As some of you have noticed, the layouts of the front page and the word pages have been changed. Listing words is fun, but the meat of Wordie is in the comments and the repartee, so I thought the conversations should be raised in prominence. Feedback and suggestions for improvement are, as always, welcome.
A word about what’s been going on with the site. Wordie finally outgrew the basic hosting it launched on, so this week I moved it to a new home, a VPS on Slicehost. I’d like to think that eventually Wordie will need a dedicated server, but this should do for a while, I hope.
While I was at it I ported Errata over to Blogger, as you may have deduced from the new look. I was hesitant to do this, since I didn’t want to disturb the existing posts and comments, but I decided the benefits outweighed the minor headaches. My Wordie time is better spent working on the site itself, rather than futzing with blog software. I moved all the old posts over to Blogger, and sucked out the old comments as well, though I have yet to attach them to the new posts (I’ll do that soon).
Lastly, I spent some time this afternoon optimizing the db, which sped some pages up 10x. May or may not be noticeable to you, dear reader, but at the least it should help the site better handle traffic spikes, like when William Safire did that “On Language” column about Wordie last week*.
Hopefully this puts site infrastructure in good stead for now, which will both let me get back to building features, and allow Errata to focus less on web development, and more on words and language.
*not true
Apologies for Wordie going kind of bonkers while I sorted out DNS issues related to changing hosts. I just ironed out some config kinks on the new server, the transfer finally went through, and from reports in the field, they seems to have propagated throughout the pipes.
If this outage really has you hot and bothered, this might soothe you.
I just added Facebook as an “also on” service, so you can connect your Facebook profile to your Wordie profile. I registered for Facebook a while ago and ignored it until it exploded recently, but I quickly got addicted once I realized that practically everyone I’ve met in the last five years is on there. I was late to this party, but it’s amazing to see that it actually sort of lives up to the hype. Unlike, say, MySpace, which I loathe, or LinkedIn, the suburban corporate office park of social networks. Or even Twitter, which is rad, but even more pointless than Wordie. Which is part of the appeal of both, I suppose.
It brings up a question, though. I plan on building a Wordie Facebook app in the coming weeks. I could just port over the existing blog widgets, and may, as a sort of warmup. But an app that takes better advantage of the platform might be more fun. I have some ideas percolating, but would love to hear suggestions. I’m thinking of something that would tie into both the friend connections on Facebook, and the word connections on Wordie, and that was simple and fun to boot, is the direction we should look in. If anyone has any brilliant ideas, please post them in the comments.
As promised, added a new widget tonight: Random Wordie Words. This joins the existing widget, which shows the most recent words you added to Wordie. The new one is pretty self-explanatory: it displays random words from Wordie on your blog or web site. You can configure how many.
Just added two new feeds: one displaying five random words, and one showing the last 20 comments made on Wordie. The feeds are available in the new “feeds & widgets” section (linked at the bottom of each page), to which I’ll soon be adding a “random words” widget, as well.
I’m planning on devoting more time to Wordie in the next few weeks, so please let me know if you’d like any changes to the feeds and widgets, or if there are any other features you’d like to see.
Hey grammar nazis, this one’s for you.
Back in March I linked to Ficlets. I’ve been a steady user of the site since then, and I’ve published 66 short stories there so far.
When I first found Ficlets, I enjoyed a fun literary culture similar to the one here on Wordie. The other users were intelligent, thoughtful authors; the atmosphere was encouraging and clearly valued good writing. A good number of the contributors were published authors in the real world of considerable fame, and it was fun to rub shoulders with them.
In two months, that has changed dramatically. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but it seems the site has been overrun with children. Generally I’m pretty laid-back about bad writing and will just overlook it, but it’s gotten to the point where nearly every Ficlet published reads more like a text message than a literary work.
In the good old days (ha ha) the serious writers would rank garbage as garbage: one star out of five. The hope was that people would get the message and step it up. Unfortunately they didn’t, and they now outnumber the rest of us. To add insult to injury, the kids consistently rank the worst stories with the full five stars so the entire ranking system is useless. Most of the good writers have apparently fled in terror by now.
There’s an underlying attitude here, I think. It’s apathy toward all things grammar, or more. Sometimes I detect outright contempt for it. It’s never capitalizing anything. It’s never breaking text into paragraphs. It goes beyond not knowing how to spell; it’s not _caring_ how to spell. It’s waiving the single- or (already extreme) double-exclamation points in favor of eight or ten or fifteen of them.
I don’t intend to use Errata as a soapbox for my frustrated rants — though it’s probably too late now — but I’d like to hear your thoughts. I’m concerned that SMS and “IM-speak” is bastardizing communication amongst the youngest generation. Is it really that important in the big picture? Are we dealing with lasting illiteracy or a short-term fad? What does a disregard for even the simplest writing conventions mean for the future in, say, thirty years?
I’ve become a grumpy old man. Get off my lawn.
(originally posted on the old errata by uselessness)