Photo by Ed Yourdon http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/That's all fixed now, thanks to the good folk at Squarespace, but in the meantime I thought I'd check out some of the alternatives. Don't get me wrong: I love Windows Live Writer, despite the fact that it crashes at least one=ce during the course of writing a blog post. It's fully-featured, intuitive (especially if you're used to using Word), and free.  But there is no harm in exploring the competition, just in case one of these days Windows Live Writer decides to pack its bags and leave permanently.

I came across this article on the web, which is pretty good:

4 Alternatives To Windows Live Writer For Blogging

After reading it, I decided to give Scribefire another go (I did try it aeons ago, but didn't like it much). It integrates with your web browser, which in my case is Firefox, and has an intuitive interface, as you can see from the screenshot a little further down this page.

Scribefire has an intuitive interfaceThings I like about Scribefire

If you're doing research on the web, Scribefire has two great advantages over Windows Live Writer.

First, you can see the web page you're researching on, and write about/from it, without having to flip backwards and forwards between your web browser and your article, as you can see in the screenshot.

Scribefire integrates seamlessly with your web browser

Second, it is really easy to extract the details of the webpage and insert them into your article: all you have to do is right-click on the web page and then select Blog This. That will insert the title of the page, with a link to it, into your blog post -- like the link above.

Third, you can very easily change or configure templates for your blog posts. For example, the default template is as shown below.

Scribefire's original templateHowever, by inserting 'title=$T' just before 'href' (without the quotation marks), the title of the link (that's the text that shows up when you hover your mouse over a link) will be inserted automatically, which was one of my bugbears until I discovered this (see my third point blow). But this is only useful if you feel knowledgeable and confident enough to mess around with the underlying HTML code.

Fourth, Zemanta, which finds related articles automatically, is built in to the design.

Things I don't like about Scribefire

First, there are no paragraph styles, ie Headings. So you have to format headings manually each time.

Second, there appears to be no draft publishing option -- although I have thought of a work-around. You can set the post to publish in the future, so if you set it to publish in, say, an hour's time, that gives you time to edit it in your blogging platform should you need to. In my case, for example, I like to display a summary of my articles on the front page of my blog rather than the whole article.

Stop press: I tried scheduling a blog post, and it didn't work! So, in effect there is no draft publishing option as far as I can see.

Third, when you extract a link to a web page as described just now, the link doesn't automatically insert a title. In an article I wrote after trying Scribefire for about 4 minutes, I mistakenly said it wasn't possible to insert a title for a link easily. In fact, all you have to do is select the link and then click on the link icon, and a box pops up in which you can configure the link. However, see my third point under "Things I like about Scribefire".

Fourth, I wish there was a spellchecker!

Conclusion

I still prefer Windows LIve Writer, but Scribefire will prove extremely useful for those occasions when I want to quickly throw a post up based on a web article I'm reading at the time. It's well-worth having a look at. You can download it from here: ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging

Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:

• scribefire test

There are two main reasons for this, both of them pragmatic. First, if I write down a brilliant idea and then lose the notebook I wrote it in, that’s pretty disastrous.

Second, I have boxes in my loft full of notebooks in which I wrote stuff – and it’s almost impossible to find anything, or at least very time-consuming.

Pens and paper, and laptops, are not mutually exclusive! Notes being taken feverishly, by Yazan Badran http://www.flickr.com/photos/zozo2k3/Now, I tend to write the date on the cover of my notebooks. For example, one notebook I have proclaims that it dates from January to March 1984. That’s obviously better than its not being dated, but it still means that in order to retrieve an idea I have to try to remember the month and year in which I had it!

These days there is no need for such shenanigans, if you’re prepared to invest a bit of money. I use two different solutions, which are as follows.

The Livescribe Echo Smartpen

This is a special pen, which works with special paper. It does several things.

First, although you write with it in the usual way, when you get back home you synchronise the pen with your computer, and it not only transfers your notes to your computer in digital format, it makes them available as a pdf should you wish to print them out or email them to someone.

What that means, of course, is that it doesn’t matter if you subsequently lose or mislay the notebook – apart from the inconvenience and expense!

Another thing it does is make your handwritten notes searchable. I have no idea how it does so, and I am especially impressed that it can interpret my handwriting most of the time! What that means is that as long as I remember a keyword I can find my notes about it very quickly. When I say ‘keyword’, I mean it’s pointless searching for a word like “the”, because it will result in hundreds of results. Rather, I tend to give my notes a heading, which is what you’d do anyway. Thus I headed my notes from the Education World Forum conference ‘EWF13’, and that’s what I search for if I need to refer to them.

You can also amalgamate notes from different meetings or occasions. For example, I have been undertaking research on a phenomenon known as Bring Your Own Technology, and giving my notes on that topic the heading of ‘BYOT’. I have also created a subsection called ‘BYOT’ in the Livescribe desktop application, so I can copy any notes on BYOT into it. That means I have all my BYOT notes in one place.You can create custom notebooks in the Livescribe desktop

Another handy feature is the ability to record as you write. Amazingly, it matches the recording with the writing. What that means is that if you cannot remember what you meant when you wrote something quickly as you were interviewing someone, say, you can press the pen on the word and it will play back what was being said at that time.

You can also purchase software that will convert your digital handwriting into text, but I didn’t find that to be very effective.

So there are plenty of advantages in using the Livescribe, but there are some disadvantages:

• The design of the pen is pretty horrible. The Echo is slimmer than its predecessor, but is still very bulky. Moreover, there is no clip on it, and the top detaches for when you want to write, making it easy to lose.
• You can’t tell when the pen’s memory is full – or at least, it doesn’t give you any obvious warning that it’s about to become so. It would be good if a message box appeared when you synchronised the pen with the desktop, because then you would have more chance of clearing recordings from the pen before entering a crucial meeting!
• Recently, my pen has stopped working intermittently. The only way to get it going again, I’ve found, is to remove the refill and then reinsert it. As my American colleagues would say, go figure.
• You have to keep buying refills and the notebooks, and these tend to be more expensive than their analogue counterparts, though not massively so.

On the whole, I find my Livescribe pen an essential part of my writing toolkit, and never go to a meeting without it.

Evernote Smart Notebook

I like Evernote, which I’ve written about before. But Evernote is purely digital. The Smart Notebook bridges the gap between paper and digital.

You have to buy special paper, in the form of a Smart Notebook. These are quite nice, being the Moleskin brand, which I adore anyway. They’re not cheap, but lovely to write on.

The good thing, though, is that you can use any pen you like.

To transfer your notes from the notebook to Evernote, you need a phone or other device with the Evernote app installed. What you do is take a photo of your page(s) with the camera icon in the app, and then synchronise your smartphone notes with your online notes in the usual way.

As with the Livescribe pen, your notes become searchable -- even though they are embedded in photographs. This feature works very well indeed.

There are a few disadvantages however:

• You need a smartphone or other device in order to use it.
• Taking the photo is fiddly, even though the app is very good at focusing the page.
• You can’t record meetings in audio format like you can with the Livescribe.

Nonetheless, given the fact that you can use a comfortable and/or cheap pen, this is a nice option. Also, if you use Evernote anyway you can have all of your notes in one place. (In theory, Livescribe links with Evernote, but I have never managed to get it to work.)

Conclusion

It’s up to you which of these options you think would be ideal for you. Each of them enables you to transfer your handwritten notes into digital, searchable text. For me, both of them are useful, but for different purposes. If I am going out and about, but not to a conference or formal meeting, I tend to use the Evernote notebook because I like the paper and I like my favourite pen! But if I need to make sure I have a record of what was said, eg if I am talking to a supplier about the features of their product, the Livescribe is the more appropriate choice.

Links

Livescribe

Evernote Smart Notebook

There are several reasons why working on – and with – paper is beneficial.

Research documents

Unless the sources I’m using are both relatively short and relatively few, I find that printing them out and splaying them all around me is much better than flicking between dozens of tabs in my internet browser, or through several documents. It’s much easier to annotate for a start, easier to organise (I usually end up with several piles according to topic, with some documents placed widthways so I can find them faster) and, frankly easier to read.

I’m not alone in that, incidentally. I think it will merit a separate post, but there is a body of research to suggest that people read differently on screen than on paper, and that the reading isn’t as deep – or at least long-term retention has been found to be lower.

Outlining

The journalist Gay Talese apparently drafted his outlines (in some detail it has to be said) on paper before doing any typing. And if it was good enough for Gay Talese, it’s certainly good enough for me! (Find out more about him, and read his seminal ‘Frank Sinatra has a cold’ at Esquire.)

I find that if I outline an article on paper, even if only in a sketchy kind of way, it helps me organise my thoughts.

Here’s an example of a brief outline I wrote for an article while sitting in a café:

Outlining on paper can be very helpful in organising your thoughts -- more so than doing so on a computer, in fact.

(In case you’re interested, that became ICT and computing lessons should be organic.)

Convenience

That’s another thing. I find it easier to and quicker to jot down some ideas in a paper notebook while sitting in a café or even waiting at a bus stop, than doing so on a machine. Having said that, I do sometimes email myself some notes for articles, but they’re not as detailed or ‘joined up’.

Joined-upness

When I outline on paper, I often end up drawing arrows and lines from one part of my notes to another, creating small boxes of bullet points and doodling (which aids my concentration!). In other words, working on paper enables me to make connections, to join up different ideas, in a way which somehow is different from, and I would say better than, doing so on a screen.

Conclusion

I don’t outline every article on paper. In fact, I don’t do so for many articles. But I do find that with larger projects, such a s a book on Bring Your Own Device which I’m working on at the moment, working on paper in the first instance may seem slower (to be honest, I’m not convinced it is), but it yields better, ie richer and deeper, results.

For heaven's sake, use a spell-checker!

Did you spot the two errors? I especially liked the rendering of the word ‘intelligent’!

But just think: it was not only the person who wrote this who failed to notice the spelling mistakes. So too did the person who signed it off to be printed, and so too did the person who printed it.

Of course, the spell-checker won’t pick up words which are incorrect in the context, but correct in themselves. This fact is exemplified in the following poem. There are several versions of this. I obtained this one from the Louisiana Tech University website.

A Little Poem Regarding Computer Spell Checkers...

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Level 1: Unconscious incompetence, ie you don’t know, and you don’t even know that you don’t know.

Level 2: Conscious incompetence, ie you still don’t know, but at least you know that you don’t know.

Level 3: Conscious competence, ie you know that you know

Level 4: Unconscious competence, ie you are so good at what you do that you don’t even have to think about it: you just do it automatically.

Strive to be better! Photo by prayitno http://www.flickr.com/photos/34128007@N04/Now, it’s that last stage that sits uneasily with me as far as writing is concerned (and perhaps even in general). Because it seems to me that unless you are innately gifted you can’t reach stage 4 and write stuff that is actually pleasurable to read.

Another way of saying this is that I think unconscious competence can be faked. I’m thinking in particular of at least one “content mill” which specifies the exact number of words you have to have in the headline, how many in the first paragraph, how many in the second paragraph, plus quite a lot more rules about what sort of words should be in the headline and so on. I've come across bloggers who recommend this sort of thing too.

Now, I suppose you could get into the swing of writing in this formulaic way, and become so good at it that you would reach the heady heights of Level 4. And I also suppose that if you were able to pack useful information into your articles, you would have an audience for them. But would your writing actually be enjoyable to read?

Would such a formulaic approach ever produce such gems as this, for example:

“It was the kind of wind that seemed to peel the flesh off your bones and come back for the marrow.”

That was from the pen of sports writer Hugh McIlvanney, and is just one example of brilliant writing that you would want to read over and over again.

For myself, I can ‘bash out’ (as my wife so charmingly puts it) articles fairly quickly, and people tell me they like reading them. But I am always striving to become a better writer, as even a cursory glance at my credit card bill would prove.

In fact, to me, the very idea of being in a state of unconscious competence suggests stagnation. Much better, I think, to continually feel there is another pinnacle to reach.

Well, anyway, when I finally got round to actually putting FocusWriter through its paces, I could see it was designed for people just like me, ie those for whom the internet, email and so on and so forth can be as much a source of distraction as one of enlightenment.

FocusWriter is a program that is designed to help you focus on writing. There are a few bells and whistles, but not that many. And in any case, when you fire it up it takes over the whole screen. You don’t even get to see the menus or icons of FocusWriter itself unless you move the mouse pointer up to the top of the screen.

Move the pointer to the bottom of the screen and you will see useful stats like your word count and what percentage of your goal you’ve achieved.
OK, so let’s talk about goals. You can set your goal for the day in the Preferences menu, either as the amount of time you spend or the number of words you produce. This is potentially a handy feature, although, disappointingly, any changes you make to your goal apply to every Session.

What is a ‘Session’, I hear you ask.  Let’s suppose I’m working on three bits of writing. By starting a new Session for each of them, and then starting a new document in each Session, I cause a wondrous thing to happen. The next time I start one of these Sessions, it automatically opens the last document I was working on, and even places the cursor at the point I reached when I saved it and quit. Why couldn’t Word have a feature like this?

Another feature is the alarm. You can set this either to an actual  time or to a ‘delay’. The actual time alarm is for when you want to get down to watch your favourite TV programme, or make a phone call, or have dinner, etc. The ‘delay’ is for when you want to set the alarm for, say, 20 minutes’ time.

Getting to grips with the program is very straightforward, as you can probably see from the screenshots. No need to wade through a hefty manual.

If you find word processors like Word too ‘busy’, you might like to try FocusWriter.

For me, much as I admire the program, I find the same problem with all such applications. It is that the very absence of so-called ‘distractions’ is, to me, in itself distracting. I like having various bits and pieces at my fingertips.

But that’s just me. You might as well give FocusWriter a whirl. After all, it’s free!

Download FocusWriter.

Screenshots

TimersPreferences, eg set your daily goalCreate your own colour schemeView your statsCheck how much of your goal you've achieved todaySet an alarm

This picture resides at http://wallart101.blogspot.co.uk

He was interested in ‘the pregnant moment’, according to the commentary for the exhibition Litchtenstein: A Retrospective.

This is defined as “the crux from which one can imagine the whole story”.

I really like the concept of the pregnant moment. It seems to me that if a writer becomes so involved in the story or article she is writing that she can no longer see the wood for the trees, one approach would be to try to identify ‘the pregnant moment’. What sentence, or scene, is or should be the very essence of the piece being written?

By the way, the exhibition is wonderful. See it if you get the chance.

You've almost certainly already seen examples of embedding. Go to any website where there's a video clip on the page, and you're looking at it in action. In other words, embedding is simply the act of inserting code into a web page or blog that puts the object right there on the page. This 'object' might be a video, a presentation, a document, a picture -- just about anything, in fact.

Embedding means that your readers don't have to leave your siteOne thing that's important to bear in mind is that when you embed an object all you are really doing is inserting a link to it -- but a special type of link which puts the object itself, rather than the usual sort of blue underlined hyperlink, in front of people.

What’s the point of embedding stuff?

So, a reasonable question would be: why bother? After all, how much effort is it for people just to click on a link to take you to the object itself? There are several reasons why you might want to use embedding rather than plain old-fashioned linking.

Firstly, why encourage people to leave your site when you don't have to? Go into a department store and you'll notice that there is, say, a Costa coffee bar: not a sign telling you where the nearest Costa is on the high street, but Costa itself. Embedding is the same sort of idea.

Secondly, in some cases you might not want people to go off-site because you have an enclosed space like a members-only area, or a protected area such as, in a school, college or library, a virtual learning environment or an intranet.

Thirdly, if you have embedded more than one object in the page, it would become tedious for the reader to have to keep going somewhere else, and then coming pack to the original page.

And fourthly, as implied by the previous point, placing the object where the reader is, rather than expecting the reader to go to where the object is, provides a service to the reader -- a bit like meals on wheels.

Some words of warning

A couple of things to bear in mind about embedding are as follows.

Firstly, because the embed code is really just another kind of link, if the object itself is moved or deleted, or if access to it is blocked, then embedding it won't do you any good.

Secondly, even if the video is not unavailable, you might still want to place some sort of disclaimer on the page to the effect that you can't guarantee that the object will always be available.

Thirdly, although embedding an object is not the same as downloading it and then uploading it onto your own website, you should still be aware of copyright issues. Some sites specifically state that you're allowed to use their materials for educational purposes only. With those that don't, you may wish to seek permission. Where this is impractical, my own suggestion would be to make sure you include citation information if this isn't obvious. For example, a video hosted on YouTube will have the YouTube logo embedded in it, but a photo from Flickr won't have any such logo, so a proper citation is in order -- assuming the owner has allowed people to use his or her photos in the first place.

How to embed things

How do you go about embedding an object? In the case of YouTube and similar sites, the embed code you need will be right there on the page, as illustrated in this screenshot (it may be ‘hidden’ under a button labelled ‘Share’ or something like that). You select the code by clicking in it and pressing Ctrl-A, and then copy it to the clipboard by pressing Ctrl-C. Then, in your blog editor, find a button labelled 'Source' or 'HTML', click on it, and paste the code there by pressing Ctrl -V. If you paste it into the normal editing window, all people will see is the embed code. (Note that some blogging platforms, such as Squarespace, which is what I use, have a facility which enables you to paste the code into a special window without having to find the Source area.)

What if it's your own video or audio file, hosted on your own website, or an organisation's server, that you wish to embed? Where do you get the embed code from? The best site I've come across for this is the Video Codemaker site.

To embed a picture from Flickr, click on the Share button, select Grab the HTML/BBCode, select the size you want, then click on the code, and then copy the code to the clipboard and, finally, paste it into your blog or website.

But why stop at video? The article, How to embed almost anything in your website is very good, with instructions on how to embed files of all descriptions in your website or blog. Be aware that the article was written some years ago, and at least one of the instructions (those relating to Flickr) have changed since then. Still, the article should at least provide you with a useful starting point.

Blogging can be as easy as writing! Photo by Denise Krebs http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsdkrebs/The first thing to do, and probably the most difficult, is to think of a name for your blog. It can be pretty general, it can include your name, or it can include words which indicate the subject matter of your blog. It’s up to you.

You also need to decide on a web address. This can be different from the name (or title). For example, I have a blog called My Writes, but its web address is http://terryfreedman.blogspot.co.uk/.

Once you’ve decided on a name and a web address, it would be a good idea to check whether or not someone else has used them. You can do so by searching for them, eg by using Google.

Next, set up a blog in either Wordpress or Blogger. Each has a different interface, and different (though overlapping) features. Which one is right for you is a matter of personal preference. Wordpress probably offers a potential greater degree of flexibility, because there are so many add-ons available for it. These are little programs that enhance or extend the functionality of the basic out-of-the-box application.

If you wish to host your website, both Blogger and Wordpress have paid-for options which low you to do so. Hosting your own blog means that you administer it on your own website. This has the advantage that you can basically do what you like with it in terms of its appearance and functionality, but has the disadvantage that you have to ensure that you keep everything up-to-date in terms of security patches.

For example, if someone discovers a major flaw in a piece of code you’ve installed, eg one that allows anyone with the right technical knowledge to hack into your blog and make changes to it without your permission or even knowledge, you would have to drop everything and make sure you install the security patch that will fix it, or upgrade the entire program.

To try Wordpress without paying anything up front, go to www.wordpress.com. This will enable you to create a blog with an address like www.mymusings.wordpress.com. Similarly, signing up for Blogger will enable you to create a blog with the address www.mymusings.blogspot.com.

These kind of web addresses are fine for trying out these services, or indeed blogging itself. Obviously, though, if you are thinking of running a business blog, a more professional-looking web address would be, say, www.mymusings.com.

To do so with Wordpress, go to www.wordpress.org. I understand that you can upgrade from the hosted (.com) to the self-hosted (.org) version if you wish to. See the Further Reading section for information on how to do so, and for further differences between the free and paid-for versions.

You can also upgrade a Blogspot web address to a customised one, and again this would be a paid option.

What I would recommend is trying out the free versions of Blogger and Wordpress for a week or two, to see which one you feel most comfortable with. Once you’ve decided that you can quietly drop the other one, and start promoting the one you’re going to use.

Further Reading

Self Hosted WordPress.org vs. Free WordPress.com [Infograph]

Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org

Upgrade from WordPress.com to SelfHosted WordPress.org