n0d3.org

If you own a business with infinitely customizable products you likely either use Basecamp from 37signals aka 37 Signals. If said product involves text or “copy” you wish your clients would use Writeboards. They don’t though.

Writeboards are great for people who enjoy learning new skills and also enjoy paying less time for production of things that use copy or text.

But the learning curve is just steep enough that no one really uses them.

Below you see what I enter for my first Writeboard. Please, if you have additions/subtractions/improvements, let me know.

Also please search my site for WriteboardIntroText to be sure you’re using the most up-to-date version.

This is a test Writeboard.

The text that follows is the result of 8 months worth of client-feedback. Please contribute.

If you want to contribute please click the “Edit This Page” button near the top of your screen.

h2. Specific request:
Please improve this document based on your own experience. My goal is to have the best Writeboard introduction for clients ever written.

h2. Basic
First off, poorly formatted ideas are better than no ideas. Just start going at it.

I’ll give you a small secret, though. If you are brave enough to click “Edit This Page” and you look over at the right you’ll see something that says “Check the formatting guide to blah blah blah.” If you click “formatting guide” a cheat sheet will appear in your browser and this will pretty much give you all the formatting most people use in Microsoft Word.

Note that the table shows you how to achieve an effect on the left, and how to “code” it on the right. Also, the form is serious about whether there is a double-linebreak or a single-linebreak (important for you listers out there) Don’t glaze over. Take a breath and look it over and suddenly it will make sense.

h2. Advanced
There is no advanced.

Ok. So there is:

# I usually write whatever I want to post in a barebones text editor. Like Notes on PC or BBEdit/TexEdit/SimpleText on the Mac (the trend to notice here is… anything but Word, which adds all kinds of funky garbage to your words).
# Then I save whatever I wrote to my hard drive.
# I copy whatever I wrote in the text editor into the form field.
# Then I style that text with the codes you see above this text box (you did click the link before you went all advanced on me, right?).

h3. Advantage to the “advanced” method:

# Saved copy of whatever I wrote is always available to me. Given that 60% of everything we do has future applications, this is the digital incarnation of “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
# I get to write in an environment I trust to deliver cross-media text (sorry Word users).
# Begin to understand how to communicate text-attributes to content-producers due to coding your own _italics_, *bolds*, and even “interactive tidbits”:http://www.thoughtfaucet.com

h3. Learning curves to the “advanced” method:

# You probably are used to writing text in Word. You’ll have to learn how to write text in a simple text-editor
# You don’t know how to copy and paste from a Word document to the web.

h3. Secrets of the advanced….

You know that headline stuff, the thing that calls out a headline/header? Well I bet it goes beyond what the cheatsheet defines. Say you replace the number in the whole headline hoopla right? I’m going to start with 1 and go through 6 below.

h1. This is h1

h2. This is h2

h3. This is h3

h4. This is h4

h5. This is h5

h6. This is h6

So that’s the intro to Writeboards. Please collaborate. Let’s make the best text ever for your project. And let’s do it the quickest with the least complications for the producers of your text content.