The Scribd Experience

I started publishing my essays on the web using Booksie -- it was among the ones I found when searching  for sites where my essays could live. My first impression when using it was not good. The process of making your writings available is very clumsy there; you have to copy and paste your documents instead of simply uploading a doc or pdf file.

So, today I decided to try another site I had read about during my search. That one is called Scribd and it is the way you expect any publishing site to be. You create an account in a second, and then you are free to quickly upload and publish your files. The interface is very easy to use and it even offers statistics! I can see all my documents listed on a page, the categories are simple to choose from and change if needed, and the summary field can even be auto-filled for you in case you do not type anything.  Since you upload your own files, format is not compromise either like it is when using Booksie.

I had four essays to publish to Scribd under my brand-new account; I had one essay to add to Booksie so both Scribd and Booksie had the same essays published. Believe it or not, it was faster for me to create a new account and do it all on Scribd than it was to publish one single essay on Booksie. Argh... Maybe I do not need to have the essays on both and I can simply cancel Booksie. I will think about it.

For now, I added  right next to the essays' titles the link to the Scribd version of the essay and the link to its Booksie version. And another plus for Scribd: On Scribd it was very easy to go get the URL of the essays to be shared -- there is a 'copy' button next to the URL field display . And guess how this is done on Booksie. Yep, you got it: as far as I could see, the only way is to display the document and copy the URL displayed in your address bar. Ha!

Until next time!

First Day Posting and Publishing

I finally got started on this project!

I have been writing essays and papers for some time now and wanted to make them available online -- as a backup for me and maybe as a resource for someone else.

After researching where I could upload/publish my writings to, I found Booksie and created an account today. My first essay is published there now and a link to it is available on my Essays page.

I think I have a lot to learn about using Booksie. This first time was a little painful... I thought I was going to be able to upload PDFs and make them available, but nope. I have to copy and paste the text onto Booksie's editor and publish everything that way.

Formatting was an issue. I ended up editing the source (yes, HTML) so I could have line breaks in my essay. Maybe they were going to be there once I published the essay, but they were not showing in the preview.

What I already learned is that the "Paste from Word" feature does not work on Chrome, so I had to use Booksie from Internet Explorer. Hmmm...

I will keep going and let's see how many more essays I can get done today.

Until next time!