Turbocharged

Do you have a blog but hate writing online? If you do, you’re not alone. Let’s crack one of the secrets to producing more content in less time.

Every blogger has felt “writer’s dread” at least once. You know the feeling: an idea hits you, and seconds after that, your inner voice tells you hey, that’d be a good idea for an article in my blog.

And then you never ger around to actually publishing an article discussing your idea.

Why dread posting an article, if it’s so simple?

The reason for that is not so evident: getting from idea to published post is not simple — it’s actually cumbersome. There are several steps in between logging in to your blog and hitting the Publish button.

Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: if you want to produce new articles constantly, you better start streamlining your publishing process. Cut steps. Because, if you have to think twice before writing, you’ll be blogging a great deal less.

Now, I’m going to talk about a discovery I made that truly slashed the time I spent writing.

Formatting your post kills your productivity

Good articles have formatting cues. Anything that structures your text can be a cue: a strategic set of words in italics, headlines and subheadings, bullet and numbered lists are all good examples. Without them, your article is a big blob of words, and your readers will have a hard time actually making sense of your wonderful article — or, most likely, they’ll head to another Web page, or the fridge (hey, that’s not unheard of!).

Thank $DEITY for WordPress, then! WordPress (and, by extension, Turbocharged) has an integrated rich-text editor. It can make life way easier for beginning authors who don’t want to learn HTML and all the usually required gunk needed to write Web pages. I myself use it from time to time.

Yes, rich text editors are wonderful — but they don’t come without drawbacks

The Turbocharged/WordPress rich text editor is great, but it has two main drawbacks:

1. It takes some time to load. Even if it’s just under 10 seconds (with a fast connection), those are 10 seconds you have to wait while your article idea boils and fades in your head.
2. Formatting an article is cumbersome. See, you need to constantly switch your right hand (or left hand, if you’re a leftie) from the keyboard to the mouse, to click all those wonderful buttons.

Let me focus on drawback 2 for a second. You may think that using your mouse and clicking on buttons in a toolbar is a fabulous boost to productivity. But you’d be categorically wrong.

You unconsciously spend an average of three seconds each time you switch your hand from the keyboard to the mouse. And you spend three more when you return to the keyboard (alas, these bumps on the F and J keys are fantastic).

These seconds add up. Not only are they a waste of time, they actually kill your inspiration: you can’t actually be thinking two things at the same time, no matter how “multitasking” you fancy yourself to be. Ever found yourself trying to get “in the zone” right after you’ve manipulated things with your mouse? There ya go.

Enter Markdown — exit toolbar

I’ve found that the simplest solution is actually the one that seems more complicated: I just killed the rich text editor.

Actually, I didn’t just do that — I hate writing HTML, and the <> keys on my keyboard are in an astonishingly inconvenient position. What I did was get myself a helper: Markdown.

Markdown, an invention by Daring Fireball, is a plugin for WordPress (bundled for free in Turbocharged), is a preprocessor — a fancy name for something that takes your text and does the dirty job of converting it to another format. With Markdown, you write using a special format, and you get a post in HTML, fully transparently.

Now, don’t panic. I know I just said “special format”. Of course, at first reckoning, that sounds a lot like HTML. Trust me, it’s radically not.

So that’s what I did: I killed the rich text editor in my WordPress user profile settings, then I installed Markdown and enabled it in the Plugins management page. Actually, I didn’t have to install it, because it came included with Turbocharged (did I mention that already?).

The Markdown cheat sheet

Writing in Markdown is extremely simple. These are the rules:

1. You write plain text.
   
2. Paragraphs are simply blocks of text separated by two ENTERs (carriage returns).
3. Some characters on your keyboard format your text automatically.
4. You can also use HTML if you feel like it — Markdown doesn’t mind.
   

That’s it. And here’s how you format things.

Bulleted lists

To get a bulleted list like this:

• item
• item 2
• item 3

Just write:

- item 1
- item 2
- item 3

Each line begins with a dash and a space. That’s it. The dashes are converted to the right HTML that yields a bulleted list. Don’t separate list items with several carriage returns — just use one between each item.

You can nest lists:

* important point
   * important sub-point
* another important point
* hey, I’m starting to look like a PowerPoint slide!

Ordered lists

Same deal:

1. one
2. two
3. three

can be laid out as:

1. one
2. two
3. three

A number, a dot and a space. Great, huh? The thing is, only the first line must start with 1. The rest can repeat the 1. — Markdown is smart enough to “do as you mean”.

Italics and bold face

Want to italicize some text? Enclose it in *asterisks*. That will yield asterisks. The key is that both the opening and the closing asterisks must be next to a letter. Oh, you can use underscores as well.

Same goes for bold face, but using **two asterisks** instead of one. Instant bold face for two asterisks

Hyperlinks

For hyperlinks, you can use the convenient Link button on the non-rich WordPress post editor, but Markdown also has a shortcut: (http://url.com/ “Title”) is turned into Title.

Block quotations

> quote your text with greater-than signs and you’ll get a block quotation
> * and you can even
> * do lists inside quotations

Easy, right?

Horizontal rules

Three asterisks in line, separated by spaces: * * *. Three dashes also do the trick.

Headers

These are my favorites (wait, did that just sound like I don’t have a life?). A pound sign in front of a line of text is a level 1 heading. Add more pounds to get less font weight (ironic, isn’t it?).

#Heading level 1
##Heading level 2
###Heading level 3

But, how the hell does this improve my writing productivity?

There’s one big reason this will help you write faster: you no longer need to “switch contexts” between writing and formatting. Say goodbye to formatting demotivators.

Once you get used to Markdown (half an hour at the most), you’ll be writing and structuring your article simultaneously. In fact, you’ll end up wishing your word processor accepted Markdown as well. Put in other words, you’ll be writing as humanly fast as possible, and your only speed limit will be your typing skills.

Time to brush up on typing skills, isn’t it?

Markdown and HTML

Markdown is friendly. It can be intermixed with HTML, so you can use the WordPress image manager to add images without effort. The only thing to remember is that text wrapped inside block-level tags (HTML paragraphs, blockquotes, headings, DIVs) doesn’t get the Markdown treatment.

Oh, and don’t forget that your text needs to escape the characters <, > and &. These are special in HTML, so you need to write them like this: < > and & respectively.

And that’s it for this tutorial

We’re done. But I don’t want to let you go like that. Instead, I’ll:

• share with you a one-page quick Markdown cheat-sheet — place it in your browser’s toolbar for quick access
• push you towards Turbocharged — you know, it’s got the Extra edition of Markdown and 99 other useful plugins included; but of course, if you’re already a customer, you already knew that
  

Happy blogging!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Turbocharged and WordPress tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.