Young Writers Society

Added a couple of features last night. The first are the re-introduction of topic descriptions. When you go to post a new topic (or edit an old one), you'll be able to add an optional short description that'll show up when browsing the site. Should be helpful for storybooks in particular.

The second feature is that now when you post a link to a topic or work on YWS, the link will automatically display the title of the work/topic.

Awesomeness!! Thank you.

LOVE the title link thing!!! Thank you!

I quite like the fact that Storybooks is now the last tab. Gives it a sense of importance

LouisCypher wrote:I quite like the fact that Storybooks is now the last tab. Gives it a sense of importance

.. The tabs are in alphabetical order.

STILL.

Just finished putting together a word cloud generator:
YWS Word Cloud Generator

It's using the jquery AwesomeCloud plugin to generate the word cloud image. To generate the words for the word cloud, I built a php modification that does the following:

- First, it gets rid of all punctuation except for apostrophes.
- Second, it transforms your text to all lowercase. This way, Meander and meander are properly counted as the same word.
- Third, it counts up words and the number of times they appear. These are then weighted relative to the most used word, with the most used word being given a weight of 65.
- Fourth, it takes out the 100 most used words after removing commonly used words such as "the" and "has."
- After all that, it gets sent to the word cloud generator.

Have some fun with it! It was actually fun to build and mess around with. Keep in mind also that it's not perfect. For example, while Meander and meander are counted as the same word, meanders and meander are counted as two different words. I tried a number of ways to get around this, but each way solved more problems than it created.

At the moment, the word cloud generator isn't linked to anywhere on the site. That will change in the coming week when I redo the footer area and add more writing tools.


Other stuff

Lots of new stuff in the past week. It's all already been announced, so here's a quick rundown:

- Topic descriptions
- Subscribe to topics
- New blogs page
- New default blog template
- Storybook linked to on the DT
- Minor behind the scenes tweaking of the homepage to make it load faster

Entering in each chapter of a novel to find out the most used word is an absolutely fascinating exercise...

All these changes and upgrades make me so giddy, it's fantastic

Ohh and "My Storybooks" section and link to SB and subscriptions and new blogs and descriptions and the word cloud generator thingy which is just marvelous to procrastinate with and.. 8D

Brilliant. Thank you very much 8D

^^ I am totally in love with EVERY change Nate's made in the past week ^^

Nate, I think if you were able to make it to where Squills posts would show up in the Homepage underneath the forums area or something. I think more people would see Squills that way.

Thanks,
Aquestioning.

Aquestioning wrote:Nate, I think if you were able to make it to where Squills posts would show up in the Homepage underneath the forums area or something. I think more people would see Squills that way.

Thanks,
Aquestioning.

Done!

Thanks! Thanks! Thankkkkkksssss!