So after rediscovering the distraction free editors to write reports, it seemed mad not to use the same environment to update my blog. I really like the fact that the editor only supports plain text and didn’t want to reduce the readability of the plain text by having lots of unneeded markup all over the place.

What I needed was a simple tool to convert my semi structured text into html and then I could just upload that to my blog. Ideally the tool would be a command line tool so I could easily automate the two steps.

I looked at a few different tools but in the end chose to use stx2any as it seemed to be a fairly close fit to the type of plain text I normally use, and also produced the cleanest html.

Then I started to look at tools to upload html into my WordPress blog, I was expecting there to be quite a few but can honestly say I didn’t even find one. I find this a bit wierd as blogs where originally just html and before that text (remember finger). So I started to look at Python scripts that interacted with the MetaWeblogAPI but as my Python is fairly limited I thought I could probably do it quicker in Scala (as thats what I’ve been mainly working in lately).

And so an hour or two later html2blog was born. And here is how I tied it all together:

stx2any --link-abbrevs --make-title off -T html $1 |
 tidy -asxhtml -qc -w 0 | java -jar html2blog.jar

Currently html2blog is very limited in that it always creates a new draft, so the next step will be to make it update an existing entry. I’d also like to get images working at some point.

So many moons ago I was reading about a fullscreen editor for Mac called WriteRoom. The basic premise is that it is a very limited editor that actively aims to block out all distractions from writing. It achieves this by:

• Running fullscreen (so no desktop distractions)
• Supporting plain text only (so no styling distractions)
• No toolbar
• No menubar
• No statusbar
• A few simple shortcuts to do what you need

Anyway I have been running Ubuntu for a number of years, and had often ran Nano fullscreen in a Gnome Terminal but was curious what might now be available. So a few moments googling and this was the list:

• WriteRoom for Mac
• DarkRoom for Windows
• q10 for Windows
• PyRoom for Linux
• Focussed for Adobe Air

After trying each one, I decided that I actually really liked the q10 version and even though it runs perfectly on Linux via Wine, it just takes way to long to startup (2-3 seconds). Mean while the PyRoom version starts in less than 200ms, so after upgrading to 0.41 I was able to get PyRoom looking very similar to q10 with the following settings:

• Green screen theme
• 95% height
• 62% width
• Padding 5
• No border
• Autosave
• BitStream Vera Sans font

The only thing I am missing is it remembering what file I was last editing, maybe it’s time I brushed up my Python skills.