title: My Writing Workflow
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date: June 7, 2011
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content: 

<div class="kicker"><a href="http://jasonsantamaria.com/" rel="nofollow">Jason Santa Maria</a> has an amazing website. I've admired it since first stumbling upon it who knows when. And I still admire it. His site is beautiful. His articles are driven by many different templates. Despite its multifaceted nature, the design is still surprisingly consistent.</div>

With that said, I'm no JSM. I don't have the time -- nor the patience -- to do a full-on design for each article that I write. I'd like to improve on my writing abilities, but I don't want major hurdles set before me. As [previously noted], I want a clutter-free -- which translates to obstacle-free -- writing experience.

Here's my setup right now. I'm using [IA Writer] as my main editor. [Stacey] is the simple CMS<sup>[1]</sup> that I've set up to run my articles (as well as my portfolio). The beautiful thing about the two of them is that they both understand Markdown.<sup>[2]</sup> So, I can focus on writing with IA Writer and easily sync it with Stacey -- through this process, I never have to bother about logging into a "real" CMS and wrestle with formatting. As a bonus, my file is transportable and easy to read, with very minimal HTML markup. No, seriously -- take a look at this article in its [basic markup].

There are, notably, drawbacks in using this workflow. However, after trying many different CMSes in the past, I'm going to stick with this one in the meantime. It is, after all, a clutter-free writing experience.<sup>[3]</sup>

<ol class="footnote">
<li id="simple-cms">"CMS" might be an overstatement. It's really a light-weight filesystem manager.</li>
<li id="markdown">This is probably the greatest feature of IA Writer, that it allows you visually see certain Markdown formats (like bold and italics).</li>
<li id="credit">Since I'm already giving out credits, the theme for my articles section is taken from <a href="http://type-a-file.com/" rel="nofollow">Type-a-file</a>, with minimal modifications.</li>
</ol>

[previously noted]: /me/articles/on-reading-writing/
[IA Writer]: http://www.iawriter.com/
[Stacey]: http://staceyapp.com/
[1]: #simple-cms
[2]: #markdown
[3]: #credit
[basic markup]: /me/content/9.articles/2.writing-workflow/article.txt