As you may have read on another page on my site, I have been working to streamline the way I write content for these web pages. I recently learned about WriteMonkey, a minimalist text editor that natively uses Markdown and exports a complete web page of the document written. This seems like the best of all worlds. This page will describe my experience with examining WriteMonkey.
You feel as if you stepped into a time machine when you first start WriteMonkey. All you see is a black screen and a blinking cursor. That is part of the design: distraction-free writing. Don't worry, there are lots of features under the hood. And to complete the time machine feeling, press F10 and go to the Misc preferences tab and enable Typing Sounds. Now you are really transported back. That is, if you've ever been there. Youngsters will wonder what the attraction of all those clackety clacks is.
Of course, I'm writing this content in WriteMonkey right now. Here is a screen shot:
Old school, huh? But that's the idea, just you and the screen, without the distraction of e-mail, IM, Facebook, etc., icons and windows. Just you and your text.
So, how about all those features under the hood? Just right click the WriteMonkey screen and you get a popup menu with many of the choices. Press F10 to get to the dialog to set preferences.
WriteMonkey can work directly with either Markdown or Textile, both lightweight markup languages designed to make it easy to generate HTML from plain text. I like Markdown. This text is written with its markup. You can look at the official site for markup syntax or a page I've written on Using Markdown in Writemonkey. I've also put up a test article page that shows some of the basic Markdown markup and how it renders in a browser.
To generate the web page you are reading, all I had to do was export this file from within WriteMonkey (Ctrl-Shift-E) to an HTML file. WriteMonkey generates the HTML based on the Markdown markup and applies a template (a CSS style sheet). This page happens to use WriteMonkey's default style sheet (well, I did increase the font size by hand——these eyes have gotten too old for 12 pixel fonts). As you can see, it's a very simple style. You can create new style sheets to customize for your site. I'll work on that for a future page and tell you what I learn. I'm not sure how you can incorporate divs into the styling, but that's exploration for another day.
The work on WriteMonkey continues on this page.
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Writing with WriteMonkey
More Using WriteMonkey
Help Using WriteMonkey
Using Markdown in WriteMonkey
Copyright Jim Brown 2011
Last updated: 4/30/2011