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Writely is an free online word processing tool that can be used for document creating, collaboration, and blogging.  It’s a beta release — but the Writely folks say that the basic features will always be free. I hope so, because they’re getting something free too — free testing, bug reports, feedback, and ideas for features.  I think it’s a fair trade, if they stick to their word.

I use WordPress for my blog, and the interface for writing a post is not very easy to use for new bloggers who don’t know html.  I do know it, but I guess I got spoiled by the Blogger posting interface.  I want a word processor when I compose, I don’t want to have to go putting tags around any formatting I want to appear on the page.  Writely is a full-featured word processor that contains icons and buttons for most of the things I want to do when I write a post — create a link, format my text with bulleted or numbered lists, and check my spelling while you’re at it, please.

Once I’m done, I just adjust the settings to work with my blog, click on the “Blog” button, and it’s posted.  And the Writely screen after I’ve posted makes it very clear what’s happened– not only by having the word “blogged” in orange letters next to the title in the Writely list of posts, but also by having the preview page background with the word “blogged” repeated over and over as wallpaper!   In fact, the feedback is wonderful in this application — it’s very hard to not know what you’re about to do, doing, and have done.

And the link feature is very nice — just highlight the text, click on the link icon, and a popup appears. You enter the URL and any “flyover” text you’d like to appear when someone mouses over the text (”title,” in HTML).  And to have a link open in a new window, you just select that option (”target” in html).  Very easy.

It works with many blogging packages, as listed here.

One caveat for WordPress — if you use categories, you can’t select them on Writely (although the Writely folks say they’re coming).  And Writely publishes the post, it doesn’t write to a draft version.  The first few times I used it, I posted to the blog (because it was just sooo easy) and then scurried over to the blog to edit the post to have categories.

But then I realized that I could also click on the HTML tab in Writely, copy the whole post, and paste it into the WordPress editor, thus giving me more control from the blog — to add categories, trackbacks, or even set the timestamp for a later date, so it would get published the next morning, for example. Then I can archive the Writely post, so it isn’t in my active document list, but still there if I need it. So it serves as a backup as well.

If you’re unfamiliar with html, the post in the WordPress editor will look very odd.  But it does work fine. 

I just hope I don’t get too mentally lazy and forget all the HTML I’ve learned over the years!