I’m trying out a new piece of software today. You see, I have always been admonished to keep a journal, and over the years, I have made several attempts, but they were all short-lived, for one reason or another. Since the advent of blogging, I thought I’d finally be consistent with journaling – but alas – I’m not. There are some things I’d like to journal about that a) would not be appropriate for publication on the WWW, and b) would likely bore the pants off of you, my reader, and c) might just confirm your sneaking suspicion that I am, in fact, a raving lunatic.

What’s cool about this software is that I type my journal entries (my once beautiful handwriting has become chicken scratch, at best) and my entries are searchable by keywords without a lot of jumping through hoops on my part. Another excellent feature of this software is that I can post journal entries to my blogs (yes, I have more than one) without copying/pasting. And I can categorize my journal entries by which blog I posted the particular entry to, as well as other categories that don’t have anything to do with either of my blogs.

The software allows me to keep more than one journal, too, so I could create a personal journal and a separate journal for a particular project I might be working on, like that book I keep promising myself I’ll write one day. And apparently, I can post entries from any of the journals I create to any of the blogs I’ve set up – so it’s a true central repository of all my writing.

The software has some cool journaling-specific features, too, like automatically creating an entry for the day. If I don’t type anything in that entry, nothing is saved, but if I do, I don’t have to worry about dating what I write. That’s handy. It also has a cool little timer, so I can set it for whatever amount of time and just free-write for that period of time (one of my favorite ways to get myself writing when I don’t feel like it.)

So, we’ll see how this works out. I downloaded a full-featured 45-day trial, which will take me through the end of the year. If I like it, and I actually adopt it (like I hope I will), I’ll buy it when the trial expires. And, of course, I’ll tell you where you can get your hands on it, too.