A while ago I had an idea for a web site – I was trying to do a bit of creative writing and found that what I really wanted was a tool that would allow me to work on a document where-ever I was. It would keep a copy of my work on a server, accessible only to me, but I could share it as a web page if I wanted. It would also allow me to download the text as plain text or in RTF format and work on it on my local machine if I wanted as well.
I could have used Blogger or something, but Blogger always puts your most recent post first, and if you’re writing a novel you want the first (and probably oldest) chapter to always be at the top.
With my site you’d be able to chip away at your writer’s block any time, any place. And you’d never have to worry about your hard-drive dying or the web hosting company going bust, as you’d always have a local copy on your own machine and one on the server.
Unlike Blogger, there would be a save button on the page to avoid those ‘oh my god all my work just vanished before I published it’ moments.
Well, I never got very far – aside from sketching out its features and finding a short, memorable .com domain name that was free.
No matter – there are a few sites that seem to offer pretty much what I was going to do. There’s ThinkFree Office Online, and the one that I’ve started testing is Writely.
Writely allows you to collaborate, publish to blogs, publish HTML if you want, you can download your work in Word or HTML format. It seems to do pretty much everything my web site would have done – it even has a save button. You can save as often as you like, and it tells you on the screen when you last saved it.
So now I have no excuse…