Using Writely

Collaborate, publish and blog with the web word processor.

I've discovered Writely today. Writely is a free word processor that you can access online. It's still in Beta, but you can start checking out its features. One of its functions is to be able to use it as a blog tool. The interface gives you much more control over the rich text than a normal blogging tool, you can insert pictures and links and format you text and backgrounds with ease.

With Writely you can create a new document by clicking on 'New', you can upload a document from your computer and you can send documents by email. To publish to your blog, click on an active document. It will open in a new window. You can then see a 'blog' tab. Click on it, and once you have the 'Blog Site Settings' configured properly to your weblog settings, you can post the document to your weblog.

You can collaborate on a document with friends or collegues by emailing them with an invitation to add content. Posts can be archived, published, emailed; revisions tracked; and tags added. Writely even has a spell checker. The HTML screen gives you even more control over the look of your articles by giving you the option to add special code, like CSS classes. For added control over my image display I like this feature.

Adding the URL link for the image necessitated scooting to the HTML screen. This option doesn't seem to be available, but the means is here so for me this makes Writely a cool tool.

Update: Writely posted this article to my blog saying it was 19 hours ago. There needs to be an option to set a time zone so posts are added in the correct order. This one was slipped in 3 down the page where it should have been first until I changed the date and time. Also, there's no option for adding a category yet, so this also needs to be done manually. All markup is in upper case and for those concerned about correct coding format, for me this is not okay so I've had to fully edit the post. Some code is not contained in quote marks.