I first ran across this meme on Adriaan’s web site of people publishing pictures of their workspace … that is, the area where they make their work, make their web site, and execute their creative ideas. What the hell, it might make reveal more of my blogging persona.

Of course, this got me thinking… should I clean up and represent my workspace as is, or how I want it to be? I’ve been working on my taxes, and I’ve had lots of receipts and papers strewn around the room like the aftermath of a small tornado. Well, alright, I won’t clean, but I just might tidy things up by stacking those papers… effectively spell-checking my environment.

Of course this one dimensional perspective doesn’t really show that much. I mean, you can’t see the baby seat on the floor underneath my chair next to my PowerMac G4, or the bookshelf of computer books behind me. That’s right, a book of poetry can get severely damaged if it is stacked next to a Perl book, so the shelf that you can see has all of the soulful books.

When I refinished my den, I knew that I wanted to replace my desk I had had since college with something more open (better for a basement den, right?), and found this desk at Dania. It is looks like a series of interlocking, kidney-shaped tables. The downside of this sort of open-ness is all the computer cables, which I anchored to the bottom of the desk so that they aren’t that noticeable.

But my physical surroundings is only part of the story, as I spend more time looking at the monitor than on anything else in this room, so I thought that it might be of interest to see the tools I use to build my website.

Which reminds me, I’m thinking of adding a new tool to the mix…

Markdown

I like SmartyPants and I like Textile and have been using them both with the Ecto client for publishing my content to my MovableType-based website. As you can tell, things are pretty rockin’ here because of these nifty-swell tools.

But as much as I like Textile, it has some annoyances. Most of those, however, I work around with raw HTML from Ecto’s menu, so it is fine. But John Gruber, the author of SmartyPants, has come up with a new way of formatting my writing that I just might like. He calls it Markdown, and it is pretty slick.

In case you aren’t familiar with this new project, the goal is to write text the way we all write email… well, the way we wrote before we accepted HTML-formatted email and smarter email clients. That is, the text way.

Basically, you just type and it figures out how to render itself as HTML. This is the goal of Textile, Markdown, and a host of others as well. Markdown, however, seems to be pretty readable after the fact.

But all of this will be a moot point as soon as Ecto (and other blogging-clients) decide to put a WYSIWYG editor in their tool instead of a simple text box. That’s right, Adriaan— if you’re reading this, take this as a challenge and business opportunity to integrate something like Mozilla’s web page editor within Ecto.

Now that would be slick.

Oh, Adriann, one more thing… This Markdown seems pretty nice. Any chance you can put the plugin as part of the Preview?