How I Blog: Ink

How I Blog: Ink

Continuing my look at how I blog, I thought I'd explain my signature format: digital ink.

Scribbles: Pretty much all ink here. Entries are penned on my Toshiba R25 Tablet PC. I like this model because it has a 14" widescreen that provides plenty of horizontal writing space in landscape mode.

I write my entries and most of my other notes in Windows Journal. It's a simple app designed specifically for ink. Pages are easy to size and zoom. Colors are easy to pick. Oh, and it offers a chisel tip option.

Once written, I create a text conversion and paste a copy to the end of the entry. the I use the tool ring from Inkseine (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/inkseine/) to capture the ink as an image and paste into Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net/download.html) for resizing and conversion to jpg.

The jpg is uploaded via ftp using Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org/) and then I work my magic in Build 52 (http://www.markandtanya.us/scribbles/Build52.html). This is where I add hyperlinks to the image and the converted text, hidden but indexed by Google. The HTML is spit out and pasted into Blogger. It's lengthy but I have the method down. And that's how this got here.

Rambles: I ink here only occasionally. It's meant to be a quick blog, so I use Windows Live Writer with the ink blog plug-in (http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=80ddd0aa-585c-4191-b7a5-dbfb2341d284). Very simple, but without Links in Ink or converted text, so it's not searchable.

Notes to Self: Not a lot of ink yet, but I want to increase that, which is easy to implement since this is an Evernote (http://evernote.com/) blog. I can ink straight into Evernote on my Tablet PC. Not a lot of control over the formatting and the ink converts to flat images online, but handwriting recognition is built-in.
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