Daily writing medium

December 23, 2014 1:38 PM

I want to get into the habit of daily writing in 2015, and one way I'd like to do this is by fleshing out a single poetic prose piece/novella/novel over the course of a year, through daily posts to a site, with possible social or RSS features so people can follow along if interested. What is the best medium for doing so?

Some ideas:
-Medium: I love the usability and design. Everything is great except it has a tendency to bug my friends when I post things. The last thing I want is people getting emails every day.

-Tumblr: I suppose this works. I've never seen any longform writing happening on tumblr, though?

-Wordpress: Pros and cons?

-Livejournal: I still have my old livejournal. It's retro-cool now right?

-Tilde.town: I have a page here that I don't know what to do with yet. Post new things every day in an early 90's-style minimalist HTML site?

-Ello: Maybe? I stopped using this a few months ago but I could see my account being repurposed for this project.

Opinions on these? Others I'm overlooking?

posted by naju to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I think Wattpad might work, it's a sharing site like tumblr but only for writing. I don't use it and I don't know if it supports RSS.

Twitter could be an option, but it doesn't support RSS any more.
posted by Small Dollar at 2:48 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I like Wordpress and use it almost daily, but not for your intended purpose. I'm not sure, exactly, what it is you're doing though? Writing different poems a day (there are lots of blogs I follow who do that) or one single piece over a year? Either way, it's free and you can do whatever you want on your blog so long as it follows the guidelines.
posted by patheral at 3:35 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you enjoyed LiveJournal, you may enjoy Dreamwidth. It's a LJ fork that's under awesome ownership and will not show your readers any ads. Features and usability are pretty much the same.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:41 PM on December 23, 2014

There's also Cowbird. I'm not sure how much visibility the site gets outside of its own community, but for me that is sort of a feature and not necessarily a bug.
posted by gubenuj at 4:49 PM on December 23, 2014

Best answer: Ghost.org is a simple blogging platform from a former Wordpress designer which is designed specifically for blogging (as opposed to CMS). It's blogs are beautiful and it seems like a perfect match for just writing. You can get the code for free and host it yourself or have Ghost host it for you for $10/month.

I like Ghost a lot but if you wanted free I'd probably recommend getting your own domain name and pointing it to a free Wordpress-hosted blog. (Which gives you the flexibility to easily point it somewhere else if you decide later on something better or customized.) This article features a pretty fair comparison of Ghost and Wordpress.

Tumblr doesn't seem to me to be really aimed at writing and longform, more at snippets and GIFs and pics. (That's not to say it couldn't be used for longform, just that I don't think it's the best fit for it.)

Wattpad seems really interesting, and it's free, but most of the popular authors on the site are teens and it seems filled with fanfic... and that rep might rub off on others using the site...

Amazon has launched WriteOn (currently in private beta) as its own entrant in this space according to TechCrunch - something to watch.
posted by skywhite at 5:47 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: These suggestions were very helpful. I ended up getting a domain name, running Wordpress on it, and customizing a theme. Right now it's barebones minimal and mysterious. No explanations or anything. Seems like something I can work with.
posted by naju at 6:04 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Tumblr is great for images or artwork but long text posts give me a headache for reading due to the lack of formatting. WP is fine but the only real downside is I didn't like the UI for posting new entries.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 9:35 AM on December 24, 2014