You need a place to compose and hone

If you're like me, you sometimes sit on bits and pieces of blogs for days, even weeks, crafting or refining. You need a place to compose and hone.[1] And the less time you spend worrying about how it looks, the more time you can focus on the words.

I needed a toolkit that was portable, allowed rich text formatting, was quick, and didn't run in the cloud (because you can't depend on the Internet to write; it had to be as reliable as a typewriter[2]). I've used a ton of apps and have finally found a collection that works well for me. I'm sure this list will grow, but here's a snapshot, and they are all free and easy.

1.
AllMyNotes
http://allmynotes.vladonai.com/ ➚
• Free portable or desktop outliner
• Drag and drop files into AllMyNotes to store while you're composing and save them out later when you need them (that's a paid feature). Embedded office files show as icons and use less space than a lot of apps that do this; embedded images show as images; you can reduce them to thumbnail size and store them in the body of your blog as a reminder of where you plan to place them. They're still full size when you save them out.
• Very attractive; love the colors and soft edges
• Fast saves
• If you're pasting straight to Blogger, links automatically are coded to open in a new window; I link out to other sites a lot, this is very helpful.
• Spell check
• Very friendly and helpful author! I got AllMyNotes free on a the daily site Giveaway of the Day ( http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ ➚) and the author had no obligation to help me, but he did. I will use this probably until v3 and then purchase the next iteration.
• (Minor complaint: Pasting directly into blogger pulls in a lot of code from AllMyNotes, which must be using it for its own text handling. You can't see the difference as a reader, but the source Blogger interprets is cluttered, and all your changes, new images, etc compound the clutter.... which leads me to #2...)

(I composed this blog entry in AllMyNotes, then copy/pasted into Live Writer, images and all. All I did was tweak formatting and some link syntax.)



2.
Windows Live Writer Portable
• Get Live Writer here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-writer ➚
• Make it portable here: http://www.online-tech-tips.com/blogging/run-windows-live-writer-from-usb-drive/ ➚
• If you aren't using it, you don't know what you're missing; frequently appears at the top of the list for blogging software; easy as Word to operate and publishes straight to a variety of blogs, though IMHO it could add some contextual shortcuts and a caption option. It probably can be used to some extent to create and organize, but it's not an outliner.



3.
keynote-nf
http://code.google.com/p/keynote-nf/ ➚
• Free outliner, being developed by Daniel Velasco and based on the excellent work of Marek Jedlinski who created the base feature set; it's in active development and is open source; although I found a new favorite in AllMyNotes, I have a fondness for the raw power of KeyNote-NF.
• You can drag files both in and out; in AllMyNotes you can drag in, but need to right-click and save out.
• Search pane is full featured and very robust; every occurrence of your search is shown for you, just click through each and you see them in context.
• I still use it for large projects that store a lot of data and require a lot of searching.



[1]
If you're the type to open up a post, write it and hit the publish button, you're not like me and this isn't for you.

[2]
I’m also wary of cloud security and long-term storage; no service is immune to hacking, hardware failure, bankruptcy, etc, and if you rely on a cloud service, there is a risk that goes along with it. I do use Google Docs for many things, and I use Gmail; I tolerate some risk for some things, but I archive most of what I write, whether that’s Gmail, Comcast email, Twitter or Google Docs; and I religiously back it up where I know it’s protected and secure.