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It’s been a while since I wrote anything tech-related here and I thought it’s only fitting that I start off the new year of tech writing with something that would help other bloggers like me. This one in particular will help bloggers have a better writing experience. Although WriteMonkey is a general writing tool, this article is focused on how it could be used by blog writers specifically.

WriteMonkey is just one of the many distraction-free writing tools that have cropped up the writer’s scene during the past year. These are small programs that let you write freely with no distractions. What distractions, you ask? Well I’m sure you’ve experienced writing in Microsoft Word and you know it has an unimaginable number of features. All too often, those features only get in the way of your thinking as you write/type your work. Distraction-free writing tools remove all of that by just giving you a full screen program with a plain background and text without any of the visible formatting. It is not however just an ordinary text editor. You’ll see why in a bit.

I’ve tried most of these tools, at least the ones with a Windows-compatible version. I remember struggling between Q10 and WriteMonkey but I can’t quite remember now what made me choose the latter. Anyway, that’s the stuff for another article. But in this one, I will show you how I added such a tool to my blogging workflow. I’ve been using WriteMonkey for 3 months now and it has really helped my blogwriting. Uhm… I hope it shows.

Before, I just start my writing directly on Windows Live Writer. I love this program and I’m sure most bloggers do too. But after more than a year of using it, I found things I disliked about it. I appreciate the spell-check feature but I get rather annoyed seeing red marks on my precious article which is supposed to be a draft anyway so stop correcting me! Call it being OC but half of my writing time back then consisted of adding words to the dictionary or marking misspelled words as “Ignore”. Very frustrating. Yeah, I can disable it in the settings but the spell-check feature isn’t the only thing that bothered me. The whole program itself begged for my attention! Anyhow, I discovered WriteMonkey through Lifehacker and the rest is history.

Download WriteMonkey
Requires Windows XP, Vista or 7

Setting up WriteMonkey

WriteMonkey doesn’t need to be installed. I have the WriteMonkey program folder inside another folder aptly called No Installers. Then I created a shortcut to the program which I pinned to the Windows taskbar for easy access. You can also pin the shortcut to the Start Menu or Desktop if you prefer.

I no longer begin writing my blog posts on Windows Live Writer. All the posts I’ve written here for the past 3 months were born in the comfort of a WriteMonkey screen.

WriteMonkey’s menu can be accessed with a simple right click anywhere on the screen.

You can customize a lot of things including:

• the color of the background and text
• the width of the writing area and the margins
• the spacing between lines and paragraphs

I won’t go into detail with the other features but let’s enable something all bloggers need: the word count display.

Right click, select Progress, check Progress count and Show unit then choose Words for the unit.

Writing the Draft in WriteMonkey

Before you get lost in your writing, the first thing you need to do is save the file. WriteMonkey saves each file as a regular text file. Do Ctrl+S to save the file.

Then I just write like I normally do but without the text formatting yet. I paste all the links and quotes I need. Move ideas around. Do a belly dance. Do whatever ritual you perform during writing.

This is where you’ll notice the advantages of using a program like WriteMonkey. There’s nothing in it that could drift your attention away from whatever you’re writing. It’s just you and your words. You can change the colors to suit your preference. I have 4 color schemes saved. I use whichever suits my current mood.

My WriteMonkey Color Schemes (RGB values)

#1 – paper: 203,188,137 – ink: black
#2 – paper: 34,34,34 – ink: white
#3 – paper: black – ink: white
#4 – paper: 34,34,34 – ink: white

So how do I insert the formatting?

WriteMonkey supports Markdown which you can use to pre-format your article. Although it isn’t required, this nifty feature might save you some valuable time later.

Some of these markups are used like so:
*bold*
_italic_
__underline__

There are also Markdown equivalents for other HTML tags like headers and blockquote. For a complete list you can visit http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Once you’re done, you can export your article with the markups converted to HTML code. Do this by going to Markup export from the right-click menu. I just check Export to default web browser and uncheck the Include stylesheet option. The article will be opened in a web browser where you can just get the HTML source code ready for pasting in Live Writer.

Some people might not like having to learn these markups and think they’re just distractions. Well, to tell you honestly I don’t even use them all. I only use the bold, italic, header, list and hyperlink markups. (As a blogger, you shouldn’t ever use the underline here.) And I don’t use them all the time. But for long articles, it’s extremely useful.

And what about the images?

Well, nothing fancy. I just use placeholders as highlighted in the screenshot below. I don’t use the Markdown syntax because it’s too complex for my needs.

Getting a bird’s eye view of your article

Without the visible formatting, a long article could become very hard to manage. Fortunately, WriteMonkey has Jumps.

Right-click then select Jumps or press Alt+J to toggle this window on/off.

A handy way to keep notes

One of the really cool features in WriteMonkey is the repository.

Each file has its own and you can switch to the repository view by pressing F5 or Alt+R on the keyboard. You can use this to keep some of the stuff that you don’t want to see or include in the article. I use it to store long URLs that I would later link with words from my article. I also put in there all the other stuff that doesn’t get into the final draft for posterity’s sake.

After you have written several drafts, you can easily reopen any of your 10 most recently opened files by doing Ctrl+Tab.

You can hit F1 to view the help card showing keyboard shortcuts and basic markup syntax.

WriteMonkey also has a spell-checker, timed writing, advanced statistics and web lookups. There are several more features hidden in this small but incredibly useful program but the really great thing about WriteMonkey is that it’s fast, writer-friendly and free! The program’s developer is also quite cool because he’s very open to feedback and suggestions. Frankly, I already love WriteMonkey just how it is now. Maybe just add more witty quotes for the Monkey to say.

I hope you found this helpful. I might blog about a comparison between all distraction-free writing tools depending on the feedback here. Oh and I’d always like to see new color schemes for WriteMonkey so share it in the comments if you have some. Thanks for reading and happy blogging! ^_^

WriteMonkey Official Site

WriteMonkey on Twitter

WriteMonkey Discussion Group