ben.hamilton.id.au

This post has been written using WriteMonkey as the text editor. Not only that but I’ve utilised Markdown as the method of text mark-up. All of this has been achieved using WordPress as my CMS, Firefox as my browser and a Firefox plug-in called It’s All Text.

My first impressions are actually good. Although its taken a little setup, I’m actually happy with the result. You see, using WriteMonkey as a text editor is, well, gorgeous. The screen is emptied of all distractions. With typewriter mode enabled, it is a pure joy to use.

Now to get this to work I did the following:

• disabled the visual editor in WordPress,
• installed the It’s All Text Firefox plug-in,
• installed the PHP Markdown plug-in for WordPress,
• started writing :)

Not so hard is it? Actually the writing bit is the hardest. But you knew that…

What it now means is that when I begin writing a new post in WordPress, I simple click the little edit button that appears, and WriteMonkey fires up, comes to the foreground and I start writing. To finish up, I press CTRL-Q and I click YES I do want to save it.

So I can whole-heartedly say that it’s worth the effort to setup WriteMonkey. Go do it! It feels good.

Of course, now the hard bit is about to start, that is, do more writing.

PS: Only found out about WriteMonkey via DownloadSquad

Just did yet another painless upgrade to WordPress, which is the software that powers this web site.

It is now running version 2.5 quite happily. What made this upgrade different was the fact that I did it from my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10.

Every other upgrade I’ve done from a Windows platform, using the FTP tool I’ve been familiar with, FileZilla.

The default install of Ubuntu hasn’t installed FileZilla, so it was a quick click to System | Administration | Synaptic Package Manager | Search | “Filezilla” | Mark for install | approve the dependancies | Apply.

In under a minute, FileZilla was installed and my favorite FTP tool was running just like it does on my Windows laptop. Yay! I just love how easy it is to install most things with Ubuntu.