Triberr Review: Useful Tool or Shiny Toy?

Does social media eat into your writing time?  There are plenty of social media tools that can help with reducing the time spent, while others can turn unexpectedly into time black holes.  I like checking out new tools, because sometimes I can find one that helps me out.

So what about Tribber?  I was introduced to it in Kristen Lamb’s class.  All the “We Are Not Alone” (WANA) writers of the class jumped into, built a tribe, and started sharing blog posts.  Triberr is a fancy blog reader.   Where it’s different from other blog readers is that you are getting all the blogs from your group, or tribe.  You can “Approve” or “Like” a blog post and send a link to it over Twitter.  There’s also a discussion section similar to Facebook.  The whole idea behind it is to support your tribe, and to reach a larger audience.

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT IT

It made all these blogs easy to scan and read.   I’m all for anything that cuts some of the time involved with social media.  It was also fun interacting with the other writers.  When I saw people sending out my links, it felt like maybe I was being successful in my blog.

THE PROBLEM AREAS

There’s two:

1. The Help section is terrible.   It’s poorly organized and incomplete.  I ran across a useful topic by accident but when someone else asked about the same topic, I could not find it again.  Other topics frustrated me because terminology was not explained.  A visitor should not have to go outside the site to find information about the site.

2. Link Spamming.  This was the more problematic area for me.  Initially, I thought it was great to see my blog getting tweeted out everywhere.  But then I started to notice that people doing the tweeting weren’t visiting the blog itself.  They either had Triberr set to autotweet, or were just clicking send.  I want people to send my links because they think my posts have value.  Otherwise, it adds to all the junk on Twitter now.  Many bloggers like me are selective about the links we send.  I read everything  first before I send it out to make sure it’s going to be relevant to my brand and platform.

Triberr has since turned up for link spamming — from writers in my WANA group! — on Twit Cleaner.

RECOMMENDATION FOR THE BUSY WRITER

Is it worth your time to help promote your platform?  In my opinion, it’s a shiny toy.  It looks cool, will consume time, but will not help you build your platform.

For you: Have you tried Tribber?  What has been your experience with it?  Post your commentsbelow.

 

Technology Hacks for Dealing with Twitter Spammers

Have you noticed lately that there seems to be a lot of link spamming on Twitter?  It’s hard to have a conversation when I have to wade through all the links.

So I get to fight technology with, well, technology with two handy tools:

TwitBlock: Sometimes I find it hard to tell if a Tweep is a spammer or not.  This program uses a rating based common things spammers do.  It gives you a breakdown so you can decide if you want to block someone or not.  Mostly, it’s caught p**n sites, and occasionally, someone will end up on it accidentally because they display spammer characteristics.

Twit Cleaner:  This is probably the handiest Twitter tool I’ve run across.  It analyzes the tweets of your followers and recommends people who should be unfollowed.  It includes people who excessively RT, those who send too many links, and even those who never interact with anyone.  All you have to do is select the ones you want to unfollow, and Twit Cleaner will take care of it.  To give you an idea of how bad this problem is, about two weeks ago, I unfollowed about 100 people for the three above reasons.  I went back in today and reran the report, and I’d accumulated more people who were doing the same thing.

For you:  What kind of hacks have you been using to deal with the spammers?  Any links that weren’t mentioned above?  Post your comments below.

 

Moleskine Hacks for Fiction Writers

Have you run into a situation where using technology made more work instead of simplifying it?

That’s one of the reasons I started using Moleskin notebooks.  You’ve probably seen them in Barnes and Noble, or even Target.  Rows of simple notebooks in different colors, itching to be picked up.  There’s an artistic feel to them, a special kind of magic.    Other notebooks like the one below feel like homework.

But what would you use it for?  Here’s a few hacks to try:

Ideas 

Ideas often come in spurts, and it seems like never at convenient times!  How do you record them?  I’m always scrabbling around for a piece of paper.  Recording them all in one place sure makes it a lot easier!  During Ravencon, I was getting such good information during the workshops that I was getting ideas, so I added them right there in my notebook.  I know exactly where they are, and I don’t have to go hunting for scraps of paper or files.

Research Notes

Have you ever stumbled across an article in a newspaper that has something you know is perfect for your story?  Usually it’s at the worst time — no paper to write on.   I’m always tearing the articles out and stuffing them in my pockets, but then I forget to take them out and record the information.  But a Moleskine is small enough to bring everywhere, and it only takes a second to pull it out and add a quick note.  You can’t even do that with a cell phone in that time!

Critique Groups

I’ll bet you’ve been doing critiques, and probably getting critiqued.  A Moleskine is a great place to note comments on another writer’s work, and also to note comments on your own.  It’s all in one place, so it’s easy to refer back to it at a later date for that one comment that didn’t seem important at the time but now makes sense.  I like the aspect of writing it down, rather than trying to type because there’s going to be a temptation of trying to capture it all.  Writing forces me to hit the points that catch my attention, because are usually the ones I need to pay attention to.

Workshops

Right along with the critiques are online workshops.  If you’ve tried one of them, it’s a lot more work than reading the lessons.  There are exercises that have to be completed.  The Moleskine is a great option for working through the lesson and having everything in one place.  At the convention workshops, all I had to do was carry around one small notebook and a pen, and I was set.

For you:  What are you using your Moleskine for?  What kind of hacks do you have that you’ve found work?  Post your comments below.

 

Metric Conversions

I was working on a chapter and had to put distance in.  Since it’s set in a foreign country, I suddenly realized that they would probably go by the metric system.  This Metric Converter helped me convert distance into kilometers.  You can also convert weight or temperature.

 

 

The Web is Not Public Domain

Ten years back, I had submitted some short tips to a computer magazine.  At the time, I was trying to use them to build a relationship with the editor so I could submit longer articles (and get paid!).  One day, after emailing him another tip, I got a strange email back.  He asked me if I submitted the tips anywhere else.  I hadn’t, and he explained that another site had taken content from his site, including my tips.   But the damage was done.  Though I had some tips in submission and submitted a few more, the editor never used any of them again nor did he communicate with me again.

The web makes things easy to access, and a lot of people out there think that everything is automatically public domain.  It isn’t.  Cook’s Source magazine apparently lifted an author’s article from another online magazine and published it, then suggested the writer was lucky they didn’t charge her for editing.  As the Washington Post notes:

Anyway, within hours after Gaudio posted that last night, her story of copy theft had begun richocheting around the Internet. The magazine’s Web site is mainly a placeholder, directing people to its Facebook page — and that’s where things got ugly.

I did visit the Facebook site–it is pretty ugly.  I imagine the site will be coming down in the next day.  The most troublesome thing out of this is that the editor has posted additional comments that suggest she doesn’t think she did anything wrong.  There’s a lot of that going around.  People just seem to think that it’s not big deal and it is.

 

A Look at Scrivener for Windows

One of the problems I’ve always had in writing a novel that eventually the number of pages starts to be overwhelming.  Yet, if I break it up into smaller pieces, like individual files, I suddenly have a lot of moving parts that are easy to lose. Schivener for Windows is a new release in beta to help writers like me with workflow and organization.

Pluses:

I like to create the story in small chunks and hop around. I might work on several at once. Scrivener displays the individual files of a project in a sidebar called a binder so I can just click on the next one I want to work with.  Very easy to hop, and at the same time, I have the big picture of the story.  In Word, I’d have multiple documents open. Invariably, I’d accidently close one that I needed.   This limitation also made it difficult for me to see the whole picture.

Each story chunk also has several pads assigned to it. One is for notes. It’s better than writing down notes on Post-Its scattered around or typing them in the story itself. Another is for linking research to each section. My research is often compartmentalized–I might do research that affects only one chapter and not the entire book. In a previous story, I tagged passages with comments noting the research source.  In another, I was keeping it in different files and notebooks–things got lost very easily. But in Scrivener, I just link to it on the pad, and it’s always there.

Minuses:

Not everything is intuitive. Some of the features are not in logical places. For example, I had to turn off the spell checker. It wasn’t obvious that it was even possible, and I had to click around to find it (it’s under Edit>Tools). There also isn’t any way to run a spellcheck, though that may be a feature that comes later.

Spellcheck doesn’t work right. It flags parts of several words as being misspelled. The search and replace is very hard to see and doesn’t give cues saying anything has happened. Some people have been complaining about the lack of double-spacing–even that’s been hard for me because I’m so used to it. In this case, I’m ignoring it because it may be a benefit in the long-run. I’m trying not to focus on length in my rewrite, so single spacing takes away all the cues.

For screenshots and to download the software, visit the Literature and Latte site.

Disclaimer: The company didn’t give me anything for this review. I just did it because it fit into my topics this week!

 

Can you Imagine Typing a Novel on This?

Computers make it easy to write a book.  Type everything on the screen, and hit the enter button to go to the next line.  When you’re ready to revise, you can either print and make revisions on paper or it right on the screen.  But before computers, it ws quite a bit different.  I had a great-uncle who published books and short stories from the 1940s-1970s.  He wrote his stories on a manual typewriter like one of these.    This is what it was like to write on one:

Take a sheet of paper and mark the bottom margin lightly with a pencil.  That way, if you got into a creative rush, you wouldn’t type right off the page.  Insert the paper into the typewriter and adjust it to make sure it isn’t crooked.  Start typing.  The keys jump up and hit the paper, leaving the image of the letter.  It’s quite noisy, especially if you type fast.  As you type, the carriage of the typewriter moves to the left.  When you reach the end, you grab the lever on the right and pull it to the left to return the carriage to the beginning of the next line.

Very labor intensive.  Writers had to retype the manuscripts from scratch for each draft.  It wasn’t for the faint-hearted!