What interesting developments!

Hi Write Bite,

I like your ideas. Having a themed rant is a good plan, as after several months of the site operating we seem to have covered a lot of ground and I think it would help our creativity to give us some direction. Perhaps giving the winner or top ranters of the week the power to suggest the following week’s topic, should they be interested, could be cool.

Re having images in every rant, there are obvious copyright concerns. We can’t just google stuff and post it if money is involved. Well, you could I guess, but you run the risk of getting in trouble for copyright infringement. If your staff however added their own images, I think that would be really cool. Add another medium to the rants.

Sounds like the site will become more interesting after the launch. Good luck with it and I’ll be keeping an eye out.

Pete

Pete makes a good point about copyright issues. One idea would be a disclaimer/certification from the user that the image is either not copyrighted, or that they own the copyright, and that WriteBite is not liable if the user engages in copyright infringement. Before the image can be posted, that certification has to be checked by the user.

On the voting for themes, I would suggest that users be allowed to make several choices. For example, I might be interested in writing about politics or about Sci/Tech, or both. If there’s a list of themes, and each user gets to choose, say, three from the list, it may help to get more people interested in writing on a regular basis.

Moderation is a good idea, I think. Might I suggest, also, that rants be subject to editing? Not for content, but for spelling and/or grammar. I know that I miss an awful lot of typos in my rants (proofreading is not my biggest strength), and frankly, I’ve seen some really BAD spelling and grammar posted.

I can’t wait to see the new site! Just, please try to make it sooner rather than later – I’m getting anxious without my WriteBite!

I like ranting; please email me when you get back up and running. I have very strong opinions and love sounding off about them.

The image requirement might keep some from posting; what kind of images would you accept?
Thanks,
Susan

Hey, guys!! What’s the deal? When are you going to be back up and running?

@Susan, we will have a sidebar that suggests images (in the public domain) for you to use. We will pull these images for you from Flickr.

@Lupine, nice to see you still check up on us. Honestly, I can’t predict when we’ll be up and running again. We’ve gotten so busy with school and other commitments that development progress has slowed to a crawl. However, the extra time has allowed us to grow and mature our skills and our ideas, and you can expect the WB2 to be a major improvement over WB. It is essentially a completely different site built from scratch. Also, we’re open-sourcing the project so if you know a little Python and Django, you’ll be able to run your own little writing contest site with minimal work.

YAY!! You ARE still alive out there! I like that you’re going to open source the site – open source is always a good thing. Unfortunately, my expertise runs more in the age of dinosaurs – FORTRAN, PASCAL, COBOL, C, C++, SQL, etc. The newest thing I’ve learned is some java.

I’m getting so old…