Young Writers Society

If you've been following my profile or been in the chat or seen my blog entry, then you're probably aware of WriterFeed Pad.

In short, WriterFeed Pad (WFP) is an online document editor that uses an open source program called Etherpad. You can use it to write a story with someone else, plan a storybook together, or just store your documents online. In fact, if you're like me, you already use online document editors since that makes it easy to share documents across computers.

WFP doesn't differ much from regular Etherpad except in one critical aspect: this is the first time it has been hooked into a forum. This means your YWS account and WFP account are now linked.

To see what I mean, go to 'My YWS' and choose 'WriterFeed Pad Account' from the drop-down. This will open WFP in a new window, and then just log in with your username and password!

Why use this? It makes writing a story with someone else so much easier. You can work on a storybook together with other people, and you can easily edit anything you write online from anywhere. Use WFP to start writing your novel at home, then use it again at school to continue writing your novel there, and then use it on vacation to write your novel from the hotel.

If you have any questions, please ask! Also, I'd love it if you let me know if you're using this and how you're using this.

Some of my school computers do not have a working version of Word, so this is going to be handy for that! Also, Google Docs isn't as intuitive as this, so yay!

It might be cool to be able to put these pads in folders.

EDIT: Spellcheck would also be awesome. Firefox, for some reason, doesn't underline the misspelled words.

I tried to enter Lumi's pad, and it wouldn't recognize my account. He set it to public so it was alright, but it's a bit annoying if you want it to be private.

Past that, this is just downright awesome and I'll have to use this in the future.

In regards to Rosey's adventure: from what I can gather from exploring the account managing page, you can only bring friends into private pads if you create an account for them, and those are ultimately just subordinate limbs of your master account. However, anyone can enter while set to public. Would there possibly be a way to make our docs private while allowing our friends to enter without the use of subordinate accounts? Of course, this is a completely new program, so as it is right now, it's phenomenal.

Lumi wrote:In regards to Rosey's adventure: from what I can gather from exploring the account managing page, you can only bring friends into private pads if you create an account for them, and those are ultimately just subordinate limbs of your master account. However, anyone can enter while set to public. Would there possibly be a way to make our docs private while allowing our friends to enter without the use of subordinate accounts? Of course, this is a completely new program, so as it is right now, it's phenomenal.

At the moment, no. I would love to and I will definitely try to figure out a way to do this, but all this Etherpad stuff is way over my head; it uses incredibly complex javascript that I can only figure out by deliberately breaking stuff then trying to figure out what I broke!

But, other ways of doing it wouldn't necessarily be much better. Even if I could make it such that your friends automatically had access, that wouldn't work for everyone since most YWSers have people on their friends/followers list that they wouldn't want to have access to their Pads.

Any other way of doing it would only be slightly less complex. You'd still have to go to the Account Management page and do something like "Grant Access." Then the Grant Access page would just be like the Create New Account page, except there'd by no entry for "email" and "password."

In any case, be sure to check out the 'Help' page, which covers sharing (in fact, it's the only help topic!).


Snoink ->> I know spell check would be awesome, but it's not going to happen.

I'm beginning to think WriterFeed Pad just hates me.

I tried signing in to my own Pad, only for it to tell me I entered in the wrong password. I know for a fact this is the same password I enter in to YWS (and I typed it about five times to make sure, getting the same error each time).

I even tried it without the space in my name, but then it couldn't find my account.

I'm fine using the non-personalized pads, but not being able to access my own is mildly annoying.

Just a quick note, I'm removing the managing accounts area such that you can no longer create accounts. The problem is that once you do this, that person you created has access to your entire WriterFeed Pad collection. I'm sure not everyone will be comfortable with that.

Fortunately, I didn't know you can set access to public while still requiring a password to enter. That sounds like a far better solution to me than anything else. Just be careful who you share the password with! Of course, save revisions often so even if some jerk does delete everything, you can still recover it.

> I haven't tested out yet that much, but for now let me just say it's sleek and awesome and I love the YWS intergration.

Whooooo this is fun! I've only used it to add to the YWS story so far but I'll probably find other things to do with it too.

Query! I noticed tonight, as I started to transfer some saved poetry in to a Pad so that I could play with them whenever I wanted, that you can't copy&paste in to the pad? This may just be me incompetent, but if someone could explain it to me, I'd be eternally happy!

[Edit] I tried importing but that refused to work for me, I'm not sure why? [/Edit]

Just thought I would let you know that this probably my favorite feature on the entire website at the moment. It is probably because I've become inactive from the chatroom and don't have the time to review, but still I really enjoy the writerfeed account. The reason is that it allows me to easily transfer my work from one computer to another without the hassle of a flash drive, but I wish it had spellcheck like word does.

I've developed methods around spellcheck. They are known as my Grammar-Nazi friends.

I'll also copy stuff to Word periodically just to have a back-up in case I can't access WFP for whatever reason (college wireless is unpredictable sometimes) and spellcheck it there. Then I copy it back with all the corrections in place.

how do you clear a chat feed? and what if a whole section turned a different color what do you do?

For clearing a chat feed, I don't think you can.

For changing colours, just cut out the section (highlight it, then hit ctrl X) then hit ctrl V in the same spot. That changes it back to your original colour.

I just have one question. How do you export your documents? I tried, and something happened to the file.