Writing Resources

Over the last year or so my other half and I have slowly, and a little nervously, been dragged away from doing web design using Serendipity, and over to the dark side of Wordpress design. Unfortunately we had no option since we were being paid by the client and they wanted Wordpress.

Don't get me wrong, Wordpress is a great blog engine however my first love was always Serendipity because it is designed to do the job of blogging very well whereas Wordpress always seemed more like a CMS with blogging as it's main drawcard.

Well now we're being tugged in another direction altogether, yup, another engine which is even more CMS and less blog. Can you guess? It's Joomla, a CMS I haven't had a lot to do with in the past but now have to work with on an almost daily basis.

We've made the decision to stop producing free templates because they take up so much time, and I really don't want to sell premium templates, the amount of support that people need just isn't worth the effort versus the income.

In fact that is a major downside to professional webdesign as well, clients are very rarely willing to pay and often expect loads of free support long after the project is completed.

I prefer concentrating my efforts on writing, I have a number of clients for whom I do copywriting and advertorials but the income isn't fantastic yet. I'd be interested in knowing if any of the readers of my blog write for a living.

So, getting back to Joomla. One of the things I did back in my Serendipity days was write a bunch of tutorials on how to customise themes or do basic things with plugins that a lot of people found useful. Would anyone find Joomla or Wordpress tutorials interesting?

The goal should be to answer the question: Is StoryMash.com "The Future of Collaborative Fiction"? Whatever the answer may be, the author should examine the site to answer this for themselves.

Its strange, I earn 100% of my income from being a webmaster, which I hardly ever talk about, yet a significant amount of the traffic I get from search engines on this blog has terms in it like 'make money', 'becoming a fiction writer', travel writing, etc.

I don't know why I'm ranked for these terms, but since so many of my daily readers want this info I might as well provide it. And since so many of my online friends love writing and are torn between remaining true to their creative spirit versus making a bit of money from their writing, here's a site worth joining.

Storymash is a profit sharing site for writers with a twist. What's the twist? Storymash is a collaborative writing site for fiction. Writers join, then add to existing stories, or start new stories which other writers will then help complete.

In todays Internet its an exciting medium that I think will catch on with more and more of these types of sites. And refreshingly Storymash doesn't try to be a social network either. Sure you can add a comment to another writer's work or vote for the quality of their writing, but essentially this is a site for writers to practice their writing.

Now getting back to earning some money with Storymash, they pay 50% of all revenue to their writers, and regularly hold writing contests with prizes of $500 or more. The current contest expires 20th June so I know a few of you might be interested in checking out what they have to offer.