Comments on: Taking on the 750 Words March Challenge

By: Marius Høy

Marius Høy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:07:36 +0000

Apparently 750words did`t expect this much traffic. I got “New signups temporarily turned off” when I tried singup.

By: Erik Senjaya

Erik Senjaya — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:32:53 +0000

@alex: Write Room is cool but I don’t have Mac.

By: Eddie Forero

Eddie Forero — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:24:50 +0000

Looks like you broke their site, Gina – way to go!

Looking forward to it coming back up so I can check it out…

By: rossotron.com/

rossotron.com/ — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:09:24 +0000

@Alex – Yes, Buster had some tweets last night to the effect of the server’s broken and he’s working on work-arounds and/or dedicated servers. Definitely got crashed by the mad rush from Smarterware/Lifehacker/Twitter yesterday afternoon – he said his traffic increased by at least 10x before it went down.

By: Alex Bea

Alex Bea — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:28:56 +0000

@Erik – Write Room (Mac) does this. If you take it out of the full screen view it will count automatically, and if left full screen you’ll see the count by moving your cursor to the bottom of the screen.

I just went to 750 Words and I’m getting a 403 Forbidden error. Did Smarterware+Lifehacker crash it?

By: google.com/profiles/si…

google.com/profiles/si… — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:15:04 +0000

i keep getting this error when trying to go to 750words.com

any idea what’s up?
———————
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
———————————

By: Erik Senjaya

Erik Senjaya — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:10:00 +0000

Is there a text editor that can count the words (in real time) while we are typing?

By: Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:40:08 +0000

Great tips, thank you Justin!

By: Justin R.

Justin R. — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:56:29 +0000

In graduate school, we read The Artist’s Way (which this app is based on) and were required to write morning pages. If you haven’t read the book, it’s a good read for those interested in boosting their creativity.

I will repeat three tips, which were given to our class by our professor (thank you Laurie!) which greatly increased their effectiveness (at least for most of us). It’s a sort of modified morning pages if you will.

1. Stream of thought…even if there aren’t words. When I started out, some mornings I simply would put pen to paper and not write a thing. I was perplexed but others had the same issue. The key, after having a class discussion, was that you’ve got to forget about the length. No words coming to you? Draw what comes to mind. Some days I drew pictures and then words, and then whatever came. Some days I never hit 3 pages, other days I did. Let go and let those thoughts out.

2. Don’t read them. Seriously. We were specifically told not to censor ourselves, not to let anyone else read them, and to not go back over our entries for at least eight weeks. It’s a freeing experience, what you write will probably make no sense even to yourself later, and it just clears the mind.

3. Write in the morning. This is hard for a lot of people (myself included) because it messes with the routine we have for ourselves, but I got more out of writing in the morning (writing in the evening felt like a diary, not a through stream and that didn’t help me). Do experiment for what works best for you.

While the app doesn’t work for me (I like streaming onto paper), I think anything that helps increase the creative spark in people is a good thing!

By: stemplar

stemplar — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:18:01 +0000

I love the idea but I do not use facebook at all – he needs to come up with another way to sign in.