The Writer’s Technology Companion

Tools, Tips, and Technology for Productive Writers



Entries for May, 2008

How to FTP

FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol” and is the easiest way to upload files to a site on the Internet, especially if you want to send more than one file. You can think of it as sending files directly to the site through the backdoor, rather than going to the site through the front door […]

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Write a Story on Twitter! A Very VERY Short Story Writing Contest

Copyblogger is hosting a unique contest: tell a story in exactly 140 characters on Twitter. The prize: a 4GB iPod Nano for the best entry!
If you’re not familiar with Twitter, here’s the deal: Twitter is a “micro-blogging” platform, sort of an “IM meets blogging” thing. You can post test-message-sized “tweets” (up to 140 characters) from […]

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Is it Worthwhile to Post on Sundays?

Sunday is a traffic black hole here at The Writer’s Technology Companion. Generally I get about 1/4 to 1/5 the traffic of a typical day on Sundays.
The “received wisdom” about blogging is that traffic will plummet on Sundays, so I’m not alone in seeing this. Even the subscriber count goes down, since it’s based […]

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Software for Writers: Liquid Story Binder XE

Liquid Story Binder XE is one of the few pieces of for-pay software for writers that I think is worth its salt. Mac users have their Scrivenir, which is beautiful and seems perfect for writers, but I don’t have a Mac and so I don’t have Scrivener. Liquid Story Binder (LSB from here on) is […]

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Free e-Book on Writing for Helium

Bob Younce of The Writing Journey has released an e-book detailing how to make money writing for Helium. The Helium Report offers advice on how best to use Helium’s system to make a strong income from the site — Younce shows an income of just over $1,000 US with 2 hours a day work over 45 days.
I’ve […]

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Spread the Link Love: Link to Other Blogs to Promote Your Own

One of the best ways you can promote your website is to link to other sites.
Doesn’t make sense on the face of it, does it? How can sending people away from your site build traffic to your site?
Well, there are several ways linking to other sites can help build up traffic for your own.

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Link: Random Name Generator "Unled"

Need names for your novel’s cast of thousands? Unled has you covered. Visit the page and you’re presented with 4 random names drawn from, as I understand it, census data (or maybe phonebooks, or maybe even Google — in any case, some suitably large database of actual people’s names). You get two men’s names and two women’s […]

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My Article in ByLine Magazine

I got a pleasant surprise yesterday — a big fat envelope from ByLine Magazine containing a check and a couple of copies of the April 2008 issue with an article by me featured on the front cover! I hadn’t known the article was accepted for publication, so it was a real surprise indeed!
The article is called “Build […]

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How to Create PDFs from Any Document

PDF, the Portable Document Format, is a standard created by Adobe for circulating formatted documents over the web. Using Acrobat Reader or some other PDF reader (I like Foxit Reader, which opens much faster than Acrobat Reader and seems to work just as well), the recipient views your document exactly as it appeared on your […]

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Link: Social|Median, a New Social Network

I’m playing around with Social|Median, an as-yet-not-public social network that allows you to create and administer topic channels. Like other social networks such as Digg or Reddit, Social|Median lets you vote stories up and share them with your network (they call it “clipping”). They also send you a daily round-up of thetop stories in […]

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