Scrawlers presents: Contests
Scrawlers.com is pleased to be giving away the wonderful book “The War of Art” to one lucky writer. To enter the contest, simply write an inspiration-themed story and tag it with “resistance.” Enter as many times as you dare! Read more about the contest over at Scrawlers proper.
Random drawing will determine the winner of this contest. We plan to run a new contest approximately every month. The better the response, the better the prizes. Enter now!
TWoNF - 100-character bio
Perhaps the smallest change made over the past few weeks is the new 100-character bio. If you thought 100-words was limiting, try 100-characters. This is especially constraining when talking about oneself!
It’s easy to setup your 100-character bio. Just visit your bookshelf, where Scrawlers lays in wait, luring you to personalize your biography. Click the link. You know you want to.
Infuse some humor into your bio.
Or make it a little descriptive.
Just don’t write more than 100 characters!
If you wish to change your 100-character bio later, visit your bookshelf, click on “Manage Account” and then click on “Update profile.”
As consumers of the Internet, we at Scrawlers have been inundated with social networks and their inherent personalization options. Not surprisingly we’ve grown tired of the constant maintenance of our own accounts across the ‘Net. This explains why you find Scrawlers taking baby steps to Web 2.0. Rather than giving you every personalization option under the sun, we’re choosing to stick with our own brand of customization, which will hopefully lead Scrawlers to smell pleasantly different than those other communities.
“The Week of New Features” has come and gone. We enjoyed highlighting a few of the recent goings-on at Scrawlers. Rest assured there is more to come. Subscribe to The Scrawl to catch every new announcement as well as Nate’s excellent thoughts on writing.
Note: Maintaining a profile at Scrawlers requires that you sign up or login.
If you have any comments on this new feature, please email us.
TWoNF - Live word count
How frustrating is that damn 100-word limit? Air out your grievances in the comments, on your blog, or into your pillow. We’ll give you time.
. . .
Do you feel better now? Good.
The least we could do is help you keep tabs on that word count. Well, we’ve implemented a live word count feature that is sure to make your writing a little less frustrating. Check it:
Note: Writing stories at Scrawlers requires that you sign up or login.
If you have any comments on this new feature, please email us.
TWoNF - Favorite authors
“The Week of New Features” continues with the introduction of favorite authors. If you’ve taken the chance to read several of a particular author’s stories, it may be time to make her a favorite author. It’s simple to do, just visit her bookshelf page and click “Favorite this author” in the sidebar:
Just like story favorites, you can always click the “x” next to “Favorite author” if you ever change your mind:
Naturally, an author has fans. Visiting the bookshelves of other fans is another great way to uncover interesting stories at Scrawlers.
Revisiting your favorite authors is as easy as visiting your own bookshelf:
Note: Author favoriting requires that you sign up or login to Scrawlers.
If you have any comments on this new feature, please email us.
TWoNF - Favorite stories
Does a story at Scrawlers tickle your funny bone, scare you, make you wonder, or even make you cry? Maybe a particular story brought with it an excellent workshopping experience? Mark it as a favorite and never lose track of the words.
Every story, save for the ones you have written, will include a link in the tool section at the end of the story. Just click “Favorite this story”:
If later you decide the story is no longer your cup of tea, simply click the little “x” to remove it from your favorite list:
Now if you look at the dedicated story page, you can see all scrawlers who are fans of the story:
If another scrawler is a fan of a story you like, maybe visiting his bookshelf will lead you to other interesting stories. To visit the bookshelf of any scrawler, simply click on her name, whether you see at on a byline, in a notes section or in the sidebar.
Look at the sidebar on a scrawler’s bookshelf to see what stories he enjoyed:
You may notice that I have a list of favorite authors on my bookshelf. I’ll tell you more about that new feature tomorrow.
Note: Story favoriting requires that you sign up or login to Scrawlers.
If you have any comments on this new feature, please email us.
TWoNF - Twitter publicity
For one week only, Scrawlers presents “The Week of New Features.” The past few weeks have seen a some fun and useful features hit the Scrawlers universe, and I’d like to quickly highlight each of these.
Twitter - caffeinated communication
At no cost to you, we have begun notifying the Twitter universe of any and all new stories written at Scrawlers. For the uninitiated, Twitter is politely referred to as a micro-blogging service. When one posts to Twitter one is typically answering the question “What are you doing?” When someone submits a new story to Scrawlers, Scrawlers is telling Twitter about it. That’s what Scrawlers is doing, thank you very much.
And did I mention Twitter only allows 140 characters in which to make this update? Sounds familiar, no?
Any Twitter user following Scrawlers will receive notification of a new story. This means web browsers, instant message clients, and cell phones across the world will buzz with a link to your latest creation. Not bad!
Visit twitter.com/scrawlers to see it in action:
We’re also announcing new blog entries through Twitter. When a new post hits The Scrawl, Twitter followers will know about it shortly. Of course, you can always subscribe to the blog via the news feed as well.
Technorati Tags: Twitter
Share stories with friends
A new feature released today at Scrawlers is the ability to share 100-word stories with friends. You must be logged in to share a story. Simply click into the story’s page. Beneath the list of story tags, you’ll see an entry field with a “Send To Friend” button. Simply enter one or more email addresses, separated by spaces or commas, and an email will be sent to your pals.
The resulting email, sent separately to each of your friends, looks something like this:
Scrawlers writer Barry (barry.hess@scrawlers.com) would like to share this 100-word story with you.
“Palm Reader” by Mornara
To read the story, please click below:
http://www.scrawlers.com/scrawlings/read_story/116
To read what Barry has been writing, visit:
http://www.scrawlers.com/profile/bookshelf/Barry
Thank you!
The Scrawlers Team
http://www.scrawlers.com
info@scrawlers.com
Notice this is one place where your email address will be shared, but only with your friends.
Technorati Tags: writing workshop, creative writing
Scrawlers in July
Scrawlers has taken a little while to click with the Interweb. July has seen the site start catching on a little bit, however. The timing is decent as Scrawlers is now in a state where the functionality in place works pretty well. There are certainly features that we are dying to provide, and hopefully you will see those sooner than later.
I thought I’d take the time to do a little comparison of statistics between June and July.
In June:
- 111 visitors
- 248 visits
- 1,079 pageviews
- 4.35 pageviews/visit
- 5:05 average time on site
- 37.5% new visits
- 12 countries and territories visited
- Top 5 countries: United States, Canada, South Korea, Germany, United Kingdom
- 38% used Internet Explorer
- 35% used Firefox
- 65% used Windows
- 33% used Mac (mostly me, I suspect)
- Google was the biggest referrer
- “Nathan Melcher” was the most frequent search term
In July:
- 1,358 visitors
- 1,736 visits
- 5,109 pageviews
- 2.94 pageviews/visit
- 3:38 average time on site
- 77.48% new visits
- 59 countries and territories visited
- Top 5 countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia/Netherlands
- 82% used Firefox (I attribute this to the StumbleUpon extension for Firefox)
- 8% used Internet Explorer
- 75% used Windows
- 21% used Mac
- StumbleUpon! was the biggest referrer, accounting for 64% of visits and 95% of new visits
- “scrawlers” was the most frequent search term
In all, we’re pleased to see a near thirteen-fold increase in visitors. Not a lot of the StumbleUpon! visitors are sticking around, but at least they are helping to get the word out by giving us a “thumbs up.” This non-creative-writing traffic has lead to a dip on the pageviews/visit and average time on the site, but I still think those numbers are pretty decent compared to those of the general Internet.
Our biggest problem is that we are very hard to find through search engines. No one looking for a creative writing outlet or an online writing workshop is going to find us through a search engine. This blog is one thing that seeks to change the math, of course.
In all, it has been an exiting month here at Scrawlers. We’ve seen some excellent new writers join our ranks. We are very excited to find where the next months lead.
I’d be remiss if I did not think the StumbleUpon user who first submitted Scrawlers to the site. Her name is onyxstone, and she’s a 15-year-old from São Tomé and Príncipe. Yes, that São Tomé and Príncipe.
~Barry
Technorati Tags: writing workshop, creative writing
Scrawlers welcomes RSS
If you’ve visited Scrawlers recently, you may have noticed some little symbols next to story and author names.
These symbols represent RSS feeds, a convenient way to be notified of Scrawlers updates. You can copy the RSS links into a feed reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines. It’s really convenient to follow things like blogs and other dynamic content through feed readers.
New features to help you write
A few new features have rolled out to Scrawlers over the past few days.
Writing should be more convenient for everyone. Based on feedback, the writing process has been the biggest headache for our authors. We agree! Please read on for details.
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About
Brought together by mutual interest in creative arts and web development, Minnesota duo Barry Hess and Nathan Melcher founded Scrawlers.com in 2006. Scrawlers marries creativity with a web-based outlet for aspiring writers and The Scrawl blog seeks to add fuel your creative fire.
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Recently Written
- More free books for you to win
- Still time to enter our “Back to School” contest
- I’m teaching English this fall.
- Your Friday Recommendation #18
- Win a free hardcover copy of Stephen King’s “On Writing”
- Why I Haven’t Been Blogging #2: Improv Festivals
- Why I Haven’t Been Blogging #1: I got married.
- How does one get back into blogging?
- Your Friday Recommendation #21
- So where have I been?…
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