Sometimes, I come across ideas for posts quite by accident.
Early this afternoon (November 6), for instance, I was looking at the wiki that we use for scheduling our posts, trying to figure out my posting schedule for the next few weeks. I was also wondering whether I’d be able to post something for the week of November 10. We try to have our posts in by midnight on Thursday of the week before the post runs, and I was, quite frankly, drawing a blank on post ideas.
I’d pretty much concluded I’d have to put posting anything off for a week, and I turned to other concerns. I’ve been frustrated with my writing (or lack thereof) lately, and I’ve been thinking I need to restart a daily writing practice --- something along the lines of using 750words.com, but without relying on that service
Readers may recall that I recently wrote about using Evernote in the classroom. In that post, I noted that I use Evernote for storing all kinds of information, not just for keeping track of my class notes. Since everything in my Evernote account is searchable, it seemed a good place to start keeping that daily writing.
The catch is that I’ve started doing most of my writing in Markdown, for a number of reasons. (I won’t go into them here, but if you’d like some good reasons and a quick introduction to Markdown, check out Lincoln’s post from a few years back.)
So far as I’m aware, Evernote doesn’t handle Markdown natively. Still, I was sure there had to be a way to get them working together, and that more than likely some clever person had already figured something out. So off to Google I went, and I found this: Evernote for Sublime Text. I’ve been using Sublime Text for most of my writing for some months now. A Sublime Text package that integrates with my Evernote account is ideal. I can do my writing in the application and markup language I’ve become most accustomed to using, and can send daily work to my Evernote account with just a few keystrokes, and without having to leave Sublime Text. The note shows up in Evernote formatted in rich text, but I can easily open it (or any other note in my account) again in Sublime Text to continue editing in Markdown. This may turn out to be just the tool I was looking for.
It turned out to be a fine post idea, too.
Do you have a daily writing practice? What about a favorite set of tools for writing and for storing your work? Let us know in the comments.
Lead image created by the author. It’s a composite of her own screenshot and a CC-licensed image by Flickr user othree.
