Seeing plain text notes published on Calepin I find very encouraging to the processes of writing up notes. The title, date, category and tags inserted with TextExpander add structure to the note making process, increases focus on what the note is about and what I want to cover. It removes the blank-page block of writing. Saving them in the one Dropbox folder, dated and titled, gives them order and place. Seeing them on Calepin gives them purpose.
Suddenly short, throw-away notes have a purpose. It’s worth writing things down. It’s simple and no effort. It’s better because they exists as a starting point if I want to continue writing on them. If I don’t develop them then they still exists as a note and a note that I can view as an web post article. Writing things down and seeing them on a web page makes it more encouraging to polish the note into a full post. A post would never be written if I had intended to write a post.
The fact that a note is ‘published’ with each save removes the preciousness of having to ‘make a post’. The use of Markdown means that even a simple bullet point list is easy to write. Start each line with a hyphen-space-word combination and I have a bullet-point web page note. Making a list of what I want to write about can be easily written and looks like a ‘real’ post when viewed on Calepin. Even a first ‘brain-drain’ stage of getting the points I want to make, out of my head and into words, becomes a ‘valid’ post on Calepin just because it has been saved to Calepin’s Dropbox folder. I particularly like using the Mac App Store application iA Writer for the task of writing. It's a joy to use.
The fact too, that I can write these same text notes, to the same folder, using the same TextExpander trigger on my iPod or iPad using Textforce app is also very encouraging to writing down notes. (Elements–not an app I like–or any other text app that supports TextExpander and a user selectable folder on Dropbox can be used. Note: Some apps don’t allow the user to choose the Dropbox folder to save to.)
Notes are not lost in some proprietary app or file format. They are not locked onto one device. They can be edited and updated on any device. When you see the text, it is in more human readable Markdown if any formatting or links have been added. (If you need to embed HTML things such as YouTube videos, that can be done using the standard HTML code.)
One thing that usually inhibits me is if things get too precious that I feel that cannot complete them perfectly. When I feel this towards something, I do not start it. If things become too important then I don’t want to do it wrong. If I do not want to do it wrong then I become frozen. Calepin and informal notes that are posts feels like a way to ‘break the ice’ on preciousness, perfection and fear of failure and fear of being wrong. There is a greater chance of doing rather than just thinking about by breaking the resistance to the starting the doing-process.
With there being no difference between saving and publishing, or saving and updating. If I want to see the update in a browser, then I just go to Calepin.co and click publish to update all posts. If I want to use it on FoC, it’s already written or at least started.
Well, that’s the theory. Let’s see what happens in practise over the coming months. My Calepin site is neilboyd.calepin.co
