Entries RSSWhen Michelle Theall dreamed up Women’s Adventure Magazine, she imagined a magazine that would capture her own love of outdoor pursuits and thoughtful journalism - WA is a bit unique in the sports mag arena. I know there are lots of you dear readers who spend time journaling, blogging, podcasting, taking quill pen to parchment, or any other method of expressing yourself creatively when you’re not out exploring the world. In fact, we’ve heard from some of you with our reader’s story contests and you’ve got engaging things to say. Some of you may already have your own personal blogs.
When Mariner Software wanted to send us a sample of their brand new journaling software, WinJournal, I hesitated because we’re an outdoor magazine not a writing magazine, but I remembered all you accomplished and budding writers and gave it a try. (There’s a MacJournal for Apple users.)
WinJournal is an easy-to-use way to organize all your writing, whether typed or spoken, and publish it online, either on your own personal blog or to your website. I used it this year to keep track of everything I saw at Interbike (a big cycling trade show), and it kept all those hurried thoughts in one place. It was great to not have stuff scattered all over my computer in little notepad files that I never got around to finding and rereading later.
I struggled a little bit to set up the connection info for publishing directly to my blog because my blog address is different from my user name, but about fifteen minutes of poking around solved the connection snafu. Pretty cool! I can compose offline, and with a click of my “Publish to Blog” button, up goes my post!
WinJournal has lots of extras that let you personalize and decorate your posts as well as privacy settings for locking your journal. If you are copying and pasting something from an email message that has the carrots (>>) in front of each line, WinJournal has a Cleanup function that will remove them, as well as other clunky code bits that you don’t want to publish. If you’re not into sharing your thoughts with the entire cyberworld, WinJournal is still a great way to keep a personal or family journal, complete with your digital photos.
I was also able to record some commentary with my posts and WinJournal stored them as .wav files that it attached to each entry. My WordPress account requires a space upgrade ($$$) to enable sound files on blog entries, so I wasn’t able to test it out.
aka, my desk
The only thing I really struggled with was resizing the WinJournal window. My computer desktop looks just like my real-life desktop — like a bomb went off at some point. I’ve got about fourteen programs running at once and I’m used to resizing and dragging them around the desktop with carefree abandon. I could resize the WinJournal window but pulling it back out in size was difficult and it would only intermittently allow me to grab the top toolbar and drag the whole thing around the desktop. Of course, this may be an “Id1oT” error, as my boss at work likes to call them - user error, not the software’s fault.
WinJournal is pretty cool software that will definitely encourage your writing efforts.
WinJournal/MacJournal from Mariner Software: msrp $39.95
