Write This Way

Who knows the pleasure of a dog being stroked – standing absorbed in the pleasure of it.

Suddenly there is a proliferation of applications with which to write.

Refly describes itself as an editor for content marketers, bloggers and authors that helps you avoid grammar mistakes and spelling mistakes. It’s Mac only.
Update June 2023: I took out the like to Refly, and my advice is not to go anywhere near it.

Telegraph

Telegraph is web based and it is so minimal that someone is bound to like it.

Write As

Write As is another web-based offering and describes itself as

A writing platform
Write.as is built for productivity. It’s simple enough for you to concentrate on your thoughts, and powerful enough to support the most prolific writer.

Write once, publish everywhere
Write for yourself, or share a post with someone. Publish to a Write.as blog and any of these platforms (Medium, Tumblr, Twitter) where your audience already waits.

Private by default
Express yourself without worrying about who’s watching. You can publish without signing up, and even if you do, we limit what data we keep about you.

Draft

Draft is web based and has features that will be of real use to some people – as opposed to things that are nice to have but not that essential.

When you share your document using Draft, any changes your collaborator makes are on their own copy of the document, and you get to accept or ignore each individual change they make.

And you can see the changes on the screen with a side-by-side view.

Update September 2023 – it is ‘offline for maintenance’ and has been for a long while.

HackPad

Hackpad, owned by Dropbox, is somewhat similar to Draft. Check it out and see what can be done with it.

Update Nov 2021

I clicked the Hackpad link and it goes to a page that says ” Welcome Hackpad-ers!
Your pads are now available on Paper free of charge. Get ready to work together better than ever.”

Dropbox Paper is a collaborative tool already, so I think what this message is saying is that Hackpack is no more and the new thing is Dropbox Paper. Maybe it is no more than a change of brand name?

Known

Known, which is located at Withknown.com (presumably because the ‘known domain is taken by someone else) describes itself as a “collaborative social publishing engine that allows any number of users to post to a shared site with blog posts, status updates, photographs, and more. Its robust open source framework can be used to build fully-fledged community sites, or a blog for a single user. It’s up to you.” There’s a button to download and install, but uploading to server is not exactly nothing. But you can work with it online directly – and that is easy.

Update June 2023

Bear Blog

BearBlog describes itself as a privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words, a blogging platform where words matter most. 
Your readers are protected while your content is delivered at light speed.

There is a free option and a paid option at $48/year. If I had no other options available to me, this is what I would go for, partly because the person running it has made a promise that it will run forever. I guess that doesn’t include the period after his lifetime, which is a sobering thought. It is also one of the securities within the WP ecosphere – so many people working on it together,