The Tools section of the Writer’s Database site is no longer just an empty placeholder. We’ve published our first tool for use outside of the site proper.
It’s a Google Gadget, a little portable list displaying up to three of your pending submissions–those manuscripts that have gone out into the world and haven’t come back from the markets yet. This can be installed in your Google Personalized Homepage, if you have one. (And if you don’t, it’s free and easy to set one up.) I haven’t yet tested it in Google Desktop, but the documentation seems to indicate that it should work there as well.
The instructions for installation are on the Tools page of the main site. Note that you’ll need to enter your Widget Key (available on that same Tools page), and not your password, into the widget. Since the key allows read-only access to your account, and currently only to the Pending Submissions data, typing that into a third-party site is not so much of a security risk as asking you to give them your account password.
When I rebuilt the Writer’s Database, I tried to make sure I wasn’t losing any existing features while adding the new ones. But sometimes, it takes a fresh pair of eyes to make sure you’ve caught everything.
One of my favorite users* pointed out yesterday that it was no longer possible to sort the list of submissions by your choice of title, market, or date submitted. Oops!
I’ve restored that capability as of tonight. Just click on any of the first three column headers. Thanks, K!
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* What do you mean, I’m not supposed to have favorites? Some of you contribute lots of good ideas!
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.
Been working on the one-time upgrade script that will convert all the existing database content from version 1.0 of the site to work with version 2.0. It would have worked with no problems . . . except for one, er, problem.
There was a flaw in version 1.0, related to handling of quotation marks in the names of manuscripts and markets. You could put quotes into the names of either, but when you submitted one of those manuscripts, or submitted to one of those markets, the record of the submission would fail to record the full name of that submission or market. It would only record up to the quotation mark.
This is an easy thing to fix, but I only became aware of it just now. None of my own stories or markets have quote marks in their names, and none of the site’s other users ever complained about it.
So, there are a whole bunch of records where the submission data doesn’t quite match up to the market and manuscript data. I think the best-if-not-only solution may be to correct each of these records manually.
The lesson: always code things correctly from the beginning. Cleaning up after yourself later takes longer.
I knew that already. But knowing it and always managing to write 100% bug-free code are two different things.
So, the new version 2.0 of the site, with all the new community features, isn’t even live yet as I write this. It’s still in testing and late-stage development on my PowerBook. And yet, the “social” aspect of having a writer’s database on the web has paid off again.
Within the last couple of days, a new user (whose name I won’t reveal in the interest of privacy, though he’s welcome to comment this post if he wishes) signed up for the currently live version of the site, and e-mailed me to introduce himself and to ask a couple of questions about the feature set. It turns out he’s a graduate of one of the Clarion (science fiction and fantasy writing) workshops this year, 2006. I’m a Clarion 2004 graduate myself, so I’m pleased at the new acquaintance.
Maybe this sort of thing will happen more, and not just for me or even just for SF writers, once the new version launches. That would be pretty cool, I think.
Any other Clarionites out there, using the site?
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.