December 2005 Archives

Like wow - my g33ky brother passed on this link to me the other day about this online Web Word Processor called Writely. It's completely blown me away with how cool it all is - even though it's still in Beta testing, @ 49% as of writing this, I'm seriously impressed with both the concept and the usability.

I've used a few online text editors, like FCKEdit, TinyMC, but they've always been buggy especially in FireFox - whereas this has been rock solid so far - massive touching of wood going on at the desk ;)

Usually, when I write up a post for any blog, I either do a short one in the edit space of my blog engine, or if it's a sizable one in Word (mainly for the spell/grammar checking) - but to be blunt, Word can be a pain in the A$$ with it's over abundance of extrainious coding that it will throw into make stuff look pretty - that and it's a memory hog.

But, I have to be at a PC to use Word, and usually my own with it's custom spell checker switched on - and if I was working with someone else when editing an article - much emailing and waiting has to occur.

The last point is what's got me excited - using Writely, you can allow online collaborators! So, like with your blog engine, you can write posts from anywhere in the world (or in my case currently, anywhere in the UK) and also collaborate with others you have allowed before publishing. I see many possibilities for this - so once I've picked my way through it all, I'll write up a full review later.

I love Firefox - being an old crusty as far as surfing the Net goes, I've used browsers as far flung as Internet Explorer 2 through to it's last incarnation of IE6, Opera since it began, Netscape's weird numbering scheme until it got remade as Mozilla, Safari on the Mac and finally I've settled with Firefox.

Firefox 1.5 has been out for a short while now and i do like it's capabilities - mainly through the several extensions that you can place onto it.

I've been around on the Internet since the early days of BBS's and school modem link-ups using BBC Micro's way back when in the dark ages of computing.

So I've seen a heck of a lot of development on how the web is used and abused...