Show HN: WriterKata – a site for writers to practice their craft
writerkata.com
writerkata.com
Of technical interest, this is my first Node/Express site, coming from the Rails world. I enjoyed the low-level nature of it but did miss a lot of the built-in features Rails gives you. Don't know what you got til its gone, I guess. :-)
A strong lede is compelling, informative, and brief. Those goals are tough to reconcile. You'd spend 5-10 minutes nailing the "perfect" lede. Then you'd go through it carefully, cutting out anything extraneous or sloppy. Then you'd toss it out and start again, approaching the story differently.
Despite the nature of the exercise, it never felt boring or repetitive. It was great practice, too.
[1] Don't ask me why journalists spell it "lede," when "lead" is perfectly fine. It's a quirk of the trade, sort of like the journalistic use of "graf" for "paragraph."
One question – I noticed that you're doing some validation of the inputs (i.e., I can't seem to submit a sentence without a period) – could you explain the reasoning for this?
On the one hand, it seems fairly constraining (and probably comes with a few unfortunate edge cases). On the other, perhaps that's the benefit of the kata philosophy.
What happens to the exercises once they're completed? Is there some sort of social review, advice from mentors or the like?
Edit1: after using it for a (very short) while, some thoughts.
1/ It would be cool to be able to compare what others have written for the same "katas".
2/ Some katas are uninspiring/difficult. A button to change it would be nice ("try another").
(3/ Maybe it's just me and I need more practice, but for some stories I find it hard/impossible to fit everything in just one sentence.)
Edit2: Okay, so from the "board" we can access "public cycles" of users. This is nice, but it would be interesting to access the work of others not from their usernames but from the katas themselves: group all answers to a given kata (possibly limited to the katas one has already completed, as to not be influenced by the work of others).
It could also be nice to be able to continue a story -- although I'm not sure how this would work.
.. did you read what the guy said?
If you were to read the pages of Naked Lunch in a random order, it would make just as much sense as if read in the order they were printed.
> Inspired by the practice of coding katas, I decided to create WriterKata.
Would you be thinking of one in particular? I'm always up for more practise.
Suggestions:
- Host your scripts instead of using googleapis.com. Don't feed Google data about your visitors.
- Autofocus the new textareas.
- Support Ctrl+Enter (or Cmd+Enter).
What is wrong with giving google the data, in exchange for the free bandwidth and api's?
I agree with your other suggestions though.
Why not define the terms and give an example of each... atleast to folks who are not logged in.
Props to you: This is a very cool idea.
Not sure I'll use it, but I love it. Reminds me of that time I did NaNoWriMo and we gave random little challenges to each other to spur us ever onwards in that quest for 1666 words per day.
What would be amazing is to let me not progress until I successfully met some of the grammar conditions that were placed upon the sentences/paragraphs (eg. I had to google what an appositive was) but was not sure if I successfully used it correctly.
PLEASE PLEASE make some way to share/see others' responses!
lispylol: you can view other's 'public' cycles.
Question to creator: how do I make my cycles public? Have been scrutinising the interface, perhaps not closely enough ;)