My writing starts with an idea. A kernel I work over in my head and discus with friends until it is ready to be written down. When I get many ideas at once I manage them with TaskPaper. Really good ideas never make it to the list. They are born, worked over, discussed, written down, edited and published all in one continual motion. I can’t stop thinking about the really good ideas. Writing them down is the only way to get them out of my head.

I write most of my articles on my Mac, but some like this one start out on my iPad first. I used to write all of Egg Freckles’ notes on my Newton, but it became too difficult to get my content off of my MessagePad when it was time to edit. With Dropbox my content is accessible from everywhere the second I write it.

On my Mac I write in BBEdit. I like how the project viewer shows me everything I have written on Egg Freckles in a single window, and how the currently open files update automatically even if the content is updated in another application or on a different computer. It helps that BBEdit is the most powerful text editor on the Mac even if I am just writing in Markdown.

On my iPad I have tried several different editors but stuck with Elements which is what I am writing In now. A good iPad text editor must sync with Dropbox instantly and reliably. It must allow me to increase the text size and preferably write with white text on a black background. Elements does all of these things, and although it doesn’t allow me to open and edit old Egg Freckles entries easily I have other tools for that.

I start a new entry by duplicating a previous project folder. Stacey my CMS works with folders called projects. Each project is numbered in the order I want it to appear on Egg Freckles and contains the plain text file and image I want appear in the published article. I label the project with a temporary title, insert a perspective completion date, and delete the existing content. Now I am ready to write.

Writing the first paragraph is always the hardest part. It usually takes me a half an hour or more of trying different introductory sentences to get the flow right. When I don’t like what I have written I delete everything and start over. I don’t like writing with fragments of unused sentences scattered across the page. When I have a series of points to cover I list them all out and then return to the first point to fill them out one at a time

I edit while I write. When I get stuck at a particular part I scroll to the top and work my way down rereading what I have written and editing each line as I go. In college the start of my papers were always better written than the end because I would often run out of time to start a formal second draft. The red squiggly lines under misspelled words are my worst distractions. I often cannot finish a line without replacing them with the correct word. When I edit I rarely fix individual words or phrases but rather select the offending prose and rewrite it in place. I type faster when I can write out complete thoughts instead of correcting individual characters.

After I have written a substantial portion of a project I will take a break to come back to the rest. As with my more informal editing I resume by reading from the top and working my way down. After reading through what I have written several times I will read it once more out loud to myself to make sure I didn’t miss any errors. Before I am done I correct any mistakes in my Markdown, and add any relevant links.

I almost always save dithering my articles accompanying image as a reward for after the writing is complete. Often I have already determined the image I am going to use before I start writing. If I am writing a review of an application or about a computer workflow my article’s image is usually a preexisting computer icon. If a suitable image does not come to mind a Google search for ideas is my best remedy.

It is best practice to start out with the largest version of the source image possible even if the dithering process removes most of the detail. All of my dithered images end up being either 256 or 600 pixels wide so my source material must be larger than that. If my source image started out as an icon Mac OS X’s Preview can quickly convert it to a alpha channel equipped PNG any image editor can understand. Pixelmator helps me trim, crop, and resize the original image so that it is suitable for dithering. it is pointless to dither an image prior to resizing, but important to make the most of the available width before exporting the image to HyperDither.

HyperDither is TinRocket’s dedicated application for applying the Atkinson dithering technique. It only has two settings Sharpen and Contrast which I toggle off and on until I find right combination. I wish there was an iPad version of HyperDither, or that it was included as part of Pixelmater. Relying on HyperDither’s superb dithering capability means image preparation is restricted to my Mac and round tripping my images between HyperDither and Pixelmator is required.

Back in Pixelmator I remove the white pixels by making them transparent and convert the black pixels to the appropriate shade of green. I export the result as a two color 8 bit PNG. Finally the entire project including the text file and the newly created image can be uploaded to the appropriate directory on Egg Freckles using Transmit. Stacey does the rest by converting my Markdown into HTML and embedding my dithered image into the published page. I let my readers know a new article has been posted to Egg Freckles using Twitterrific, and sit back and enjoy the success of being a published author.