Authoring, improved

This is my next generation workflow. I’ve written about this before. Recently here and here and here. And earlier here.

Here’s the next generation, using these tools: StackEdit, Grammerly, Markdown Here, Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus Copy as Markdown and maybe other stuff.

I’ll work backward.

At the end of the trail, there’s either Blogger or a final Google Doc. Or maybe some HTML. In the front is Voice Typing because I can talk much faster than I can type. In the middle, there’s …. Stuff.

I’ve been voice typing in Google Docs for a while. I could say things, and add punctuation that Google Docs doesn’t know about, and correct stupid errors as they appear. But there were problems. One was that every website had its fonts and faces. If I copy pasted the raw HTML into my Google doc, it looked like ransom note graphics. If I stuck it as text, then I lost any links that were in the original and I had to recreate them painfully. Another one is that while I am typing, I’m also doing research. I find web pages that are relevant. And I want to capture the list of web pages at the end, and sometimes put them as citations in the middle. Working in markdown with StackEdit solves all these problems.

I use StackEdit a Markdown editor and renderer. One one side is a nice Markdown editor. On the other is an HTML renderer. So I can see what the rendered HTML will look like as soon as I produce it. And, unlike some other tools, it keeps the two sides in sync. So I can look at the rendered HTML, and if I don’t like what I see, I can go right across to its source. It’s WYSIWYG document drafting. Which is pretty cool.

When everything looks as beautiful as I want to make it, I can copy paste the Markdown into blogger, and then use a tool called Markdown Here to render it into simplified HTML. When I post it, Blogger will style it according to my theme. Or I can copy paste the HTML into a Google Doc or some other document that likes to have HTML, and I’ve got it all formatted to my taste.

I open lots of web pages as I’m researching. I don’t want to lose them. So I use Copy as Markdown, which lets me pick either one tab or all the tabs in a Chrome window and makes a Markdown reference—or a list of references—to the tabs and puts the Markdown in (or on) the clipboard. So I can paste the Markdown into my Doc or the into StackEdit edit window.

Composing in Markdown rather than Bloggerese is also nice because I can move Markdown from place to place and process it as though it was text. Which it is.

Once I’ve got clean Markdown I could move it to Blogger, press Ctrl-Shift-M and Markdown Herewill convert it to HTML. But I’ll do that later. First I need to spell and grammar check my text. Because I suck.

No problem. I’ve got Grammarly, which does all that to perfection. I copy the StackEdit Markdown and paste it into a Grammarly document, clean it up, and then I could move it to Blogger and convert it to HTML. But what if I broke some formatting? OK, move it back to StackEdit, then Blogger. Easy Peasy.

What could be better? Well, a couple of things. I’d like not to have to do all this copy/pasting crap between Docs, StackEdit, Grammarly, and Blogger. I want to automate some cleanup and error checking. I’d like not to have to keep switching between tools to do this. And I know how to do it. But for now, this is a real improvement

In this post I wrote:

“Write me!!”, said wannabe blog post about my improved writing workflow.

“Write me!!”, said a wannabe blog post about StackEdit.

“Write me!!”, said a wannabe blog post about Grammarly.

There, guys, now are you happy?

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here, Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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