---
title: "Using Tinderbox to write articles for the web"
date: 2010-06-07T00:41:03-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2010/06/07/tinderbox-article-tutorial/
author: Les Orchard
tags: [metablogging, webdev, writing, tinderbox, entries, html]
---

# Using Tinderbox to write articles for the web

<em><strong>TL;DR:</strong> I just put together [a tutorial about writing an article in HTML][article] using [Tinderbox][] from [Eastgate Systems, Inc][eastgate].</em>

<em><strong>Update:</strong></em> There's a <a href="http://pc.de/pages/tinderbox-tutorial-be">Belorussian</a> translation of this post provided by <a href="http://pc.de/">PC</a> - very cool!

![tinderboxicon][]

<em>Tinderbox Icon by Bryan Bell, via [flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe](http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2476581071/)</em>

[tinderboxicon]: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3105/2476581071_7a55c565dd.jpg 

[article]: http://decafbad.com/2010/06/tinderbox-article-tutorial/article.html

I've been toying with a set of writing topics to get my blog going again, apropos of [my notion of writing for myself][cobwebs]. 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][marsedit], 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][avd] this way, and it was a silly way to do things.

[marsedit]: http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
[avd]: http://decafbad.com/skein/2010/03/11/alpha-vs-delta/

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][github], and the [article exported to HTML for easy reading][article].

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.

[yak shaving]: http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html
[github]: http://github.com/lmorchard/tinderbox-article-tutorial
[tinderbox]: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
[eastgate]: http://www.eastgate.com/
[construction]: http://bit.ly/cBJBpX
[tinderbox]: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
[eastgate]: http://www.eastgate.com/
[couchdb]: http://couchdb.apache.org/
[Sigmoid function]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
[cobwebs]: http://decafbad.com/blog/2010/03/10/pondering-the-cobwebs