Evernote for writing

When I first built this site, I started a blog which was terribly built, not in a CMS and a nightmare to maintain. Back in those days, I didn't think about keeping copies of things so that site is now lost in the depths of time but the motivation to write has kept me at it here and there.

I've used so many apps over the years to keep track of blog posts which are either waiting to be written, in progress or published. Using a word processing app like Pages seems like an obvious choice but maintaining the file structure is a nightmare. I'd basically keep them organised in folders based on date: YYYY > MM > DD-specific-title.pages, which on paper makes a fair amount of sense but as I mentioned, I wanted to keep track of which were unpublished, drafts and so on. I've also tried OmmWriter which, despite my love for the app, suffers from the same file structure problem and lack of status.

During the many geeky discussions with my colleagues at the pub, Evernote had cropped up quite a few times. After a brief demo of how it worked, I began using it for things like bookmarking bits of text and clipping images from the web but after a few days I realised I was creating more work for myself as I already used Delicious to keep track of things I find interesting on the web, so Evernote fell a little by the wayside. This happened to coincide with a bit of a writing dry spell towards the end of Summer.

When Autumn hit and I began writing again, I decided to try my hand at Evernote for producing drafts before moving over to ExpressionEngine for publishing, a process which was also suggested during our work pub chats.

I have to say now that I'm in the swing of using it, I can't imagine using anything else. The ability to create multiple notebooks means I can separate out content based on what it's going to be used for (ie journal, work, photography etc), tagging allows me to keep track of the status of a post and the best thing of all, syncing allows me to access my content from my iPhone which has been really handy in a few spots when I've been looking to kill some time.

I'd love to hear about your processes for writing. If you have a blog post written about it or write one off the back of this, fire a link over to me and I'll drop it on here.