How do you write yours?

Every day I write hundreds if not thousands of words. Some in e-mails, some on social networks, most in articles and many in blog posts.

But the words I’m interested in here is the words written for articles or blog posts. The words designed to express a message or share information to a wide group of people – unlike e-mail which, unless it’s a mass mailing is really only aimed at a relatively small number of people.

What I’m interested in is how and what software you use to write those blog posts or article – although both are one and the same for many people.

For me it depends on whether it is a post for my blog or an article for work. If it’s a blog post I will write it in WordPress and either save as draft and come back to it later OR just publish it straight.

But when writing an article for work I tend to write in notepad – in fact I do a lot in notepad – it’s a small simple programme that lets me put ideas on screen and save without any overheads or fuss.

I’ll then come back to it when I’m ready to publish and put it into whatever publishing application I need for the job.

If it’s going on the web then I’ll either write it into the BBC Local Documentum CMS or into the BBC News & Sport CPS. If it’s going on air it will be written into ENPS.

If it’s for comment or debate I’ll write it into 606 for sport debates and CMS for anything else (since BBC Local message boards were closed).

To my colleagues this is a very strange thing to do – they all either use MS Word or write directly into their publishing platform of necessity – but I can’t work like that for some reason.

Even when writing a blog post – half the time I’ll actually write it in notepad first and copy it over – I used to write every draft in notepad until I wanted to finish one on my laptop that was saved to my desktop once.

So should I try and get out of this notepad habit? Or should I just use an online equivelant that will just let me save them all to a server somewhere?

Basically I want a draft library with no overheads – a sort of Article Ideas folder (what I have on my PC) that I can dip into, update and play around with at will.

Maybe I could knock something up quickly in PHP – I’ve got a MySQL dateabase I can save to – I mean – how hard could it be?

Oh and before you say anything – there’s too much overhead in WordPress to use that as a place for all draft articles and ideas – it’s great if I know I’ll publish it but for random ideas it doesn’t really work.