TL;DR: I just put together a tutorial about writing an article in HTML using Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems, Inc.

Update: There's a Belorussian translation of this post provided by PC - very cool!

Tinderbox Icon by Bryan Bell, via flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe

I've been toying with a set of writing topics to get my blog going again, apropos of my notion of writing for myself. But, I like to write at length and have finally decided that life's too short to write in browser <textarea>'s, no matter how cleverly augmented.

I did buy MarsEdit 3, which is a fine app for dashing off short entries. But, for longer things, I found myself doing the actual writing elsewhere and pasting the text into MarsEdit for posting later. I even wrote and posted a whole fanfic novella this way, and it was a silly way to do things.

Well, one of the places where writing actually happens for me over the past few years is within Tinderbox documents. And, as it turns out, Tinderbox has some powerful HTML export facilities that I've left underused until some things finally clicked for me.

So, I thought I'd try turning that experience back upon itself to produce something worth writing. Without further ado, here's the source in GitHub, and the article exported to HTML for easy reading.

The funny thing is, I started working on this tutorial in the middle of writing another article. So, this post is a particularly advanced form of Yak Shaving. I hope it ends up handy for someone, and I hope it leads to the real articles I'm hoping to produce.