Sharing and Editing Your Web Content

I love writing articles and blog posting but they can be time consuming and when you want to share more important text with other collaborators you need to be able to keep up with changes and be able to work together easily. I want to share a couple of free web based applications that I use successfully to do this.

Writeboards
There is a wonderful company called 37 Signals that has a series of very useful web based apps that you can use, from contact management to project collaboration. I love using their apps but I wish they had a 'one app for everything' solution for me. It's one of the complaints you hear by other users but I guess you have to look at the pricing and structuring to realize that 37 Signals would have to charge an awful lot for that, or not - if they want to have as many customers - and so their business model works best for them.

Anyway, one shouldn't complain too loudly - they offer great services for free. One of them, used completely solo, is the writeboard.

Other project collab solutions offer similar systems, calling them different names [like whiteboard] but they are essentially the same: a place where you can write and make changes, by yourself or with others.

For my writing, even for posts like this, I find writeboards very useful. You can create a document and then compare it to other versions. I know you can do this with MS Word but it is laborious. With 37 Signals' solution you can just check and uncheck dated and times versions and see the similarities/differences in an instant. And if you are savvy with RSS you can subscribe to be notified of any changes!

Go to writeboard.com and read up on this brilliant FREE service - there's little point me rewriting it all here, just know that I give it 2 big thumbs up.

Google Docs
This service from Google offers a suite of office apps like you'd get from MS Office. The features are not as rich but for sharing a document or spreadsheet with a group it is really handy. And if you are the one doing the sharing you can set up a report so you can see who has made changes to the documents on a moment to moment, or daily, basis.

You can also set up the 'master' sharing rules for the document so that those you share with can't invite just anyone and everyone to work on the doc too. Upload and download is also very easy, and combined with a gmail account makes working online very easy when you are on the road.

Editing Tip: when you cut and paste from different apps, web based or not, you can get a lot of annoying extra behind the scenes coding. Notorious for this is MS word. This behind the scenes text can really mess up your HTML and if you are a web design newbie you may not be able to work out why.

A good way to remedy this is to cut and paste your text/document into notepad or other pain text editor and then cut and paste again into your HTML editor/blog editing window/other document. You will lose your formatting [like bold, italic, heading sizes etc] but if your document is not too reliant on formatting it's preferable.