It’s a mixed blessing, having a word processor that you wrote yourself. On the one hand, you stand a pretty good chance of having a tool that works the way you do. As I mentioned previously, for me that means having a tool that helps me not forget stuff, and not worry about the details until it’s time to worry about them.
There is a downside. This morning I was thinking that I would much rather write Feeding the Eels episodes using Jer’s Novel Writer than this here blogging software. It’s not a big deal, I can write it there and paste it in over here. The thing is that Eels has special formatting, and setting all that up in the blog software is a pain. When I paste the stuff in formatted the way I want it, the blog software produces some pretty ugly markup that I then feel compelled to repair. Things are better in the new version, but still not as easy as it should be.
What I needed was an XHTML export feature in JersNW. That way all the correct markup will be there already, neatly done my way, and I can paste it in as source code. The blog software can just leave it alone. (Whether it actually will leave the code alone has yet to be demonstrated.) I’d been mulling how to implement that feature for a while now, and well, today was the day. Now JersNW has XHTML export. As JersNW’s biggest customer, the developer really hops to it when I want a feature.
The feature is mostly there, anyway. It has all I need for Eels, but now that the feature is there I have to make it so it’s useful to everyone else, also. Darn those other customers.
Meanwhile, I didn’t actually get any writing done today, and I probably won’t tomorrow as I make the export feature versatile enough for other users. I tried to get a bit of writing in this evening but my head is entirely in the land of logic right now. I would look at the page and I didn’t see words, I saw a word processor. That’s the big downside. I’ve got a confrontation between Felix and Schmidt, a battle of wits and subtle words (Schmidt is an underdog but don’t count him out), and all I can think about is overlapping <span> tags. Then I caught a margin note’s anchor shifting, and that was it.
On top of that, it’s not really a good business policy to add a major feature mere days before the big rollout of version 1.0. But there you have it. That’s how things work here at the Hut.
