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The Writing Machine

Blogging about the best articles, sites, and blog posts for Writers; on the Craft, Mind and Body, Tech, Tools, and all the other Paraphenalia.

Friday, November 18, 2005

Creating and organising Documents from within Firefox

I was inspired to respond by email to an interesting post on Lifehacker called Geek to Live: Turn Firefox into a Web Writer. This is what I wrote:

I've looked into using a combination of the ScrapBook extension, Nandu extension &/or Launchy (to access Nvu or Open Office, if necessary) to create documents from Firefox.

I've got a page captured to ScrapBook called "New Document", which I open in a tab when I want to create a new document (ie blog post draft or similar). I then right click and select "Edit this page" to open it in Nandu. I write my post, save it, then refresh the page in firefox, which shows the changes I've made. I then capture (re-capture?) the changed document to my blog posts folder in ScrapBook.

It's a little involved, and I have to clear old text from "New Document" every time I open it to make a new entry, but I like staying in the browser, and ScrapBook allows me to order things how I like, give keywords/tags to documents, search, and do some annotation within ScrapBook. Also, if I'm referring to a webpage or blog to write a post, I can save a copy of that page to the same ScrapBook folder as my blog post draft to make it easy to reference.

I use Launchy to do more involved editing, when Nandu isn't sufficient. Nvu works best with ScrapBook code (preserving ScrapBook's annotations). Open Office 1.4 screws with the annotations a bit. I haven't tested Open Office 2.0 yet. It may work fine.

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