Some Progress...

Today I was able to organize and upload more of my writings. Now I have a total of 15 essays posted to both Scribd and Booksie, but the work is not completed; I still have more material to go through, polish a little bit, perhaps restructure some, and then upload. The problem is that while reviewing material we always find a way that it can be tweaked, and the editing process can go on forever. This first batch is basically what I have submitted earlier, no extra edits done -- at least not yet!

Besides uploading more essays, I have modified this blog a little -- reviewed color settings, cleaned up the structure of the Essays page, added new pages, updated the pages to contain the latest essays posted, and created a page with resources I found on writing and publishing that can be useful to others. I have not used all the resources I list on that page, but I intend to in the future. For example, I am in the process of editing my essay My Pregnancy Journey - From Conception to Overdue Delivery so I can submit it to This I Believe. I will have to reduce it a lot because This I Believe asks for a maximum of 500 words to be used. Let's see if I can get that done.

Until next time!

My Heart is set on Scribd

I have been using Scribd and Booksie, not extensively, but enough to find out that I prefer Scribd. Besides being able to upload PDFs instead of copying & pasting text, Scribd has good default options, has less to be typed when uploading material, has better genre options, allows for multiple PDFs to be uploaded at once, generates simple addresses we can link to, opens up a clean page when readers access what we publish, and stores and displays statistics on all our documents.

I am still uploading to both, though, but I do prefer working with Scribd. Now I need to work on formatting this blog better...

Until next time!

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!