When you can speak your mind safely, the words come more easily. Mental blocks built by others' expectations are removed. The cogs of your brain are free to move again.
But you don't need to be alone to be free from expectations — you only need the right environment. Write.as aims to be that environment, from our conscientious apps to our small community of writers, all publishing under pseudonyms.
We know that great writers take the time to read and absorb the ideas around them, continually growing in style, method, and thought. Exposure to a variety of ideas helps us grow faster and see things in ways we never could've on our own. So a complete environment for recording our best thoughts needs a strong, constant source of inspiration.
Today we're opening read write.as to more writers, both subscriber and free. You don't even need to sign up to submit your writing. Now anyone can write freely, and share their words anonymously with our growing community.
Everyone will now see a “read.write.as” option in the editor menu when you've chosen to publish as Anonymous. Subscribers' posts will go straight to read.write.as, just like their public blog posts do, and free users' posts will get a pass from the Write.as moderation team first, to be sure we don't get inundated with spam or other harmful junk.
We recently published a set of community guidelines to help everyone understand why we might not accept a given post. We'll be continually updating this policy as more people write and new questions come up, but ultimately we want the writers to dictate their own guidelines. What kind of community do you want to see? How can we balance free speech and a safe environment? Keep in touch and help shape our fledgling space.
As Tropical Depression #9 nears the Florida peninsula, we look back on our northern summer and reflect. What new insights did weeks of 100 degree weather bring us? How did our code fare in intermittent power outages from a summer of short-lived squalls?
Well the sweat of the summer is finally starting to dry, and even the deadly subtropics couldn't stop us from our code. It also didn't stop you, the writer. Write.as users collectively published over 1,200 posts this past month, and almost 100 new blogs were born!
This is great news, but our 2.0 features (blogs and accounts) have been delayed in getting to the mobile apps as we've gathered feedback on the web. Still, waiting has led us to some exciting new plans for features like static pages and offline support that you'll see soon.
Until that day, we have the Write.as of today — built on yesterday with its eyes on tomorrow. Here's what we did in August.
User Guides. We've summed up the basics in a set of simple guides. If you were wondering how to add links or photos to your blog posts, the guides have that. If you want to know what neat things we do behind the scenes, they have that too.
New paid plan. We took some of the Pro features we didn't want to keep from everyone and moved them into a smaller $10 per year “Casual” plan, so more people could enjoy them (and they are!).
“Read More” links. For those longer blog posts, now you can add a “Read More...” link to keep your blog home page cleaner.
Easily move posts between blogs. Subscribers can reap the benefits of having multiple blogs under one account. Once you have more than one blog, two clicks is all it takes to move posts between them. 💥
Microformats2 support. Every post and blog has information embedded in it that makes it friendlier for search engines and other sites to interact with. Now we also support microformats2, as the first of many steps towards more modern interactions with other places on the web.
Blog post embedding. Post embedding is back, and now works for blog posts. Just add /embed to any post URL and get the code to put it on any web page.
View counts on blogs. Page views are a good way to see how much your writing is reaching the world. So we've started counting page views on blogs like we already do on posts. For now they'll only show up in the API, but in the future you'll be able to see them online (and get an accurate number).
Reading Write.as. We've been thinking about ways for writers to share their posts with new audiences. So this month we started with a new Twitter account called @readwriteas. We're looking for stories, poetry, and thoughts you want to share with the world for us to send out, keeping you anonymous if you want. Anyone can submit their posts by tweeting them with the #readwriteas hashtag, or DMing us to submit in private.
Free Stickers — because we love stickers, we just got some, and we want you to have some, too.
This is all pretty exciting, but we really can't wait for everyone to see what's in store for mobile. If you'd like to get an early peek at the Android app (releasing first), join our beta and send us feedback when it's out. Then look for our iOS update coming later in the year.