Redesigning Storycrafter.com

Happy New Year! I hope your 2012 is productive and joyful!

I’m looking forward to a visit from my brother and his family this weekend!

I have not forgotten about this! I’m just busy working on other things. This is my spare-time project.

After looking at the functionality Gravatar provides for managing your profile information and linking people you to wherever you are on the web I’ve decided to forgo creating a profile system, instead I’ll just give each member the ability to link his or her storycrafter account to their Gravatar account.

I’ve created a Gravatar account (and will upload a better photo when I get one) here you can see my profile.  In order to link your storycrafter and gravatar accounts you will have to use the same email address when registering for both storycrafter and gravatar.

The only difference is that I’ll display your storycrafter username instead of your gravatar username in your writer profile. Otherwise your gravatar profile will be used to display your about me, email addresses, verified services, and other sites.

In addition your writer profile will show the stories you write in and the stories on your reading list.

Okay, I’ll be uploading a video where I talk about the changes to the data model, and with that some of the larger changes in general, so I might as well list them here so you can access that information easier.

Storycrafter 2.0 won’t have

• a focus on characters
• character portrait gallery
• private auditions

Storycrafter 2.0 will have

• a focus on writers
• writer pages
• flexible story taxonomy
• ability to open scenes for anyone to participate
• Reading and Writings list (instead of a character watch list)
• new note system, where you can drop notes into the margins of scenes

The departure from a character-centric site to a more reader/writer centric tightens our community by removing artificial separations between a writer and his or her work. People will be able to visit your story read along, follow you, then visit your page, see what else you write in and check those out as well.

Being able to add a story to a reading list helps up find out which stories to promote on the homepage, which people might like to read, and opens up the site to people that prefer to read your writing than to write themselves.

Presenting stories as primarily a table of contents will help people coming into your story well after you’ve started and let them more easily catch up and read along - something nearly impossible with the current storycrafter.

Having open scenes makes it possible to receive feedback on your story from your fans, or just create a forum specific to your story where any members can post.

Those are some of the primary changes to storycrafter.com 2.0. Look for the videos where I describe more.