Others may have their own priorities, but for my money, “not ugly anymore” is the best feature of the new & improved Amazon Kindle. I’m actually pretty tempted by this thing now.
Amazon Kindle, 2nd generation
You can store your own documents in it via USB, without the silly 10-cent fee per document. So I can carry my own works-in-progress around with me—and add notes to them as I’m re-reading them!
Considering how much reading I do in the car, while waiting for appointments or waiting for my daughter to wake up from her naps, portability is an especially valuable quality in my reading material.
Besides, in case my work on the Writer’s Database wasn’t enough of a giveaway, I love technology. Not as much as I love reading and writing, but nearly. Shiny new toy!
Are any of my loyal readers getting one? Tell me! Maybe the peer pressure/validation will help me to overcome that last bit of buyer’s resistance.
Not using an RSS feed reader to keep up with your favorite web sites? Don’t even know what RSS is?
First of all, you should learn. As I tell everyone, sooner or later, RSS is great. It’s like having the web content you care about come to you the way e-mail does, so you don’t have to go out to dozens of different sites and fetch it.
Besides that, more and more WritersDB content is going to be available in RSS format as time goes on—especially shared market listings from other users. Once you’re in the habit of using RSS anyway, this is a tremendous convenience.
But in case you don’t feel like learning about RSS yet, it is now possible to subscribe to the Writer’s DB blog by e-mail. There you go.
The commenting feature on this blog is now closed.
I may re-open it again when I have some time to research spam-fighting plug-ins for this blogging software. But for now, we’re receiving around six comments per day, and 100% of them are spam. Or else they’re carefully targeted, helpful messages based on the certain knowledge that writers are likely to be in the market for viagra, replica watches, cheap unsecured loans, etc. — and I’m doing all of my subscribers a great disservice by not passing those messages along.
I’m still interested in giving my subscribers a platform for open discussion, but for now, this ain’t it.
I spent much of the previous year completely recoding the Writer’s Database site from the ground up, to make it easier to provide new features. And I’ve had a host of new features in mind, to be deployed on that new platform.
As of now, enough of those new features are finished (and tested) to make it worthwhile to roll the new site out to the public. We are now at version 2.0! All user account data has been converted to the new site.
I’ve occasionally rolled out new features on the site before, often in response to user requests, such as the ability to record multiple rejections in one step. But this is a little bigger than that.
Many of the new features were requested by one or multitudes of current users. Others just struck me as good ideas at the time. Some of the highlights are:
- Share your market listings (with or without your notes)
- Browse and comment on market listings shared by other users
- Submit multiple manuscripts (to the same market) in one step
- Tag your markets with one or more keywords, allowing you to search & sort them by genre, prestige level, or any other criteria
- Record submission deadlines and entry fees for anthologies & contests
- Record whether a market accepts simultaneous, multiple, and/or electronic submissions. Search by any of these criteria.
- Record a market’s maximum word limit; search by this criterion.
- Record multiple e-mail addresses for a market (one for submissions, another for queries)
(* Fiction writers, I realize you don’t care about the “submit multiple manuscripts” feature, as most editors won’t allow it. But the poets are rejoicing, I assure you.)
Additional features are still on the way. I have more interesting ideas to implement, but I didn’t want to delay giving you these new capabilities any longer than necessary.
Don’t worry; the site is still free to use!
Want to let your friends know about this site?
Feel free to copy the badges from the site’s “About” page for use on your own blog or web site. After all, the more writers who use the site, the more valuable the sharing features will be.
Or, Digg this entry, if you’re aware of what that means!
Had to take a couple of months off from this project, unexpectedly. I have a new day job now, and a lovely new house in a different part of the state. On a related note, things have been busy!
I’ve uploaded my test files to the server and reconfigured most of what’s necessary to make them work on the server—as deploying from the testing environment to the production environment always requires at least a few configuration changes. I’ve imported the user data from the old site—current as of New Year’s—without any detectable glitches in the database conversion. Now I’m continuing to test all the functionality, to make sure the move to the production server didn’t break any of the smaller features.
Also, I’ll still need to run the database conversion again before the site is officially deployed. The data needs to be current as of the actual launch! It wouldn’t do to lose those last few days worth of user activity. But it’s very close now.
And there are more features to implement post-launch. But enough is ready now to make launching the site worthwhile.
Currently, a search performed on a market’s tags will return partial words as well as complete ones. I don’t know whether I ought to leave it this way, or figure out a way to change it. It has both positive and negative consequences.
Positive: let’s say there are markets tagged with “entrepreneur,” “entrepreneurs” (plural), “entrepreneurship,” etc. A search for “entrepr” will find all of them, which is probably as it should be.
Also positive: leaving the current behavior as-is will take less time and effort than figuring out how to change it. This reasoning sounds selfish and lazy (because it is), but there you have it.
Negative: a search for “fiction” will find markets tagged with “non-fiction” as well.
Maybe there should be a checkbox to let the user choose partial or whole-word matches . . . except then I might wind up with a checkbox next to every text field on the search page, which I feel would damage the simplicity of the interface.
The decision might be perfectly clear if I weren’t trying to make it at 12:30 a.m., instead of going to sleep. G’night.
The Luminary Writer’s Database has been around since August 2002. Between then and now, I’ve never really given myself a public platform to go with it. I’ve answered users’ questions via e-mail, have implemented various feature requests, and have occasionally posted brief announcements to the front page of the site. But for the most part, I’ve kept to myself.
This blog will allow me to talk about the development process. This may include features that are still in the works, lessons learned about building web applications, or, heck, pictures of my baby daughter posted as excuses for why I haven’t put in more development time.
It’ll allow me to talk about writing, too, and stuff that I’ve read. You can skip those posts if you prefer, but I figure we have a whole community of writers here, so writing and reading are perfectly appropriate subjects.
How often I’ll make use of this blog remains to be seen. I may yet discover that I’ve been keeping to myself all this time because that’s the way I like it.