Drops of Blood

New Writing Tool: Write or DIE!

Posted on 15 November 2008 | No responses

An online friend (hey, Suzie!) pointed me to a tool that will help you break through writer’s block: Dr. Wicked’s Writing Lab and the “Write or Die” tool. You go to http://lab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html and enter your word count goal, whether you want the program to be forgiving, strict, or evil (go with ‘forgiving’ the first time), and what you want the mode to be when you stop writing: gentle (alarm sound), normal (horrid song), or kamikaze (it starts erasing your words — yikes!). You set a time frame for yourself and then click “Write.” A window opens up and you have to start typing. Boy, does it work:

	1266
36
lab.drwicked.com

One hint, though: Copy your text from the window where you typed it before you click done. The program does follow up with a reminder to save the text to your clipboard, but it strips out all your paragraph breaks.

NaNoWriMo 2008 — It’s ON!

Posted on 1 November 2008 | No responses

I’ve been a long time away from the blog but I’m trying to get back. In the meantime, I’m participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. Word count so far is 3,251. More details to come!

I’m trying to use their widgets from the site. I haven’t decided which of these I like *best* (if the darned things will ever actually work):

The participant widget:

The participant widget with username:

The My Month widget (hey, this one is inaccurate — I did over 3K the first day!):

The MiniGraph widget:

The NaNoWriMo Graph widget:

The uber-detailed Progress Report widget:

The Region Status widget:

Paddling Through a Spam Tsunami

Posted on 23 July 2008 | No responses

I’m getting hammered with spam on this site all of a sudden. It’s overwhelming Akismet, and the spam program I just installed, Defensio, is still on a learning curve about what constitutes “spam.”

For now, so that I can get something done (other than deleting email notifications about waiting spam), I’m *temporarily* disabling comments on all posts. I’ll look at this further tonight and see if I can find a better solution, though! See updates below.

(And for my random thought of the morning –”spam hammered” could actually be spammered. And this is a spamergency!)

Update #1: An online pal — who’s about to become a BELOVED online pal if this works — just sent me a link to a different plugin with a glowing recommendation. So I’m re-enabling the comments and trying Cookies for Comments instead. Yay!

Update #2: Just tested that plugin. I didn’t see anything amiss as a regular user on the site when I posted a test comment to this post. I’m hoping the solution is this simple — it blocks the spammers without hassling commenters. *crossing my fingers*

Thank you, Donncha, for the tip!

« newer posts — older posts »