A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

WriteMonkey and Markdown

Recently Download Squad had a post^[1] about a practical way to get features and support for open-source programs, specifically through donations. The post was about a program called WriteMonkey which is a minimalistic writing program that the author had originally written about previously^[2]. Think of the best code editing program you know of, mine is Notepad++^[3]. Now take that program and refactor it specifically for writing articles or blog posts, you've just created WriteMonkey^[4].

Something that interested me about WriteMonkey was the Download Squad author's post specifically mentioned writing posts using Markdown^[5] syntax. Markdown is a simple plain-text syntax which is parsed into html removing the need to tediously enter html^[6] as you write. At first glance it didn't really seem like it would really help all that much when it came to writing blog posts. But I was completely wrong and am better off for it. Now the especially useful part is that WriteMonkey supports this completely as well as having a very useful shortcut for parsing and copying html straight from Markdown source. This is incredibly useful since I can then just go to my website and paste the resulting html into a blog post and hit save and be done with it.

As I looked through the program I realized, this is much much more than just a Markdown IDE. It includes all sorts of useful features like a "progress bar" which tells you how far along you are in a certain quota you specify in the preferences. This led me to write a little bit of SQL^[7] to calculate the average word-count of posts in my blog. Excluding the outliers it came out to ~350 words per post. So I just set the quota to 350 words and it displays a bar at the top or bottom of the screen depending on what you choose showing your current progress on the quota.

It also does several other useful things like displaying current battery life as a percentage in the progress bar, showing the file you're writing in. There's also this feature called repository//main. This allows you to store text clippings in repository and then write the blog post in main. When exported as html the repository is ignored and only main is copied. Makes it useful to write notes and such in the middle of authoring a post to keep with everything you write and it's easy enough to switch between the two to make it useful. For this post I just made a list of points I wanted to cover.

After using WriteMonkey for an hour or so I think I've found the new environment I'll be writing all my posts in for the foreseeable future.

1. Download Squad: Amazing software tip: Pay free software developers to get stuff fixed! [↩]
2. Download Squad: WriteMonkey is an unbelievable full-screen text editor [↩]
3. Notepad++ [↩]
4. WriteMonkey [↩]
5. Markdown [↩]
6. HTML: HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. [↩]
7. SQL: Structured Query Language [↩]