Since brainstorming and outlining are such important activities for writers, I am cross-posting this article about Mind Mapping Tools from my tech blog.

Give it a peek.

I’ve stuck with my month of Dvorak, doing the tutorials for one week and completely switching for the next three weeks. I’m happy to stay that I’ll be sticking with the new layout.

I learned quite a bit that should be helpful to others considering a switch, and I’d like to share some of that here.

Read more… »

Alright all you Critique Circle and gamer addicts. Finally a tool for you.

Slife records not only which applications you use on your computer, but how long you spend on specific websites and emails. It can give you a good marker for how much time you are spending writing vs. browsing forums, twittering vs. nano-ing.

It also allows you to put a limit on how long you spend in an app or web site on a given day.

So why chart how you spend your time? Just like budgeting your money and tracking your expenses, it encourages you to use it more wisely. It’s easy not to think about how much time or money we spend on a certain distraction, but when it’s in front of you, and you can see that it’s taking up a third of your time and money, it’s hard to ignore.

And by nature, we’re competitive creatures. We like to achieve things. If you can just get that “writing bar” to top 100…

It’s completely private and customizable in what it records. It’s also free.

I recently noted that I’d tested out BlogJet to some success. After using it for a few weeks, and seeing a reply from Alec Satin, who has an excellent blog on Project Management and being a generally pleasant human being, I wanted to post a couple updates.

BlogJet has worked well, though I find that I have to jump on the web and make edits occasionally after posting. It lacks a couple key elements that would make it a real times saver:

• No way to insert symbols—though this dash, which I use constantly, shows up automagically, and you can add auto-replace rules for some things.
• It occasionally inserts formatting using span tags over the entire post, overriding the blog’s default styles, which is oddly annoying and unnecessary.
• Tags don’t work. It has an option to use ‘native tags’ instead of technorati, but that never works. They always show up as links at the bottom of the post instead of actual tags in WordPress.

Blog Jet is nice in that I don’t have to visit the site, log in, and click on post. So generally, when I have an idea I want to jot down and develop later, I write it in BlogJet and save it as draft on the site.

But if I’m going to post all the way through, I don’t see a point, since I have to log into the site and edit the tags anyways : (  I’ve put in a request to BlogJet to fix this feature; hopefully they’ll have an ear for my feedback.

Argh, trying this program was a test in patience.

I downloaded the ScribeFire plugin for FireFox and tried it out. Everything about it is wrong, imo. Which is surprising considering the large following it has. I suppose of the free alternatives its, well, really the only one besides BlogDesk that looked up to par.

But ScribeFire proved buggy, hard to use, hard to understand, and poorly designed. And while it had keyboard shortcuts, they weren’t documented and I didn’t intend to spend hours figuring them out to forget them later.

Their search feature fails if I put an = sign into the search (such as searhing the html for class="bold") So I ended up moving this post over to BlogDesk to finish writing it, which went buggy.

So now I’m back to BlogJet, who will be getting my $29.95 for a licence and a bit of peace of mind.

I tried out BlogDesk today. I tried to use it to write a review of ScribeFire (coming next). It didn’t go so well.

The interface is decent, not great but not horrible. Keyboard shortcuts and decent formatting. Most of the standard blogging features. No search and replace; typical.

However, after a while the program “glitched” and I was unable to edit the content of a post anymore.

The focus, even when I clicked on my text, seemed to go somewhere random, like the category list. So BlogDesk gets the thumbs down.

I tested out BlogJet ($29.95/free trial) for posting to my blog from a desktop editor. Very sharp and polished so far. When I opened it, it suggested I send this post, though it had some really silly text for the content.

It did, however, have this spiffy quote:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” – Albert Einstein

I’ll also be trying out BlogDesk over the next few days, which is freeware. But I have a suspicion it won’t live up to BlogJet’s polished UI and nice set of hotkeys…

I downloaded Google Chrome today and tried it out.  All I can say is wwwOwww. Fast. Fast. Fast.  

Everything about it was fluid and quick, down to the scrollbars, which move like liquid lightning.

And easy to use.  Simple and clean; exactly what a browser should be. And it’s compatible with every page I tried, including standard js libraries and advanced banking apps.

The only things missing, imo are:

• DOM inspector — found the dom inspector; it works like safari, have to highlight something on page and right click to ‘inspect’ it
• Keyboard shortcut for bookmarks — for mouse haters like me, this is a necessity. It’s way to slow to go clicky through menus when you view a couple hundred web pages a day (that translates to over an hour of clicking). I can type alt+b,c,d,1 lightning fast to open a login to my favorite app
• Greasemonkey — greasemonkey is essential for serious web users, it allows me to tweak nearly any page to my needs

If you’ve been thinking about trying Chrome, or updating your browser, head on over for a quick and painless install. Find out what fast web pages look like.

I checked out Digsby today. It’s an IM client that also does social networking (Twitter, Facebook, et al) and email (pop/imap/gmail/hotmail/etc).

The feature that really drew my attention was the ability to put a chat widget right on my website that allows visitors to see if I’m online and chat with me. Sure, these aren’t horribly uncommon now, but they set it up instantly and allow me to turn it on/off via my IM client. Spiffy.

Set up was easy enough. And there is a program for importing logs from trillian, pidgin, and others.

Yay!

The only difficulty I had was finding my gaim logs, which were stored in c:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.purple\logs. “.purple”?? What the heck. But that’s solved now.