The Writer’s DB Blog

The following WritersDB updates are better classified as bug fixes than new features.

1. Now, when you click a column header in the list of submissions, your sorting preference will be remembered forever—until you change it by clicking a different column header.
2. If you search your submissions (for a specific title, market, range of dates, etc.), then sort them, the search filter will no longer be wiped out by the act of sorting.
3. Similarly, if you sort, then search, your sorting preference will no longer be reset by the act of searching.

Thanks, KB, for the feedback!

Remaining to-do in this area: Highlight the column header corresponding to your sorting preference. Will do this later. Will sleep now.

And then, back to working on Exciting New Features.

My wife’s laptop fell on the floor a few days ago. After that, it wouldn’t start up. She had about 60,000 words of a novel-in-progress on that computer.

She came to me, looking scared, saying “it would be very bad” if that data couldn’t be recovered. She had assumed that I was making periodic backups of her hard drive, because I’m the computer person in the house . . . but once the thing hit the floor, she realized that that was an assumption rather than certain knowledge.

Her data is, in fact, fine. But this post isn’t about her. Are you backing up your writing somewhere?

Do it. Do it now. Tomorrow, do it again.

• Use an online backup service like Mozy.
• Use a simple external hard drive. (Get one bigger than you think you need today, because in 2 years it’ll be too small.)
• But do it. Back up your writing. NOW!

For what it’s worth, an opinion on good web development.

If a user encounters a problem while using your site—for example, they can’t find the control or the content they’re looking for—assume it’s the designer’s fault. Especially if you’re the designer.

See the comments on my previous post: “nevermind. I found the widget key. I can’t believe it, it was right in front of my face.”

It is the designer’s job to say, “That was my fault.” In this case, there was nothing but text to call attention to the widget key. Now there’s an icon:

It’s better for the designer’s ego to blame the user. But the designer’s ego is rarely the point.

Sometimes, even the best of us get distracted. And sometimes, so do I.

This wasn’t the highest-priority item on the WritersDB to-do list, but they made the Twitter API so gosh-darned easy to use, this just sort of slipped to the front of the line. It didn’t take very long at all.

Now whenever you’re sending out a new submission, you can click a checkbox to post an announcement of that fact to your Twitter account.* Then click on the pencil if you want to edit the default message.

—
* What’s that? You don’t have a Twitter account? Well, you probably didn’t have e-mail in 1992, or a cell phone in 1986. When this change comes, we’ll be ready.

For the last few weeks, as time permits, I’ve been making substantial revisions to the backend code for the Writer’s Database. That, and testing just about every action it’s possible to perform on the site, to make sure the new code didn’t break anything. As of tonight, everything I’ve tested is finally in working order, so it appears safe to launch the revised code.

You shouldn’t notice any major differences. If you do, please let me know, if by “difference” we mean something that needs fixing.

Easily anticipated Q: Charles, why are you spending time on changes that we end users aren’t even supposed to notice?

A: A very reasonable question. These “invisible” changes to the infrastructure make it possible to introduce new features that you will notice, down the line. As always, stay tuned.

A minor new feature announcement which, sad to say, will come in handy sooner or later for nearly every submiting writer:

When you’ve sent out a manuscript, you may be expecting to hear from the market within 8–12 weeks because that’s what their guidelines say. Around the 35th week, anxiety sets in. This is the time for what some writers of my acquaintance call the “polite WTF note.”

The end result of such queries is typically the discovery that your manuscript was lost in the mail. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to explain why editors refer to their desks as “the mail.”

The “Submission Details” page for each piece you’ve sent out now offers a mechanism for keeping track of these queries, separate from the more general “Notes” field.

Please note: The queries that you send for a longer work, or a piece of journalism, prior to sending the entire manuscript, are a separate topic. The site will be enhanced to allow tracking of those as well—but this is not that announcement, yet.

The most recently reviewed writers’ web sites I’ve noticed lately have been in the category of collaborative storytelling. You know: One writer starts a story, another picks up somewhere in the middle and keeps it going, and so on. Not necessarily a way to create publishable work, nor whole stories that you can call your own . . . but a fun way to stretch the writing muscles.

Links:
• Protagonize
• StoryMash

Any others to report? Any experience with these ones? I haven’t had time to check them out yet; I’m posting the links because the concept is interesting, and because it looks like a bit of a trend.

Okay, I admit it. Today’s update is almost entirely cosmetic. Yes, the front page will now display personalized content if you’re logged in, which is nice. But mostly this update was about making that page more enticing for casual surfers who haven’t already discovered the depth of features under the hood.

We’re writers, yes, and words are our milieu . . . but the pretty pictures can still help to deliver a message. So now, we have some.

The meatier updates—the API, widget updates, RSS feeds, offline capability, and (of course) some others I won’t talk about until they’re done—are still in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

I’m pretty excited about the latest new feature here at the Writer’s Database, just introduced tonight. As vital as it is to keep track of which manuscripts you’ve sent out, to whom, and when . . . that isn’t the whole story for a writer.

How much you’ve been writing, and when, is nice to know, too.

For any title you’ve added to the Writer’s Database, you can now enter the total word count in that manuscript on any given date. The site will calculate how many of those words are new since the last time you wrote, and will serve up a wide variety of graphs for you upon request. (Note that this is a beta feature. It should be stable, but if you encounter any bugs, please do report them, so we can squash them.)

You can see how the total length of a manuscript has grown (or, if you’re in editing mode, shrunk) over time. You can see how many words you’ve written each day, week, or month—on any one title, or on all titles combined. You’ll know, in one easy-to-digest picture, when you’ve been productive and when you’ve been slacking.

The easy way to use this feature is to visit the site at the end of each writing session and type in the total word count for your manuscript right away. But if you need to wait until the end of the week (or longer period) and enter your best guesses at historical data, you can do that too. If you write a few more words—or edit a few—after submitting your word count, you can just enter a new word count for that same date; it will overwrite the previous entry for that date.

They say that what you measure tends to improve, and what you don’t measure tends to stagnate. Well, it just became easier to measure how consistently you write, and how much.

So write well, my friends, and write often.

Thanks to the fine folks at Netvibes, I’ve been spared some programming effort. One of the items on the to-do list has been to create a Konfabulator widget (a.k.a. Yahoo! Widget) for those of you who aren’t using Dashboard, iGoogle, or Netvibes, but still want your WritersDB data “to go.”

What Netvibes has done, which is pretty spectacular, is to make good on their promise of a “Universal” widget architecture. It used to be that if you wanted to create widgets for Dashboard, iGoogle, Konfabulator/Yahoo, Windows Vista, Windows Live, etc., you would have to manually port the relevant code to each of those platforms, coding to match the idiosyncracies of each.

Widgets written for the Netvibes platform, though, can now be run in several of those other environments. The conversion to all those different formats is handled with no additional effort from the developer.

So, if you were waiting on those proverbial tenterhooks for the Yahoo/Konfabulator widget, you can now get it here:
http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/202565/writersdb-pending-subs
(Just click the “Yahoo” link on that page.)