So after working for about four months on various projects that required hours and hours and hours and hours in Word, I was interested when someone mentioned writely.com.

This site/company (recently purchased by google) is about doing word processing online. Originally it was probably focused on giving formatting and style tools to people who are writing online, like bloggers or page designers. But with the added option of being able to save as pdf, word, openoffice files types, as well as the standard versioning features (which anyone who has ever had to collaborate on a blog entry appreciates), make this good for those non-blog writers too.

Like me.

With this product I can write or upload a document (I am not sure about complex styles or templates though), share it with a few people, have versioning, and can even post it publicly for review. And, all in one place. I have had several hard drives crash, a power supply burn out, and a laptop fail during my recent projects, leaving me working from multiple different machines at different times, isolating my recent changes on a document on one machine or another, at risk of another crash or loss at any time. It was hard to keep it recent, or even remember which external drive I put it on at one point (lack of sleep, and too many projects going at once can be blamed for that).

This way the document is always accessible and *in one place* from start to finish. And, from a collaborative standpoint, no more emailing versions to teammates and waiting for them to email it back. You can see what's happening to it and how far they've gotten (although I fear the dreaded edit conflicts, so look but don't touch might be good).

And, of course, true to its roots, a document created at writely.com can be posted to your blog (as long as it's one of the blogs it has listed, or you know the api and path for you blog (good luck with msn spaces). That's where this entry came from (and why a not so personal entry is here).