@scriptogram is upsetting my hierarchy of social needs
It’s official, I nave new software fatigue which is a bad thing for an early adopter like me to get. I have tried most of the new kids on the block: have pinned on pintrest, have condensed on shortmail, have persevered on Path, have explored on Gowalla. I’ve watched awesome services get swallowed up by giants and digested: Friendfeed by Facebook, Gowalla by Facebook, Sparrow by Google. Instagram was a near thing and, given Facebook released an Instagram competitor virtually the next day, I’m still not sure that one’s safe. Great applications have come and gone because they compete or have some desired component to be excised, studied and assimilated.
I have tried to simplify my content creation to three tiers which have, to date, proved reletively stable and are large enough to not disappear overnight through aquisition.
Like krill, the bulk of my published content exists in the form of daily tweets. Then comes shorter creative pieces, photos, and links on Tumblr. Last comes longer, better throught out articles and stories on Wordpress; meaty and oft dripping with content, but few and far between.
I find much of the frustration with content creation lie with the tools and interfaces that get in the way of actually creating that content. HTML formatting, CSS template layouts, publishing applications like Marsedit or Tumblita, the administrative hell of Joomla, that bloody talking paperclip. They all get in the way of creating content to varying degrees. In this space, MS Word is the anti-Christ - I will never forgive the need to use spaces and carriage returns to place an image on a page. Other tools are better and in an almost Zen like quest to achieve simplicity I’ve tried most of them.
Ulysses was one of the first to tick all my boxes. Being able to add semantic tags to plain text, tags that would render correctly in any output, was a revelation. I no longer had to worry about endless font clashes, sizing, underlines, whether I had the right type of quotation marks … all of those problems simply went away.
Markdown was the next paradigm shift for me. It’s a staple now and I refuse to use any tool that is not markdown enabled. Thankfully, all the best ones are (see Mou, Day One, Ulysses 3, Markdown pad, Byword).
My publishing world was finally level. I had a plethora of bautiful markdown enabled tools. My only gripe was often having to copy the markdown from my tools and paste it into the blog post windows or interfaces. Not a big deal, until Sciptogr.am came along.
Sriptogr.am has thrown a spanner in the works by providing the last piece of the puzzle. Scriptogr.am allows me to use any of my Mac or iOS markdown tools to create content and then lets me save that file in my Dropbox account. That content is then automatically published online in a beautiful, customisable blog complete with social sharing options and essentials like RSS feeds to wire it to my other services with ifttt.com. There is no fuss, there are no hassles. I don’t need a special tool to post content or a special web interface that requires me to remember usernames and passwords to log in. I don’t have to worry about anything other than the creation of content. I love it.
But. And there is always a but. Scriptogr.am is a new kid on the block. I foresee a lot of people taking note of them in the very near future and if they’re not aquired or bought out I’d be very surprised. I also don’t know what their hosting infrastructure is like, how well they are able to scale with the demand that will surely come. So far, things have been rock-solid and fast but it is early BETA days. I’d love to kick out that Tumblr middle tier in my [tongue in cheek] hierarchy of social needs and replace it with Scriptogr.am but I might have to wait a while and see how things pan out.
via Stuart on scriptogr.am http://bit.ly/NKxo5s
