Jökull Sólberg Auðunsson

The thing with blog platforms is that they are almost completely shitty for actually writing. The process of putting your thoughts into words. Just look how small the textbox is in Tumblr. It's like they just want you to repost some images. Calepin wants to be the tool people turn to when they have an impulse to write thoughts. That's a pretty big goal, so lets see what the problem with today's tools are.¹

First, I want to talk about formatting. Writers need formatting. If you've ever read a David Foster Wallace essay you've seen how footnotes can be deployed to give the prose a more viral way of communicating thoughts. My little brother is 6 and he's just beginning to learn to read, but he loves making up fantasy stories and me and my dad decided to write them down and publish them for this christmas. He was asked how he writes his stories and he put it so well:

I just decide on a beginning, then I decide what happens in the story and then it needs an ending.

He's already nailed it. Focus writing, hah! Stories, even his one pager adventures, seek structure and that's represented in the way we conduct our writing and frame our creative thinking. Let's dive deeper into the topic of structure and what it means with the today's writing tools.

You Need to Learn Markdown

I'm totally sold on Markdown being the system to structure text. The more I use it, the more I appreciate how learnable and friendly it is and the ecosystem of tools that understand it. Markdown is respectful of online traditions, by building on symbols and keystrokes already utilized to visually structure text in emails, usenet groups and other online phenomena. The trick with Markdown is simply to harden these rules a bit and make them parsable by computers.

What does the writer give up? Nothing. It's just a learning investment. The jiu-jitsu grappling with MS Word for example, is because visuals and structure are not separated. The actual structure of the document is an abstracted complexity. The user is made to guess his way through formatting and structuring. Every problem is another checkbox in next years version to configure. The accumulated interface cruft means wasted time to anyone who finds the need to structure and navigate around ribbons and dialogs. And worst of all the document isn't suitable for anything except home printing. Want to get it online? The HTML export is a mystery sausage machine. You'll need to structure it again in a tiny keyhole textarea on Tumblr.

What is a Blog, Even?

Blogs are short term. They're noisy media. A succesful blog is noisy because the audience wants a steady stream of updates. Tumblr and Blogspot handle this well and many some individuals have done great with creating their own brand and voice with an active blog. Usually the most recent stuff is layed out on the front page and posts are short bites. Scroll, consume, move on.

Naturally when people decide to act on their impulse to write they turn to a blog platform that implies a noisy environment. But the impulse to write is not there tomorrow and the site quickly starts to assume the face of something that has been forgotten and left in an attic.

Calepin fixes this. It is your go-to place when you have that impulse. It doesn't even allow you to do anything else. Just write. No decisions on a theme, logo or typography. It's like sending your piece to a newspaper. You don't have a say in the layout of that one, do you?