Ira Cogan

[This is not advertising or an endorsement or a disavowal of any products or services, I'm just writing about the stuff I use.]

I recently wrote about the stuff this blog is made of; my domain registrar, platform, and email service respectively. In that spirit I want to write about the other stuff I've been using lately and how I arrived at the process I currently have. Over the years I've used so many different kinds of writing software, and I've gone from Windows to Mac and back. I mention this because it's relevant to the topic of writing software.

So like, in summary to be expanded on some other time, I was a PC person from the early 90s up until the XP era in the early aughts. And then the iPhone 3GS came out. I liked it so much that when my computer died, I got Mac and almost exclusively used Mac hardware products up until about three years ago when I took a spreadsheet class. The experience of Excel on a Windows machine was so superior to the experience on a Mac, I switched back. Throughout it all, I've been, and still am an iPhone person. As far as my position on this stuff goes, everybody should use whatever makes them happy. I don't think one is better than the other. Windows machines are more versatile. Macs are more secure. Linux is the most socially conscious.

Anyway, at different times over the years, some pieces of software were not available on whichever platform I was using, or the software was and, in some cases, still is, just better on one over the other. I experimented with Google Docs, IA Writer, Notability, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Microsoft OneNote, and a slew of others... Which resulted in me having a lot of writing scattered across a slew of formats. Unless I saw something through from beginning to completion in a short amount of time, it got filed away and forgotten about. I still got a buncha stuff all over the place but moved most of the important stuff to Word/Docx.

I decided when I made the switch back to PC that I would serve myself better becoming proficient at Word and Google Docs since Microsoft Office and Google Workspace are what most of the business world uses and given my making a habit of using Excel for more things instead of a bazillion different apps and services doing what a spreadsheet can do but prettier, I decided on Word. But more importantly I decided to pick one piece of writing software and stick with it exclusively. Until a couple of days ago.

My blog host is just too awesome. The CMS just works too great for markdown and uploading photos from a browser, and Word, well, doesn't do that as well. So I started out drafting in Word, and due to the friction (best word for it I can think of) I developed the bad habit of drafting directly into the CMS and publishing there... And the other day I caught myself not copy/pasting it into a Word Document and saving it immediately. I realized I need to add a little friction. Speed is nice, but the process is just too fast and I want this stuff to have a little friction to it, but not so much that it's a pain in the ass. Drafting markdown in Word is a little bit of a pain in the ass. So I was like 'What's a good markdown editor (one that isn't the CMS of write.as)?' and I've heard good things about Obsidian, but then I remembered IA Writer. I remembered the inventor of markdown really likes the iOS version so rather than try out a new thing, let me download the thing I already had but for Windows this time and see if I still like it. And, I do! I'm writing this in IA Writer right now, and I can export to Word with one click! And upon testing, it exports with all the styling looking as it's supposed to in Word.

So now I have the best of all three worlds; A place to draft for the blog that isn't the blog itself, a way to save it in .md and in .docx quickly, and the place to share it, and with just the right amount of friction to the process.

That's all for now.

-Ira