Some of the people I know are participating in NaNoWriMo and I thought I would lend my "cheerleading" talents to their cause by creating some utilities to keep track of the novel writing progress. In fact, these tools open a portal for a cloud of invisible guilt monkeys to make sure things get finished (to quote one participant).
All of these utilities are designed to be put on webpages. Apple Mac users who run OS X might be interested in looking at my Nanowrimo dashboard widgets page.
The simplest of the utilities is the "Live Participant" icon, borrowing the image that you'll find on the main Nanowrimo website and replacing their text with a more informative "live" label based on the wordcount that you provide as part of the URL.
First of the utilities I wrote, however, was the NaNoWriMo graph - designed to be placed on a webpage and updated with a word count on a day by day basis. The graph packs a lot of information into a very small space.
USE ONE COPY ONLY. Do not post multiple copies of the graph, or one for each day. Each copy uses our bandwidth. Multiple copies use much more bandwidth.
The expectation is that the NaNoWriMo participant will add to the <img ...> tag each day adding to the "history" values list (separated by "+" signs). A day where nothing was written needs to be logged as a zero, as shown.
So, what's the graph showing? 50,000 words over 30 days is (roughly) 1667 words a day. On the first day this participant wrote 1000 words, a deficit of 667 words - shown by the green and red bars. Days 2-30 now need to take up the slack, so 667 words are spread over 29 days, so day 2 now expects 1690 words but they wrote a mere 1000 again (deficit: 690 words) - shown once again with green and red bars. To take up the slack, the participant made extra effort and exceeded the estimates by doing 2 days of 2000 words (grey and green showing expected and actual word counts for these days). The expected amounts are adjusted on a day to day basis. Grey or red indicates the expected amount for a given day, and green is used for the actual word count. Obviously, the aim is to minimize the amount of red. Days without a word count are dark grey.
Over-achiever | Average | Under-achiever |
Anyone is free to use the graph (copy the HTML from the text box at the top of the page) but be aware that if it sucks too much of my bandwidth, I'll take it offline. Also, please credit me (Paul Hawke) as author of the graph.
Building on the graph idea, I created a page that would display the information in tabular form, detailing the exact expectation and the actual word counts per day, while displaying the graph for reference.
| NaNoWriMo Progress |
Anyone is free to use the details page link (copy the HTML from the text box shown above) but be aware that if it sucks too much of my bandwidth, I'll take it offline. Also, please credit me (Paul Hawke) as author.