easy as copying the URL, highlighting the text, and hitting the enter button. Gutenberg creates the link and I can keep on writing. If you want an internal link highlight the text and either click on the link icon fly-out or press ⌘K. Then start typing and it searches through existing posts or pages. Hit enter and keep on writing.
Before Gutenberg I would write in another app like Drafts or Ulysses, but now I write everything in Gutenberg. Its not as smooth as a native app but it is close enough.
Now everything is stored in WordPress. This means it is easier to find everything and drafts are that much closer to being Published.
Workout details
I have almost fallen off the wagon with my workouts. I have not been getting up early enough to exercise before work. I can fix this by going to sleep sooner. Today I did get some strength training in and then walked enough to close my activity rings on the watch.
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