What's the single most tedious thing about blogging: having to press the 'Add Blog Item ' button. I think I've hit on why taking notes with EverNote is fast: there is a blank note at the bottom of the screen that you can just start typing in.
I've realised that this could be done in a web app, simply by having a box on every page ready to start typing in. Google mail does something like this already: there is a little text box at the bottom of each message that you can select and start typing a reply: when selected it resizes itself and formatting toolbars and stuff appear. It's all very AJAXy and slick. Most of the time you can ignore it because it's not too big, once you explicitly start using it all the associated tools appear.
Compare to posting in drupal where there's all kinds of stuff filling the page: Input format, date edit boxes, categories, tags, I have to scroll down two pages to find the 'preview' and 'submit' buttons.
Here's a rough outline of the quick blogging features:
- Regular blog page appears with a textarea box ready for typing in
- Title is first line (if preceeded with a - or something), then a list of tags line, each tag preceeded with a dot or something similarly lightweight.
- Rest of post is in wilki format.
- Big button that uses AJAX to generate a preview which appears under the text box
- After preview a post button appears.
Everything goes in the one textarea box, no need to tab or click between controls. Now I know what I want, how to implement it?
I am growing disillusioned with EverNote, mainly because of the buggy handling of formatting: if you mark something bold, for example, it has an annoying habit of not turning the bold off, you have to fiddle around selecting a big block and turning it all off explicitly (very much like Microsoft Word). I'm happy to use markup to make things bold, it's simple and understandable.
I want all my notes on a server where I can get to them from anywhere.
Peter's Moblog
I'm finding that I'm using EverNote more as a means of just stashing interesting web snippets for easy access later, esp. with the firefox extension making it almost automatic. The visual appearance is just too cluttered for comfort, the tagging is almost completely broken
From what I understand & have seen of Flock (flock.com), they're trying to provide integrated blogging support within the browser, letting you drag & drop text & images from pages directly to the editor or to a 'shelf' for temporary holding. (It doesn't help with the ugly javascript kludges needed by blogspot to add basic tag support, unfortunately :( ) It's usage of del.icio.us to provide offsite bookmarks is pretty neat too. I'm interested in anything that tries to minimize the friction that shifting between apps seems to induce.
I keep returning to TiddlyWiki (tiddlywiki.com) as my go-to note-taker. It's a _very_ elegant wiki implemented solely in HTML, Javascript & CSS, making it accessible from pretty much any browser on any OS that'll pick up the usb flashdrive it sits on. And there's no need for a server as all the logic is client-side. It provides tagging by default, supports the usual markup and can be extended & customised pretty seriously. I still want something a little more transparent & fluid, though. The endless page of EverNote is a very cool metaphor, at least in part because it invokes Kerouac :)