I have been spending some time the last few weeks trying to replicate in my Drafts workflow the things that I really like about Gibberish.
It’s not that I dislike Gibberish—I really like it!—but rather that I’m trying to better understand just what it is about the tool and interface that I like so much. My theory has been that trying to replicate its workflow and behavior in my existing workflow might help me better pick that question apart.
I will admit that I have not spent a ton of time on this project. Generally, I try to avoid getting too far down the rabbit hole old fiddling with tools and workflows, as that time and energy tends to come at the expense of doing actual writing. And doing actual writing is, after all, the point of all of this, right?
About as far as I’ve gotten is to have set up a Drafts action that appends the text of the current draft to the end of a running daily notes text file store in an iCloud folder. I type a sentence or two in Drafts, use the keyboard shortcut to trigger the action, and off it goes so that I can type the next bit.
This action has been working pretty well to replicate the initial part of the Gibberish workflow—type a little bit of text, click a button, and off it goes, just like send a txt message. I also like that it keeps me in Drafts, which tends to be my starting point for just about all text generation, and also that everything ends up in a plain-jane text file that I fully control.
What’s not great about my home-grown workflow as it currently exists is that it relies upon a single text file on the back end. This text file does turn over each day, so it’s not like it just grows and grows,but if I have more than one post or thought that I’m working on concurrently (which, I will admit, does sometimes happen…), they get jumbled all together in the same text file.
To make matters worse, anything I’m working on that takes more than a day to compose ends up spread across multiple text files, and is still mixed up with other thoughts and random asides. So putting together the real post is matter of picking through multiple sentences and paragraphs sometimes spread across multiple text files and then copy and pasting them into Ulysses or MarsEdit.
That all ends up feeling rather convoluted and I find myself wondering why I am bothering with any of it and not just using Gibberish as the front-end composition tool.
That question leads me back around to why I originally started down this road: to try to figure out what it is exactly that I find so compelling about GIbberish. I think I have now largley answered that question. It’s the composition side of it. I really like being able to type this stuff in piece by piece and sending it off so that I’m not constantly staring at the whole body (or lack thereof) of the post I’m working on. At the same time, I appreciate that the tool still collects these bits into bundles around individual posts.
So I feel like I need to spend some more time with Gibberish itself. I wish that I could pick apart the composing workflow from the publishing/hosting part of it, but for the time being, I’ll just keep pulling these posts into my main blog via the RSS feed.