Sunday, February 16th, 2025 - TrickJarrett.com: Be excellent to each other.

The Desk, my new writing tool

2/16/2025 11:33 am

So, I have been working on something. This week, with the inspiration to dive back into my writing, I also whipped up this new project thanks to the help of Claude.ai. The idea is to have a central hub for tracking the progress of my writing, as I find the charts and data about my progress very motivating. But, as you'll see, it has some more features built in, including the ability for me to do my writing inside the tool if I want to.

It's not perfect, the AI generated code base always means there are bugs and pain points to be hunted down. But, it works for the base needs. I can refine and fix the remaining issues in the coming days.

Alright, let's take a look at things.

Here is the main dashboard. The red blobs are titles for my projects. I went back and forth on hiding them. Aside from suggesting the writing genre, I don't think they give anything major away, but also - I figured I may as well keep some mystery.

Right now I'm only actively working on the first project. The other four in the system are either ideas I have, or ones I have worked on previously and just haven't brought into the system yet.

The next view is the project specific one.

So, here is the project view for the current book. It gives the full overview of the data it has collected, shows how each writing session has gone, and even lets me look at previous versions of the story (so long as I am uploading them.)

I don't have to upload the manuscript, I can also manually enter the data for each writing session. But the advantage of uploading is that it acts as a backup in case something happens, and also allows the system to measure both words written as well as words removed from the most recent previous version. This is relevant as one of my pain points with a system like this is that sessions which were predominately editing, weren't easy to track as we were just tracking the total word counts, and so revisions, and cuts, and additions which come during editing were largely missed.

I'll also note, the first session here is misleading as I had done a few bits of writing on this project before importing it into the system and thus the first session is heavily inflated. But I didn't feel it was really worth diving into. It'll even out the more I write.

And the last feature, the one I am most happy with, is the in-browser writing tool.

Normally, I write using an app called FocusWriter, which blocks out all other apps and notifications and just lets you focus on writing. But, with the integration of my own selfhosted tool, I decided to recreate the base parts of it in browser.

Yep, retro CRT green on black. I don't know why, but I really like that scheme for writing. Additionally, I'm using the fantastic Monaspace Neon font, which is also my preferred font for programming. So far, it's been quite comfortable to write in.

That's really it. There are a few other small features (milestones are in the code, but not something I've fully implemented.) There are the rough corners I mentioned which still need addressing, but overall - I'm happy with the core functionality.

Previously I had my code integrated into Glowbug (this blog's admin tools), but it is very rough and barebones. Nowhere near as fleshed out as the above system. The main benefit was I could easily integrate it into the automated end of day posts where it would record the amount of writing I had done during a day.

I still can do that with this system, they're on the same system, but it will just take some reworking of the system. But I'm deciding what I want it to be and if I want to keep the same format, or maybe make the Sunday post a special edition with more information for writing from the past week, etc.

We'll see. I'm still deciding on the implementation. But now, back to writing for a bit.

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