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Text, Only Text, and Nothing But The Text—WriteRoom, Dark Room, and DarkCopy

WriteRoom

I have been playing around with two products, WriteRoom and Dark Room, which allow users the ability to edit text in a completely isolated environment. Essentially, these editors give users the ability to focus on the text, and only the text. For the professional blogger/writer, one of these text editors might become invaluable to your writing process.

Some of you will find either of these applications to be worthy as your new primary text editor, but the rest of you will think they are far to primitive, but if you are the former, like one of my followers on Twitter, you will absolutely love the concept of being able to write without distraction.

Another user on Twitter messaged me stating that text editing tools were the last things that distracted him while writing. I find that the text editor I utilize happens to have a dramatic impact on how productive I am when writing. For example, I have a difficult time using web-based text editors (like the built-in WordPress editor), but I absolutely enjoy using an application like Windows Live Writer and ecto to write my articles.

These applications will probably generate no interest for quite a few of you, but I have already decided to incorporate WriteRoom into my workflow. It is a throwback that I absolutely love, and I am usually the one that loves the fancy interfaces.

WriteRoom

WriteRoom is the first product that was created (as Dark Room is simply a clone of WriteRoom). Built for the Mac operating system (now supporting OS X 10.4 or later), WriteRoom was designed to eliminate the common distractions that are apparent with most text editing environments today. The application eliminates formatting, graphs, spacing, pictures, and more by focusing on only the most important aspect of a writing—the words.

A few features highlighted from the WriteRoom website:

  • Full-screen editing Get free from your computer and its distractions. WriteRoom’s full-screen mode hides it all away leaving just you and your text behind.
  • Document based auto-save Your documents are stored in standard text file formats and autosaved in the background to help protect your work in case the power goes out.
  • Distraction free features The menu bar, scroll bar, and word count appear when you move your mouse to the edge of the screen.
  • ‘Retro’-fit your cursor Prefer block cursors to bars? Hate blinking cursors? WriteRoom has every combination you’d want.
  • Standalone or Edit-In Use WriteRoom on its own for all your text editing needs, or let WriteRoom be your ticket to full-screen editing for text in any compatible program.

WriteRoom is not without a price—$25 might be out of bounds for some, but I would urge everyone with a recent Mac based computer to at least give WriteRoom a try. There is a free 30 day trial, and that should be plenty of time to try the application out. However, the price is warranted because WriteRoom is continually upgraded—unfortunately, its Windows counterpart, Dark Room, does not receive the same benefit.

Dark Room

Dark Room, as mentioned before, is simply a clone of WriteRoom for the Windows platform. It is very similar in functionality, and it delivers as promised. As a matter of fact, there is almost little point in having a section for Dark Room, but there are some critical differences outside of the application itself that I must point out.

Dark Room is free, but that is also as a result of there not being as many upgrades or support. Also, and unfortunately, there is no support for Vista (yet), and this might be a turn off if you happen to use Dark Room and wish to switch to Vista in the future. Perhaps everyone should e-mail the author and ask for an upgrade. Regardless, if you are on a Windows XP machine, I think you should give it a shot—after all, it is free!

Recap

Virginia Huffernan of The New York Times put it better than I ever could have:

But if, when it comes right down to it, full screen is your holy grail, and the ultimate antidote to the bric-a-brac of Word, then you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia. Where Scrivener calls itself a “writer’s shed,” which suggests implements like duct tape and hoes, WriteRoom pitches itself as the way to “distraction-free writing” for “people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world.” With WriteRoom, you don’t compose on anything so confining as paper or its facsimile. Instead, you rocket out into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens “Star Wars.” What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else.

*Emphasis added in bold type.

Oh, and did I mention that there is actually a free web-based clone of WriteRoom as well? Try DarkCopy (select full screen mode) if you want to try it out without downloading anything. I actually wrote part of this post on DarkCopy, and I really enjoy it, but you would really want to download WriteRoom or Dark Room if you wanted to work in a production environment.

Does the minimalistic full-screen view make you happy or afraid? Do you think that we have become too focused on fancy markup and formatting, that the words themselves are sometimes an after-thought?

Give WriteRoom, Dark Room, and/or DarkCopy a try and let me know what you think. It is a twist on text editing for sure, but I have already begun to believe that my productivity has improved by simply becoming less distracted.

[Image Credit: WriteRoom Main Screen—HogBaySoftware]

Bloggers: How Do You Learn Something New?

You’ve probably heard/read the age-old advice to writers: write about what you know. Not to be contrarian, but there are ways to write about what you don’t know – or at least don’t know very well – and it’s a good way to learn a topic better.

Back when I was a teaching assistant in college, I found that when I taught various programming concepts, I was forced to understand them better. In a similar vein, when it comes to blogging, I find that writing tutorials helps me understand something better – especially if I do screencasts where I have to provide the narration. If you want to do the same, here’s a suggested process:

  1. Start with podcasting and transition your skills to screencasting or web video.
  2. Get free screencasting software such as Camstudio or Debut. When you have the budget, upgrade to TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio. (All of these only run on Windows, and there’s no free video screen capture tool for Mac that I’m aware of. Colleagues have found a few low-end Mac screen recording programs, but none seem as sophisticated as Camtasia Studio. Warning: I had technical problems using Debut. It hijacked my TV capture card as well as my sound. And the screen capture mode created one of those “infinite mirrors” types of screen recording of the visible windows.)
  3. Read whatever you can about the software you want to do a screencast about, as well as get familiar with the features.
  4. Choose a few features to write about and distill your knowledge into a tutorial article.
  5. Supplement the article wth screensnaps.
  6. If you can explain better with a screencast of you using some of the features, then add that to the article as well.

Once I’ve done a few screencasts/ tutorials about a subject/piece of software, I find that my understanding is much deeper. I’m only guessing but I think that part of the reason is because having to write/ teach/ screencast gives you a tangible goal of what you have to learn.

Of course, it’s easier to do tutorials and screencasts when you’re working with software. What do you if a tutorial or screencast isn’t suitable? How do you learn new topics then? That’s my question to you. Got any tips or links to articles you’ve written about learning and knowledge? Feel free to drop them off here.

The Writing Process: Creating An Outline

Outlining an article is one of the most productive things you can do to improve your workflow while blogging. Creating the outline for this article required only about two minutes to complete, and it will have saved me at least 15 minutes worth of editing time in the end on a typical article like this.

Ironically enough, it was only yesterday when I tried to write a short article without creating my usual outline. I spent around 30 minutes trying to reorder the content correctly as I didn’t want to start over. In the process, I nearly decided to scratch the whole article, but I have heavily revised it since then and will post it soon. This is why it is important to create an outline for all your articles.

My Outline Process

I have never before attempted to define my outlining process for writing, but I will do so as I best can right now. I have broken it down into four steps, and it is fairly simple—nothing too mind blowing here. Still, some people fail to do anything like this, and it is a shame that the short time planning out an article is skipped, but then more time is required to get the finished product.

Steps To Creating An Outline:

1. Come Up With An Idea

The first part in the creation of an outline is to have a solid theme/topic to work with. You must have something to blog about in order to continue the writing process, but some people start writing without having an overall idea as to what they will end up with. I would not suggest starting an article without at least having a basic idea of what you will end up with, but to each his/her own.

2. List Your Ideas

The next order of business would be to, essentially, create a list of each heading for your content. I sometimes like to create a list of the first sentence of each paragraph (which is the next step), but I mostly create a heading for each paragraph of content (as seen above). This method is simple, and it requires little time to place down multiple ideas.

3. Introductory Sentences

After I am done with creating my basic outline which consists of a header for each paragraph, I will then fill in the introductory sentence to the paragraph. This sentence should be the idea which the paragraph discusses; therefore, it should be easy to analyze the flow of your article if you take the time to do this step. Also, it should decrease the amount of time you take to actually write the rest of your article as you don’t have to interrupt yourself to think about what your going to write as often.

4. Check For Theme, Clarity, and Flow

After all the introductory sentences are filled in, I then give them a detailed read to imagine the content that will be written for those paragraphs to make sure the flow of the article is correct. As I have written before in previous articles for Performancing, the time taken right now to plan out your article will save you a lot of time later fixing mistakes.

It Just Works

These methods are simple ways to organize your ideas and maximize productivity. I have repeatedly stressed the importance of planning out your articles, and even if it is a 300 – 500 word article, it still warrants some planning. This was just some insight as to how I plan out all of my articles. It works for 500 word articles like this one, but I also have used it for 3,000 word articles that I have written in the past and right now.

Hopefully you have found a way to improve your workflow. Planning out your content is the best way to reduce the amount of editing you will have to do later on.

If you have a unique way to plan out your articles, please let everyone know in the comments section. I am open to learning new ways to decrease the time I spend writing.

Twitter As Resource?

After Perf’s own James Mowery tore two strips off of me in the comments of my non-rant post, Twittering or Navel Gazing?, I went and used my Twitter account for only the second time since July 2007. I asked, “So help me out. Why do you love Twitter?” I’m not sure if Dan York was responding to me, but about 25 minutes later he tweeted about Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky‘s article on Twitter as a Technical Resource (in which Dan is mentioned as a Twitterer followed by over a thousand people – 1200+, in fact). Dr. Yudkowsky says,

If you haven’t used it, Twitter is one of those “I don’t think I get it” technologies… I’m fascinated by the capabilities of Twitter. Twitter is disaggregated: Twitter allows access to Twitter as a building block for other services. Now I’ve begun to wonder just where all this will lead.

In a similar vein, Chris Winfield writes Twitter Wrote This Column For Me. In it he explains how he asked several questions on Twitter and offered to link to the best answers – which he did, in his article. Of course, if you haven’t realized it consciously, I used the same method to write this article. In fact, Alex at Geekpreneur says Twitter is a great way to stimulate ideas – for blog posts or otherwise – if your mind has gone blank.

Now these are some of the ways I’d be happy using Twitter, and I can’t believe I didn’t “get that” about Twitter until now. Why didn’t I? A few reasons:

  1. One study I had wanted to do last year on Twitter was build a “web corpus” of the vocabulary of Twitterers. Besides the fact that there was too much noise with acronyms and short forms, there was no good search engine for refined searches on Twitter. [Now there is one. Aaron Wall points to Summize, a real-time search engine that scans Twitter. There’s a Summize API,
    if you want to get sophisticate in your searches and results in a feed
    (Atom format only) or in JSON. (Should we start expecting Twitter-like
    tweets in our blog comments? Might be time to turn on CAPTCHA for your
    comments, if you haven’t done so.)]
  2. When I first started using Twitter, I “followed” the people I knew online as well as many top bloggers/ online celebs. The people who knew me were often in different time zones, and the celebs didn’t really know me. The few that were also following me didn’t respond back if tweeted a question. However, that usually means (1) they’re not online; (2) they’re occupied with something else; (3) I didn’t use “@theirtwittername” in front of my question.
  3. Using Twitter isn’t really conducive to use in a web browser, even while using a (Firefox) extension such as Twitbin. But now that Twhirl (Windows, Mac) is available, the Twitter experience is much more interesting. (See the video clip about twhirl at the end of this post, produced by Ed Dale of Thirty Day Challenge. It’s really long – 24 min – but extremely informative about both Twhirl and Twitter.)

The Twitter Experience
The fact is, if you tweet to people who dont really know or don’t directly address them, then the Twitter experience is like a whole bunch of people free-associating. Yes, it seems like they’re talking to themselves, and occasionally someone might deign to respond.

But that’s looking at it at the worst of times. At the best of times, Twitter is a hot bed of news and ideas and of people connecting with each other in semi-real-time, bouncing off ideas, making requests, getting help, getting answers, getting ideas, getting work, and giving back all of that. If you’re follow real celebs, you get a peek inside their mind. If you’re following peers you don’t know very well, it’s not too hard to communicate with them on Twitter – easier than emailing them for the first time and wondering if their spam filter ate your message.

That, in a nutshell, is why you need to Twitter (and ignore any of the neutral stuff I’ve written about it in the past). It’s access to part of the Hive Mind of humanity, and if you blog, Twitter is a goldmine – though you do have to mine it.

How to Look at the Twitosphere and Participate
If you want to mine it, there are several services that give you different views of the Twitosphere. Muhammad Saleem points out Twitt(url)y, a real-time twitter tracker, as well as other similar services: Twitlinks, Tweetmeme, and Quotably. Twitt(url)y and Tweetmeme both look like a Techmeme of Twitter. Twitlinks doesn’t look like Techmeme, but it does follow both the Techmeme Twitter account and what various tech bloggers are twittering. Brad Linder at Download Squad talks about two other ways to look at Twitter: Crowdstatus and Gridjit. Other lists of/looks at Twitter tools:

  1. Chirpscreen – Download Squad.
  2. Twitter Ecosystem – Web Worker Daily.
  3. Twitter Fan Wiki.
  4. Twitter Twerp Scan – Download Squad.
  5. Twitter Tools – Web Tips.

If you’re not sure who to follow, start with the bloggers
that you like. (You can “find and follow” on Twitter.) Then look at who they’re following and selectively pick
some of those people. It’s interesting to confirm that human beings run
in social circles even online. If you haven’t done so, read James Mowery’s 8 reasons why Twitter is the blogger’s new sidekick. And remember to filter the “noise”. If someone’s tweeting isn’t what you want to follow, unfollow them.

Summary
Now going back to what Dr. Yudkowsky said about Twitter being a building block… I just stumbled across twhirl, a desktop-based client – based on Adobe AIR – for both Twitter and Friendfeed. Now this is a great application that can get me excited about at least browsing Twitter everyday. I simply didn’t like Twitter in my web browser, and the twhirl client makes the experience so much more enjoyable. Whether I’ll actually tweet much myself I don’t know. I’m a notoriously verbose person.

Drops, Dips, Spikes and other SERP activities

Let me tell you a couple things about the position of your website in Google’s search engine results.

  • If you build lots of good links to a page on your site, and you notice a short-term spike in your SERP positioning, followed by a major, medium-term dip, don’t fret. This is quite normal. Just wait while the new links build temporal equity*.
  • Have you noticed an old page dropping a bit in the search results? There are a few things you can do to help counter-act this drop. First, work to decrease the “bounce” rate of visitors to the page while increasing the PageViews per visitor. Post a relevant and interesting YouTube video on the page so that people stick around and watch. Include clear “calls to action” for visitors to move to another page on your site: Examples: “See more Boston Terrier videos here” or “Check out our Mustang gallery.” Second, aim to add one strong, editorial link with relevant anchor text back to your page each month.

*Temporal equity is value that links to your website gain over time. Google often applies a buffering algorithm to young links. If you’ve acquired good links, just be patient… your reward is around the corner.

90% of Everything is Crap—Sturgeon’s Law

Let’s be completely honest for a few minutes—there is a plentiful amount of crap easily found within and around the blogosphere. I know it, and you know it. Perhaps it is the fact that we are hammered with such a great amount of poor quality material that there is such a grand desire for people to find quality content and bloggers. It is a very interesting dicussion.

Sturgeon’s Law (Applied To The Blogosphere)

Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap, but I think that number is overly optimistic when considering the blogosphere’s status. As a matter of fact, I think it is more likely to be at least 95% or more. However, I will still, reluctantly, give the benefit of the doubt to Sturgeon’s Law. I hope that the blogosphere does not take this as an insult, but if you are reading this blog, then you are well on your way to avoid becoming the typical noise within the blogosphere—I am here to turn that noise into a beautifully constructed harmonic.

I have no factual data on hand relating to how many new blogs there are being added to the blogosphere on a daily basis, but I’m willing to bet that it is at least in the upper hundreds; but those numbers could easily surpass thousands. And with these new blogs, a variety of voices arrive as well, but still, most of them are just going to be adding to the already existing crap.

As we all hear about how so many more blogs are being added to the blogosphere, I am not bothered by that information, and neither should you. Some of you might see it as a blessing.

Opportunity Awaits

Fortunately, all this leaves a solid opportunity for you, the blogger that is trying to make a name for yourself, to put forth hard work to stand out from the rest of the crap which everyone has to filter through.

Ironically enough, perhaps it is the fact that there is so much crap out there that gives us the opportunity to break away from the rest of the blogosphere and become well noticed for our own endeavors.

After all, there are actually people who are paid to simply find great content on the web from blogs. Sites like TechMeMe, Digg, and Reddit all exist to promote quality content on the web, and they are valuable hubs to promote your best content. If you are a relatively new blogger (or your blog is just starting off), you still must reach out to the blogosphere to draw people in, but once they get there, people will realize the true value of your content, and they might even do the work of spreading the word for you.

Therefore, simple logic should kick in—the more crap there is, the more opportunities there will be. There are millions of people that are searching and linking to high quality content, and if you have the ability to properly market your best content, you will succeed. It requires an immense amount of hard work and dedication, but that is something you have to learn for yourself.

Any thoughts? Post them in the comments section. I’d love to hear what you have to say about the blogosphere being overloaded with poor content, and how you would take advantage.

The Role of “Method Writing” In Blogging?

You’ve probably heard of method acting, where an actor goes out and researches a role by interviewing people, learning as much as they can about certain types of people or a certain lifestyle, and spending time in real life acting as the character they’re studying. Sometimes they go incognito in a little town, sometimes not. This is arguable, but I believe that the best actors all follow one “method” or another, and that there could be an application to blogging. The gist of using “method” is to get deeply involved in something so that you can understand it from other viewpoints and be convincing in your interpretation – an approach that’s possibly applicable to blogging. [Updated: There’s more than one type of “method” acting, and they don’t all necesarily use this approach.]

In addition to actors, there are writers/novelists who apply a method writing style to research their books. I’ve done it for a lot of my “speculative” short fiction, but not originally on purpose. I mean, does anyone intentionally use “method” for mad partying and drunken stupors? (Other than, say, Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.?) If so, there are probably a lot of Hollywood celebrities doing method research right now, judging from all the DUI arrests for the past 2-3 years. (Although I have my own conspiracy theories about why that’s happening.)

What’s Method Blogging?

Now, the question is, is there anything called method blogging, and is anyone doing it? Is there any point to this? What could you be writing about that you’d have to research so intensely and possibly even live a different lifestyle than you’re used to? If there is something applicable, would you go through with the method process to be able to write about the subject authoritatively?

The short answer is “yes”. I have some longer answers, but they’re still brewing in my head. At this point, I haven’t even Googled for “method blogging” simply because I wanted this post to be off the top of my head, not influenced by other articles.

How Do You Apply Method?

“How do you apply ‘method’ to blogging?” is a tough question to answer, if you don’t really understand “method” (which I’m not elaborating on, beyond what I wrote above), I’m applying some “methods” as of the past few months, both to research for blogging and also for a movie idea I’m working on.

I won’t discuss my research in detail just yet – I always jinx my projects if I chatter before they’re complete. I might Twitter about it in the future, but I will repeat what I’ve said elsewhere… Despite being a writer/ author/ blogger (as well as a former teaching assistant and corporate trainer), I am both an introvert and an extrovert. I have certain inhibitions that have bothered me forever, and they’re mostly the result of my cultural background and upbringing. So in person, I’ve been playing the role of someone who is not bound by those inhibitions, and I’m mentally documenting how people interact with me as a result of my roleplaying. (However, I won’t tell you how I’m achieving this, nor what I’m doing that’s “method”.)

The result so far is that I’m learning an immense amount about human beings and how they interact with you depending on what they think you are. In the past, all I learned was about how people interacted with me based on what they knew I was.

Now, it’s unlikely I’ll ever blog about this research in detail – beyond what I’m writing here – but what I’m doing gives me fodder for scriptwriting as well as directing. If I know how people are going to behave when they see someone acting a certain way, it’s so much easier to direct an actor on how to behave, to achieve a certain effect. I really believe that this approach has its place in certain types of blogging, though I’m still exploring what that role might be.

Is Method Blogging For You?

Applying method style to acting or writing takes a certain personality type – someone who can suppress their inhibitions to possibly behave in a way that they normally wouldn’t. This normally isn’t me, but it needs to be, so I’m breaking my own inhibitions.

Is this something you can do, and how would you apply it to blogging? Can you think of anything you’d apply “method” to so that you could blog about the subject with the expertise of a well-rounded view? If you can, would you do so? Would you act or live in a different way just to learn about some lifestyle, and would you blog about it afterwards? I can’t think of anyone who might be considered a “gonzo” blogger, a Hunter S. Thompson of the blogosphere; but I’m sure there’s someone out there capable of doing it. And I’m sure that there’s room in the blogosphere for such personalities. These people would likely combine text, podcasts, and vodcasts/ vlogging, in order to project their personality as much as possible. If you know any such person you feel is applying “method” to their blogging, drop off a link in the comments.

Performancing Stream of Consciousness for Thur May 1, 2008

RSS Awareness Day
Today is RSS Awareness Day. If you still don’t know RSS is, check the RSSday.org site out to learn more.

Are You An Effective Blogger?
Learn the 7 habits of incredibly effective blogging. Number 1 (Have something to say) and #2 (Project your personality) go hand in hand. If you have nothing to say, it’s kind of hard to project your personality.

Why Twitter?
For those who understand it (and I’m still learning), Twitter can actually be a great way to stimulate thinking and generate ideas. Watch for my “Twitter as Resource?” post later today. [Ref: Neil Patel’s twittering.]

Web Developer Cheatsheet
Who needs to hire a site designer when SEOMoz is giving away their Web Developer Cheatsheet?

You’ve Got AdSense In Your Feedburner Feeds
Or you will have, soon, once Google finishes their Feedburner integration. Will this reduce feed scraping? I don’t honestly know.

Google Ocean?!!
Google will be offering Google Ocean very soon, to join Earth and Sky. What will they index next? What’s your guess?