Hoping that everyone is enjoying a good start to their summer. The weather is perfect here in my undisclosed location and I’m seriously considering writing outside. Or I would be if this world weren’t orbiting a ball of fire, ever burning in the sky and raining down filthy, cancer bearing sunlight. You might be different though! If the outside is your thing I highly recommend <REDACTED>. <REDACTED> is wonderful this time of year.

Still, you came here for news about what’s going on with WordKeeperAlpha. First, we had some trouble with my host for a couple days last week. That’s thankfully over now, and WKA should be back up for everyone. Let me know if you’re still having any problems and I’ll get right on it.

Something that isn’t fixed yet is the Goal Graphs. That’s been going on for a while, and I apologize. What’s going on is that I completely revamped the system I use to serve up the graphs in preparation for a larger upgrade that is taking longer that anticipated to finish. I’m trying to fix the goal graphs before then, but we’ve got a particularly stumping bug in there. So it might be a bit yet.

The next upgrade that I’m working on is completely redoing the Goals and Projects page. I’m breaking them each out into their own pages and adding features to both. One of the key features is that you’ll be able to see graphs related to both individual goals AND goal type graphs for projects. In addition to that I’m working in some more stats that might be handy for you. Both pages will load faster than the current Goals and Projects page does. Another feature is that you’ll be able to choose what graphs appear on your home page.

After that is done I’m going to add some features to entering word records. Right now I’m planning on adding tags, letting you tag an entry with whatever you want, like “worldbuilding”, “first draft”, “editing”, etc. A new graph will give you a visual way of telling where you spend the majority of your time / words working on a project. For example, if you write a 100,000 word novel but write another 120,000 in worldbuilding then you might want to cut that back and spend more time on your book, as opposed to coming up with the complete history of a nation that doesn’t come in until the next book. Or maybe you just like making worlds. I’m not the boss of you.

I’m also planning on adding a “session time” to a word entry. So, you can record your word count, and how long you spent writing in that session. I might also add something like location and do some maths that tell you where you write the most often, where you write for the longest, and where you’re the most productive over a period of time.

And, the major push that is going to happen closer to the end of this year and into next is going to be all the Social features that I’ve been planning. A public author page (optional), writing groups, competitions, and hopefully I’ll have something really neat for next year’s NaNoWriMo. One of the most frequent requests is a “NaNoWriMo” mode for entering words, updating the total wordcount as opposed to entering the words you wrote that day. I’ve got some ideas, but it’s a ways off.

Alright, that’s enough updates for now. I’ve got to get back to my own writing. As usual, let me know if you’ve got problems or ideas. I love hearing from you guys!