Official Quillpill Blog

News, words, and updates for quillpill.com

Brand New Features November 10, 2008

Filed under: Features, News, Quillpill Quarterly — Derek @ 12:39 pm

Our server upgrade continues and it comes along with some exciting new features.  The Manage Books section has been revamped.  Manage the books you are writing and the books you are reading from one screen.

Each book also displays the length in words next to the title.  You will now be able to check the length of your Quillpill stories without exporting.  This is just one more step in improving the drafting tool to be as easy to use and full-featured as possible and it came to us as a user suggestion.  We have a lot planned for the next iteration of the drafting tool, but please contact us with your feedback.  We love to hear from you and your suggestions help us know how the site is used and make improvements that matter to you!

In particular, let us know how writing on Quillpill affects your style, your speed, and your enjoyment.  What can we do to make the experience even easier or more fun?  Right now is a critical time in development of the full release, so do not be shy.

We have gotten a lot of great feedback regarding Quillpill’s use as a drafting tool, and now we have introduced a feature that will make it much easier to edit your works; post insertion.

Simply click the arrow next to your post to insert a new post above it.  With delete and insert, you should find it much easier to revise large portions of works, whether you are polishing the language and spelling or re-tooling the character development.

The format is the same as posting which means you can revise from your mobile phone just as easily as you draft.

Keep those thumbs going.  The zero issue of Quillpill Quarterly was a great success and we are excited about the next one.  We are watching the site and reading a lot of great work, but feel free to point out your favorite authors if you think they should be in the new issue.

In the next few months we will be seeing a lot of progress on the release version of Quillpill.  There will be a ton of new features and we will be releasing it here in the closed beta before it is publicly launched.  Stay tuned for more updates on that.

Thanks again to everyone who’s using Quillpill and everyone who has sent in feedback, bug reports, or information on how they use Quillpill and what they would like to see!  Keep it coming.

Server Upgrade! November 4, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — Elissa @ 5:16 pm

Hello everyone, we’ll be having a short maintenance period while we set the system up to move onto a new server.  This won’t last long and once you’re back on the site, everything will happen behind the scenes.  Thanks for your patience if we interrupt your writing.

A Message From our CEO November 1, 2008

Filed under: News, Team, Vision — Derek @ 12:28 pm

There are a couple of things I would like to talk about today. To start things off, I recently attended the Midwest Highlight conference in Kansas City, MO. It was quite interesting to see the tech startups from around the Midwest region. There is a lot of energy in the group, and a growing realization that more and more, high-growth business isn’t limited to a few isolated areas of the country. Anywhere you can build a community of talented engineers and artists, you can build a business.

Funding is a different animal in the Midwest. While on the coast it is almost always only the newest startups or hobby projects that are being bootstrapped for any extended period of time, it appears to be the norm in the Midwest. Talking with the angels and banks in the area, I can see why. Midwest money expects slower growth, even from high-growth tech businesses. They like to see costs kept down and money spent in smaller, managed portions.

This attitude may occasionally put a company coming into a crowded market at a disadvantage over their more free-spending opponents, but the mantra I heard was that it was best to let companies succeed or fail fast.

It’s a very Midwest attitude towards business. Most of the startup communities in places like Des Moines, Omaha, and Kansas City are in their first years, but there is certainly a growing number of people that want to see them built up.

Meanwhile, Quillpill is heading around the world. We are currently designing and testing the new version for release! While running the beta here in America, we’ve also been doing research and testing in Japan. Once the release is made, we’ll be promoting it in Japan with our Japanese partners as well as here at home.

The community we’ve been speaking with in Japan is pretty excited about what we’ll be bringing to the Keitai Shousetsu and we’re excited to be working with them.

Scheduled Maintenance September 15, 2008

Filed under: News — Elissa @ 1:06 am

Update: Quillpill is live again!

We have another short downtime for scheduled maintenance this morning at 5amE / 2amP for an hour as we deploy new features.  Thanks for your patience!

Quillpill at Mobilize September 12, 2008

Filed under: News, Team — Elissa @ 1:34 pm

I’m going to be in San Francisco next Thursday for the GigaOM Mobilize conference, which is focusing on the future of the broadband mobile web. Thanks to Women 2.0, a group supporting women entrepreneurs of high-growth ventures, I won a free ticket to the conference and am jetting out there, excited to meet all of the cool actors in the mobile space!

If you are also going to Mobilize, look for me and we can chat.  I’ll be giving out invitation codes and I’ll have a few promotional copies of our literary magazine, The Quillpill Quarterly, on my person for people to page through and maybe take home!

Curl up with your phone: Reading on Quillpill September 11, 2008

Filed under: Features, News — Elissa @ 5:39 am

Our userbase has been expanding and I thought I’d give an overview of the features we include to make reading on Quillpill easy.

Bookmarks

I think my favorite feature on Quillpill for reading is our bookmark feature.  For every book you’re reading, you can have one entry bookmarked.  This allows you to jump directly back to where you left off, right down to the sentence. To the left is an example of my bookmarked post on user cafegurl’s haiku collection.

Bookmarking is possible from any version of the site.  If you’re on the web the bookmark icon will appear to the right of any entry.  On mobile it will appear underneath each one as a text link.  On the iPill version, simply tap the post with your finger in Safari and the bookmark option will appear.  To make them even easier to find, bookmarked entries are green.

Picking Up

Bookmarking someone’s book will automatically “pick it up” and put it in your profile so that it’s easy for you to get back to and you can show others that you’re reading it.  Click the book icon to pick up a book without bookmarking it or, alternatively, put the book down if you no longer want it in your profile.

Email

If you want to be alerted when an author has updated their book you can subscribe by email.  It will send you an email whenever they create a new entry, so be prepared for them to stack up on a long writing sprint. It’s easy to unsubscribe if it ends up being too much, but I like to keep my very favorite books in email so I don’t miss the action.

RSS

If you’re already using it, RSS is really the easiest way to receive different alerts when a book is updated.  My favorite RSS reader for Quillpill is Pingie.com, an RSS to SMS and RSS to email service. It’s extremely fast to set up and easy to manage, and with Pingie you can read your favorite books as they’re being written without logging on!

SMS

Quillpill is partnering with Pingie to offer you integrated read-by-SMS and post-by-SMS services and more, so keep an eye out for our future features!

Scheduled Maintenance September 10, 2008

Filed under: News — Elissa @ 12:57 am

Update: 5:47am Eastern Time: Quillpill is back to normal.  Thanks for your patience!

Update: 5:40am Eastern Time: We’re going to pull it down again for a few minutes since posting is messing up.  See you soon!

Update: 5:30am Eastern Time: Quillpill is back live and doing funky crazy weird stuff!  Please bear with us while we get everything under control.

Quillpill will be unavailable for scheduled maintenance starting at around 4:30am Eastern time while we implement some new features.  We’ll be sending messages on twitter, jaiku, and pownce with updates during that time.


The Quillpill Quarterly: “50-Cent Words” September 9, 2008

Filed under: Literary, Quillpill Quarterly — Elissa @ 2:57 pm

Quillpill has released the September issue of the Quillpill Quarterly Literary Magazine, “50-Cent Words.” We’ve hand picked some of the most interesting and highest quality work on Quillpill to showcase the mobile and micro fiction genre. The fully illustrated 24 page magazine comes to you with work by E.T. Chevalier, Aden Penn, Eric Rice, Andrew Fry, Freeman Powell, and Dennis Loney, Science Fiction author Ken Brady’s article, “Redefining Literature 140 Characters at a time,” and an interview with Quillpill author Nikolas Bates.

The cell phone novel in Japan has become a popular literary genre in it’s own right.  In 2007 five out of ten of the bestselling novels in print had been drafted on mobile devices, including the top three.  Introducing drafting and reading tools on the mobile phone revitalized the publishing industry in Japan, enticing a new generation of non-readers to pick up paperback novels.

Quillpill seeks to bring this phenomena west. Japanese cellphone novels utilize a simplistic style that includes abbreviations and emoticons. In the first mutation of the movement, early adopters of Quillpill have eschewed “txt-speak,” instead producing a rhythmic prose with an almost classical meter. Love, action, and suspense are common themes as the format is lending itself to high-density prose; packing maximum meaning into minimum space.

With Quillpill Quarterly we are highlighting the upcoming authors of this infant genre.  We are giving back to our community by promoting our users, as copies of the magazines are being sent to editors at major publishing companies and top university departments.  The magazine is only our first step in bringing you to print.  In the coming months we will be fleshing out Quillpill with paperback publishing, promotion, and distribution tools.

Purchase or check out a preview of the Quillpill Quarterly on Magcloud.  We will be hand picking our favorite works from Quillpill as well as accepting submissions. If you’re interested in submitting articles or mobile or micro fiction for publication in our December issue, contact editor Elissa Rose (elissa [at] quillpill.com) by November 1st, 2008.

Estamos buscando un editor de Lengua Española. Si somos capaces de encontrar uno que será también la aceptación de las presentaciones del idioma español. Más noticias sobre esto más tarde! (Lo siento la traducción es mala.)
我们正在寻求一份中文编辑器。如果我们能够找到一个我们也可能会开始接受中国语文的意见书。更多新闻在此稍后!(我很抱歉的翻译是坏)

Issues resolved September 8, 2008

Filed under: News — Elissa @ 5:09 pm

Thanks again for your patience while we worked to resolve the slowdown issues today, things are back to normal again.

More new features: Markup September 4, 2008

Filed under: News — Elissa @ 5:53 pm

page break

We’ve noticed that users are putting “——” to denote changes of scene and chapter breaks, as well as using “@username” and pasting links in comments. In response to this, more than three dashes in a row (- - -) will create a break in your narrative (see image). @username will link to their profile, and when you start a link with http:// it will detect it for you and make it clickable.