The Writer’s Technology Companion

Tools, Tips, and Technology for Writers

Entries for the ‘Web Apps’ Category

Promote Your Work on Amazon with Amazon Connect

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could stand in the bookstore next to your books and recommend them directly to anyone who stopped to take a look? You could answer questions, talk about how you came to write it, mention the sequel you’re working on, and just generally connect with your readers. Wouldn’t it be […]

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Words Count: Online Readability Analysis

You know your word count. But how do you know if your words count?
Words Count is an online readability analyzer, offering you more information about your prose than you could possibly imagine. Cut and paste in any sample of text (up to 20 pages) and Words Count will give you back the percentage of your […]

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Wordpress Plugins for Writers: Part 5 - Just for Writers

So far in this series, I’ve talked about plugins that would be useful for just about any Wordpress site. Today, I want to talk about a few plugins that are designed specifically for the needs of writers. The first three deal with formatting, allowing you to easily produce article series (like this one), a table […]

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Wordpress Plugins for Writers: Part 4 - Site Maintenance

Like anything else technological, a website needs to be maintained and backed up. There is a lot that can go wrong with your website — hackers could get in and mess with your files, your web host could experience a hardware failure and not have sufficient backups to restore from, you could accidentally delete a crucial file […]

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Wordpress Plugins for Writers: Part 3 - Feeds and Comments

One of the keys to building a successful website is making it easy for your users to read and participate in your site. The two most important ways are built in to Wordpress: all Wordpress are comment-enabled, and all Wordpress sites create an RSS feed so that readers can subscribe in the reader of their […]

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Wordpress Plugins for Writers: Part 2 - Anti-Spam

The #1 hassle of running a website is the inevitable flood of spam that, if left unattended, will fill your posts’ comments sections. Most of these are obvious attempts to get either click-throughs (people clicking on the links to see what’s up) or link-backs (links from your site to theirs which affect their site’s rating […]

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Wordpress Plugins for Writers: Part 1 - Introduction

One of the reasons I recommend Wordpress as the backbone of your writing website is that it is very easy to extend what WP can do using plugins. Installing a Wordpress plugin is easy — for the most part, you just upload the folder to the wp-content/plugins folder on your server, go to the “Plugins” tab in […]

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Choose Your Own ADDventure with Protagonize

Protagonize is a collaborative fiction-writing community that allows writers to author stories separately or together, build new branches off of other writer’s stories, and rate each other’s work. The twist is, the stories are interactive, like the Choose Your Own Adventure Stories of yore. The folks at Protagonize call them “addventure” stories, with each author […]

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Write Your Movie on the Web with PlotBot

PlotBot is a new free web application geared towards screenwriters. Because it’s on the web, you can log in and work on your screenplay anywhere you have access to a computer.
Better yet, PlotBot allows you and any number of collaborators to log in and work on the same screenplay at the same time. You […]

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A First Look at Acrobat.com

Regular readers have seen me rave about Adobe’s online word processor Buzzword before. Written in Flash, Buzzword provides a writing environment so slick that it’s actually inspired me to write more!
This week, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, folding Buzzword and a couple of other projects they’ve been working on into a somewhat integrated interface. The total package […]

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