I refined <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/11/a-working-example-of-a-private-book-blog/" target="_blank">yesterday's Wordpress book diary experiment</a> a bit this morning. It is now live and in production, completely inaccessible to you lot, of course. I don't intend to write this thing in public thanks very much.

But there are some very cool add-ons I've picked up along the way that make this way of handling the research and brainstorming processes even more attractive. I feel pretty much sold right now and have spent a couple of hours typing stuff into my private book site today, working on the background and some of the characters of the story. It's also now effectively a desktop app on my Mac - and on my Windows netbook too.

Here's how. And a reminder - you can play with a public version of the thing itself at <a href="http://www.davidhewson.net" target="_blank">davidhewson.net</a>, though not with the features below since they are restricted to those with permission to write for the diary.

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There remained one big problem with using Wordpress this way. The standard web site view is aimed at reading, not editing. So looking at my diary I could find stuff very easily. But I couldn't change it, and I couldn't write a new post either. For those things I needed to go to the back end or an offline editor such as Ecto or Live Writer.

Not any more. Wordpress is an amazing piece of software, with an amazing array of plugins. The latter needed to be treated with care. They can slow down the site and be a bit buggy a times. But just two plugins transformed this site for me. The first, <a href="http://jon.smajda.com/2008/09/01/posthaste-wp-plugin/" target="_blank">Posthaste</a>, puts a simple entry form at the top of the front page. This means you can write posts and copy in reference material directly to the site and allot it a category. The second, <a href="http://scribu.net/wordpress/front-end-editor" target="_blank">Front-end editor</a>, does as it says. Once it's installed I can click on pretty much any part of the site and immediately begin to edit the text. I don't even need to see the back end of the site for most things.

Here is how the diary looks now with the entry form at the top (I've blacked out some of the text because this is now about a real project).

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/diary2.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/app.jpg"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/diary2.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/app-tm.jpg" alt="app.jpg" width="460" height="405" /></a>

And here is how it looks while I'm editing using Front-end editor.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/diary2.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/edit.jpg"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/diary2.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/edit-tm.jpg" alt="edit.jpg" width="460" height="531" /></a>

Notice how it now looks more like a computer app than a web site? That's because it is. Using some modern browsers you can choose to turn a web site into a desktop app. If your system uses Google Gears it can even download the pages to your computer so you can use it offline. On the Mac I used the free <a href="http://fluidapp.com/" target="_blank">Fluid</a> browser to create a desktop app, a site specific browser that does just one thing -- run the diary. It''s connected through Gears so in theory it should work offline (not that I've had the chance to try this yet). You can do the same with Firefox and Chrome too. For Firefox download the Prism plugin and followe the instructions. On Chrome simply create a desktop application to the site front end. Note that you have to create a Gears connection <em>in the Wordpress back end</em> first, for each machine. Otherwise you won't get that local backup to let you work offline.

So my diary really is a local diary now. And I have to say I'm getting more hooked on it by the hour.