Stumbling Through Text Blocks

I normally write in a text editor, usually Drafts by Agile Tortoise. For years, my flow has been to jot ideas down in Drafts, flesh them out into blog posts, and then exporting them to Wordpress. I even tried to have it so that I could fire and forget from Drafts.

But while it sounds simple, it ended up being unexpectedly difficult. Publishing to Wordpress is not a feature in Drafts the way that it is in Ulysses or iA Writer. While both of those apps are set up for push button publishing, Drafts allows publishing to Wordpress through user extended actions. This is what makes Drafts so powerful, but in this case meant that those user supported actions broke when Wordpress changed their backend.

So I settled on a two step model, where I'd go from Drafts to a dedicated editor like Ulysses and then publish from there. This was a drag. I wanted everything in one app, but where Ulysses can publish to Wordpress, it really lags when syncing between devices, whereas I can practically watch the text appear in the note within Drafts in my Mac while I'm typing it on my iPhone. I write on my phone or my iPad or my iMac (I accidentally typed, "mybimac," and I can't stop giggling), and I want to be able to pick up the text where I left off when I switch from one device to another. I can do that with Drafts.

One thing that I haven't tried, but am trying now, is just writing directly in the Wordpress app. I'm kind of a snob when it comes to editors, so I had never really thought of it. It turns out that if you import text into the app, it imports it into the "classic" editor, but if you open a new post within the app, it uses the new "blocks" editor, which is a lot nicer.

A long standing goal has been to post more to this blog. I'm hoping that switching to using the stock editor will help. For one thing, it's new, so I'll want to play with it. But I also want to do more from the hip, off the cuff style posts, more extemporaneous, less planned and edited.

This is already my second post today, which is promising. Sometimes it just takes playing with something new to stumble through a block.