%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |  Announcements pertaining to Writing.Com! |
 |
Starting with the current round of "Short Shots: Official WDC Contest"  , in addition to the generous gift point prizes, First, Second and Third Place winners of the Writing.Com Official Contests will also be awarded an exclusive merit badge designed by The StoryMistress  . You can only get these merit badges by winning the contests so be sure to enter!  In addition to the monthly writing contest, we are adding a monthly Reviewing contest, which will be open to all members (except Staff  ). The reviewing contest will open in July and offer gift point prizes as well as an exclusive merit badge to the First Place winner! ~Diane |
[ UPDATE: 2:25pm - Upgrade completed and the site is coming back to normal (there's a big burst of requests that come in to the servers after they've been offline and it takes them a few minutes to answer the flood and get back up to speed). All in all, started about 5 minutes late, ended about 5 minutes late. Success!  ]Scheduled Downtime: 1:55pm thru 2:15pm Eastern, Today - June 17th Greetings, We've scheduled a RAM upgrade for our primary database server to take place at 2pm Eastern today, June 17th. The upgrade will take the server from 8 gigs of RAM up to 16 gigs. Since it is the primary database server, we'll be taking the site down a few minutes before 2pm. The network staff @ our host, INetU, will take the machine offline, add the RAM, and then bring the machine back online... and then we'll bring the site back up. We expect (and hope for) less than 20 minutes of downtime. (Since this upgrade affects the primary database server there's "quite a few moving parts", as they say. We scheduled it during the day because it's easier to take care of all those, with the best INetU staff on hand.) Best wishes, ~~SM |
The following winners for the May 2010 running of "Quotation Inspiration: Official Contest" were chosen from the 10 entries submitted. Each entry was judged based on the criteria provided in "Quotation Inspiration: Official Contest" . Congratulations to the following three winners: First Place - "BLAVATSKY'S BUS" by DRSmith   Second Place - "Invalid Item" by A Guest Visitor Third Place - "I Met Mr. C." by ruwth  Thanks for entering and thanks to the judges for reviewing and determining the winners! As a reminder, entrants should not edit entries until after the winners are announced. Several entries were disqualified this round due to editing after the deadline.  ~Diane |
| UPDATE: 12:00pm 6/16 - Upgrade still progressing. Once your email account has been moved to the new server, the system will allow you back into your email account. As of this update, members who were active on or after February 1st have been moved to the new email server and are able to access their email. At this point, we are considering the email upgrade for all active accounts COMPLETE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Greetings Members! Beginning at approximately 10:00pm tonight (Monday 6/14), Writing.Com will be upgrading to a brand new email server. It is time for our site to move up to a bigger, better machine and this upgrade will allow us to retire our current email server, which is a bit over four (4) years old. We've been testing the new server for about a month now and it's working great. We're using the same upgrade systems and process as the last time we did this 4 years ago. They've been tested and retested and are still working perfectly. ("[NOTICE] Scheduled Email Server Upgrade - June 15th" )Due to the enomorous size of our email service, the move will mean some time of inaccessibility to your email services on Writing.Com. While we transfer approximately 200+ Gigabytes of email data from the old email server to our new one, you will not be able to access your Writing.Com email account or its contents until it has been moved to the new server. As soon as your account moves, you'll have access to it again. Access to your Writing.Com email account may be unavailable approximately 10:00pm through 8:00am Eastern Time*. We will do our best to minimize the amount of time that your email is inaccessible and your email account will become accessible as soon as it is moved to the new email server. * Accounts that have not been active on Writing.Com within the past few days will take longer to upgrade as we are moving accounts in order of most recent use of the site. All email in your account will be transferred exactly as is from the old server to our new one. This includes your inbox and all email folders, including your sent mail and trash folders. No loss of email is expected from this move. During the time that you are unable to access your email, the email server will still receive new emails for your account and hold them until we re-open access to member email accounts. The upgrade will affect access to email services only and during the upgrade, all other Writing.Com services will be unaffected and fully available. After the upgrade is completed, you should find no differences in your email account, (though accessing it may be faster). No changes to the interface are planned for this upgrade. We appreciate your patience and understanding during this the email upgrade. Thank you for your support! Best wishes, ~~SM |
A big congratulations to Airdale (Alex Lidell)  for her novel "Service of the Crown" being named one of three finalists in Amazon.Com's Breakthrough Novel Award in the Young Adult Fiction category! ... But she needs your help to win the category and take home the prize! Please vote and support a fellow Writing.Com'er. http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_353000882_2?ie=UTF8&docId=100... You can download and read a free excerpt from her entry on Amazon.Com's site through this link .... You can submit a review of her entry on Amazon -- please consider doing that!  We'd also encourage you to spread the word... Ask your friends to show their support, as well! Thanks! ~~SM |
| The Dropnote Tag Introducing the new WritingML Dropnote tag. Dropnotes create links that, when clicked, drop down whatever is between the dropnote tags. Here are a few examples, with links to show the raw WritingML: When you click this link... ▼ View the raw WritingML ▼ Using the {quote}{/quote} within a dropnote creates a great presentation effect... For example: Something Interesting Quote'd: ▼ View the raw WritingML ▼ Something Interesting Quote'd Justified: ▼ View the Raw WritingML ▼ What's in the box?  ▼ View the Raw WritingML ▼ (Note that, at this time, you can not put a dropnote inside another dropnote. This may change... )For complete syntax and usage, please visit our WritingML directory: WritingML Help for dropnote New "id" Sub-Tags Keeping track of on-site "things" in your notes just got a little easier with four new id sub-tags: id-Item, id-Entry, id-Post and id-NL. The tags display the id # in a "copy and paste" friendly layout. Double click the id and press Ctrl-C (on Windows, Command-C on Mac) and the id is quickly copied to your clipboard. Here's an example {id-item:100931} yields: [#100931] "Writing.Com General Discussion" Each tag has been added to the WritingML directory: WritingML Help for id-item WritingML Help for id-entry WritingML Help for id-post WritingML Help for id-nl Enjoy! ~~SM |
| Our first attempt to offer document conversion using RTF files ("RTF File Conversion [BETA]" ) worked ok, but had some rather large bugs. Prompted by some discussion of document conversion in "Beta Tests: Comments" , here is our first Word .DOC converter. Just upload a Word .DOC file and the system will give it back to you with the formating in WritingML. http://www.writing.com/main/tools.php?action=docconvert It's a very "empty" page and this is still a very early test. I would like to hear about the results members get with the converter and hope some of you will give it a test run. We'd like to see how accurate it is and how the WritingML output compares to the "real thing" in Word. If you'd like to give feedback on how well the converter does, please post in "Beta Tests: Comments" or reply to this blog posting.  If there's something in particular you'd like me to take a look at, remember to include the File ID# that the converter gives you.Thanks! ~~SM |
| Hello Members, In an effort to make WritingML tags a little more understandable, we've updated the system to allow dashes in the tag name. This update applies to all tags, but here's "b-item" as an example: {b-item:######} with the dash, now works just like {bitem:#####} without the dash. This is an important update particularly for new members. They're usually confused when asked to enter a bitem into a contest... That's read as "before you can eat 'em, you have to bitem!" We hope that changing the "standard" term to b-item will help new members see the connection to the item side of things. Again, this update holds true for all WritingML tags, such as r-item, s-user, l-post, l-entry, etc. We will be updating the documentation to reflect this and we'll be releasing a news email in the near future about this. The WritingML system will always and forever support the syntax both with and without dashes. You do not now and will not ever have to update your tags to include dashes. Please do consider updating any site "documentation" or help articles that you've written about using WritingML to teach new members the dashed tags. We'd also appreciate it if those running contests and newbie events started using the "with dash" syntax as soon as possible. (Also, tags are not case sensitive so b-Item, bItem and B-Item all do the same thing.)In addition, SMs just added the following 12 new emoticons:  = Angel = CakeB = CakeP = Envy = Moon = Silent = Sun = X = XB = XG = XR = XVWith these newbies, our List of WDC Emoticons now contains 155. And, a little off topic, but to achieve the indentation and line spacing for the emoticon list above, it is enclosed within {quote}{linespace:1.8}...{/linespace}{/quote}. Enjoy! ~~SM |
The following winners for the April 2010 running of "Short Shots: Official WDC Contest" were chosen from the 18 entries submitted. Each entry was judged based on the criteria provided in "Short Shots: Official WDC Contest" . Congratulations to the following three winners: First: "No Way, José" by Shannon  Second: "Banished by My Own Wife!" by THANKFUL SONALI HAPPY WDC 24  Third: "Invalid Item" by A Guest Visitor Thanks to all the entrants and the judges! Enter your non-fiction stories into the official site contest for May:
~Diane |
| Introducing the LineSpace WritingML tag. Example: {LineSpace:VALUE} Text to be linespace'd goes here. {/LineSpace} The LineSpace tag allows you to adjust the line spacing for a block of text. The line space VALUE must be a number between 1.0 (single spaced) through 3.0 (triple spaced). Note that the "default" line spacing used by web browsers is actually 1.2, which means that using {linespace:1.0} will produce more compressed and compacted text than normal. I've left the ability to do this in as it may be useful in poetry and certain other writings. If you want people to be able to easily read your work, please be careful how you use this tag. Here is a set of examples demonstrating the effect on a real block of text... in this case, a poem by yours truly. Normal: This is a short little poem, one I will use just to show 'em, what linespace is able to do, with just a mouse click or two. With {linespace:1} {/linespace} This is a short little poem, one I will use just to show 'em, what linespace is able to do, with just a mouse click or two. With {linespace:1.5} {/linespace} This is a short little poem, one I will use just to show 'em, what linespace is able to do, with just a mouse click or two. With {linespace:2} {/linespace} This is a short little poem, one I will use just to show 'em, what linespace is able to do, with just a mouse click or two. With {linespace:3} {/linespace} This is a short little poem, one I will use just to show 'em, what linespace is able to do, with just a mouse click or two. While I provided examples using 1, 1.5, 2 and 3, you can use any line space value... 1.2, 2.3, 2.9, etc. Enjoy! ~~SM |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
June's Contest is: "
