My Favorite Blogging Tool

Back when I was just getting started on the blogging scene, I was casting about looking for something to help me with Haloscan comments. I came across TED Notepad, and it has since become an essential tool for me. It is on every computer that I use with any regularity and every USB drive & floppy disk that I use for writing. It's that good.

Here are some reasons I like it:

Cost
The price is right: free--like most software I use. I hate to pay for software.

Size
It's small--Only takes up about 120K; as a result, I have it loaded on every USB & Floppy I use.

Clipboards
This is why I use it for blogging. I have the HTML codes for italics, bold, & hyperlink on keyboard shortcuts. As I mentioned, this is particularly useful for Haloscan comments, which is why I draft my comments almost exclusively now in TED (anything longer than about one sentence), as well as most of my blog first drafts (I occasionally have to add things through the Blogger tools, but I still edit most everything in the HTML).

Other features I like
Minimize to tray: I love this one--this makes it useful as a notepad; I use it for my To Do list at work
Save settings on exit: you can omit this box, which will make it come up the same size every time (again, perfect for a To Do list), or else remember the last state you had it in.
Unicode support: For Win XP, you get Unicode support, so you can actually cut & paste other languages. Greek, for instance, looks like this: Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. (I don't claim to be the Unicode expert by any means, but if you choose to do this, my suggestion is to save everything as file type UTF-8. I'll tackle fonts some other time in another post, but when working in TED I prefer monospaced fonts, like Courier or Lucinda--some computers have the full fonts to recognize the letters, and others will just give you the annoying boxes).

There are many other features that are too numerous to mention; you're really only limited by your imagination.

Even if you have no interest in hand coding your blog entries and prefer a WYSIWYG editor (or even Microsoft Word), you should still pick up a copy, to use for Haloscan, or just for a better all-around notepad.

To get more information, you can visit the homepage, and here is the download page. It is constantly being updated (in fact, I just noticed there is a 5.0 release available--I have 4.5.3). If you want to edit in Unicode, make sure you download the one that is not labeled "RE Clone."