Author: Shawn Blanc

Barley: Front-End WordPress Content Editor  →

Barley is a new WordPress plugin that lets you edit the text and content of your posts and pages from the front end of your site, rather than going into the back-end editor.

This workflow makes a lot of sense. And Barley does a very good job at implementing it. For me, the vast majority of edits I make to my site are fixing typos and broken links. And, usually, I find myself on the front-end permalink first (because someone pointed out the typo via email or Twitter, giving me a link to the page).

I’ve spent some time with Barley over the past week and it’s very well done. You just click your cursor in the text and you can write, edit, and more — add in links, change text to bold, write whole paragraphs, etc.

However, I have one quibble that I think is a deal breaker for me. After a post has been edited in Barley, the back-end text of the article gets converted from Markdown to HTML. I use a different Markdown plugin here on shawnblanc.net than I do on The Sweet Setup, and Barley converted my markdown text to HTML formatting on both sites. It’s not a destructive change at all, and I fully trust Barley. But, I also like to keep my posts in Markdown. So, we’ll see.

Barley is on subscription pricing plan. It’s $12/year to use it. If it sounds interesting, I definitely think it’s worth checking out. It could remove a lot of friction in your typo-maintenance workflow, and more (like the fact you can write whole posts right there in the browser!).

Barley: Front-End WordPress Content Editor

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My thanks to Fracture for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Sponsor: Fracture. Your picture, directly on glass.

Whose iPad Life?  →

Yes. Love this story from Ben Thompson. As well as the point he’s making that Apple’s new website about using the iPad in real life gives examples of people that don’t quite fit the mold for how most people could benefit from an iPad.

I think most of us who are “tech savvy” can relate to the situation of having a non-tech-savvy parent and or grandparent get an iOS device and instantly become more connected and conversational through FaceTime, email, and messages. My folks went from candybar phones to iPhones about 6 months ago and our amount of day-to-day quick communications has increased dramatically. We are always sharing photos and videos with each other over group iMessage conversations, we do quick FaceTime chats so grandma can say hi to her grandsons, and more. It’s a far different — and I think better — experience than the once-a-week phone call check in.

Whose iPad Life?

Smartphones are Becoming the Hub of our Digital Lifestyles  →

Great piece by Tim Bajarin. I often jokingly refer to my iPhone as “Command Central”. As Tim points out, smartphones are quickly becoming our “central hub” devices because they have become extremely capable thanks to software. I’d add that we’ve gravitated towards them, and allowed them to become so central to our digital lifestyles, by the sheer fact our phones are always right there in our pockets.

Smartphones are Becoming the Hub of our Digital Lifestyles

The Unacknowledged Compromise  →

Matt Gemmell:

Compromises don’t make for great products, and nor do they make for great experiences.

That’s why you have more than one device. That’s why it’s perfectly reasonable to pack and travel with several of them. And that’s also why a more rational view of a piece of technology is that it’s part of an ecosystem — your own personal one, encompassing your work, leisure, interests and utility needs.

The Unacknowledged Compromise

Editorially

Leading up to the launch of The Sweet Setup, we were wrangling about 20 active documents. I was working with half-a-dozen different authors on their app reviews along with writing several reviews and blog posts of my own, and Jeff Abbott was editing everything.

To manage all of these documents we use Editorially.

It’s awesome. Here’s why.

  • Markdown support: All the writers we work with prefer to write in Markdown. I prefer markdown. And, well, Editorially supports markdown syntax highlighting in the browser. It also displays images inline. When you’re done writing you can export your writing as an html, markdown, plain text, Latex, rich text, MS Word, or ePub file. Wow.

  • Collaboration: invite people to join the document as read-only privileges or with editing privileges. You can highlight words and passages to make notes about, and you can comment on the document in general.

  • Track changes and version control: Editorially auto-saves as your working on a document, so if your browser crashes you don’t lose your work. It also keeps all the versions of a document, and allows you to compare the changes of one version with another.

  • Document status: Documents start as “Draft”, and as you progressively work on them you can change their status to “Reviewing”, “Revising”, “Copyediting”, and “Final”.

These states worked perfectly with our workflow, and followed perfectly the progression of our articles from the initial submission by a contributor, my reviewing of it, the author’s revising of it, and then Jeff’s editing of it. When visiting my Editorially dashboard I could see instantly what the state of each document was, and knew which ones I needed to attend to myself.

  • Dropbox support: you can link Editorially to a folder in your Dropbox and then send an article to that folder. This is Editorially’s answer to “archiving” since there is nowhere to move documents that are in their final state and which have been published and that you no longer need to keep on your dashboard. This is how I archive all of our published articles, and it works very well.

  • Pasting into a document: Copy rich or formatted text from one place and when you paste it into Editorially it will format in Markdown. Even images. Amazing.

  • iPad and iPhone friendly: Editorially is a web app only with no native apps. However, it has a responsive design that works great in Safari on the iPad and iPhone. It can be a bit clunky if you’re making lots and lots of notes and annotations, and I wouldn’t want to spending hours a day, every day, working in Editorially on my iPad. But I edited several documents from my iPhone and iPad with no trouble.

Our Editorially Workflow

Being editor-in-chief, I was reaching out to potential writers asking them if they’d like to do an article for the site. Once they submitted their draft to me I would paste it into Editorially and read through it.

Because Editorially lets me make highlight words and passages, it was easy to make comments about what I felt were good, what needed improvement, and what was missing altogether. I would also make general comments on the document itself such as, “All done. Your turn.”

If I hadn’t already, I would then invite the author to join the document so they could see all my comments and edits, and then they make any changes and leave comments of their own.

Some articles were done after just one pass. Others took several rounds of back and forth work to get it to a place where we were completely happy with it.

Once the article reached the point where the author and I were happy with it, then I would invite Jeff to join. (Jeff is the editor for The sweet Setup.) He would then read through the article for the first time, making sure it had a good flow, made sense, covered all the bases, and was free from typos and other grammatical errors.

When Jeff was done, he’d set the article’s status to “Final”. I would then export the markdown out of Editorially and paste it into our CMS. Editorially also supports publishing to WordPress, but I don’t use this feature — we have quite a few custom fields and other metadata tables set up in our WordPress install that hinder us from just publishing straight to the site from Editorially.

Technically, Editorially is still in beta. There are a few bugs here and there (for example, the dashboard doesn’t remember my preference for displaying documents in a grid format or a list) and there are some other features I’d love to see added (such as the ability to transfer ownership of a document from one user to another, or an “inbox” that listed all the recent activity on all my documents). But these are small issues, and Editorially has proven to be an invaluable tool for us.

We are using it to get a lot of work done without losing our minds. I can’t imagine what our workflow would look like without Editorially.

Editorially

Introducing The Sweet Setup

Today is the day. It’s here. The Sweet Setup has launched.

There are three groups of people I want to thank:

There is much more to say about the site, but right now I’m busy fixing launch-day typos and broken links. I hope you’re able to take some time to check out the site and read some of our fantastic and considered articles. If you’re not sure where to start, take the Dime Tour.

Introducing The Sweet Setup

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My thanks to Voila for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Sponsor: Voila: Ultimate Screen Capture Solution for your Mac