Jot A Bit – Write a Little

JotABit.com

JotABit.com is a community writing website.

The title is a simple play on words. Jot means to scribble or write down. It can also mean a tiny mark. A bit is as simple as the word little. Scribble down a little, write a little, make a little mark. I found it to be a little catchy so I grabbed the domain name.

Now, you want to learn more About the website and what makes it tick. . .

The Jot A Bit website was inspired by a writing friend that wanted to publish some of her works. While I have no idea how to publish a book yet I plan to figure it out. As part of the writing community the long term goal will be to help writers get published. The short term goal, actually a permanent goal, is to have fun and inspire writers to be creative.

There are simple monthly writing contests that the registered users judge. The writing contest rules are simple and may evolve with the community as it grows. The basic mission is to have fun, keep it simple and inspire writers to write and share.

Jot A Bit is build on WordPress. Right now, it is a simple site with a growing writing community. JotABit uses the TweetMeBlue Theme.

A list of installed WordPress Plugins:

• Akismet – A must have plug-in to help control comment spam.
• All in One Adsense and YPN – add some small Google ads on each page. I customized the color to fit the website theme.
• All in One SEO Pack – This plug-in helps optimize much of WordPress to make it even more search engine friendly.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – I always track statistics for a website. If you don’t track your traffic, changes, keywords, etc. it is hard to determine where to make improvements.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Create, update, and publish sitemaps automatically.
• FeatureMe – Adds rotating featured articles to the top of the theme.
• PageNavi – Adds page navigation to the bottom of the page.
• Privacy Policy – It is always a good idea to add a privacy policy. Tell your visitors exactly what you do and do not do with their information.
• Redirection – I always install this plug-in. That way if I choose to change a URL I can fix it and make sure I don’t miss any incoming traffic.
• Register Plus – Add some extra information to the registration process. For JotABit, I tell the users about our terms, gather a real name, and may add information as the community grows.
• Sociable – Add simple buttons to leverage many of the social networks. Make it easy for your users to tweet, digg, and share on Facebook.
• Twitter Tools – Automatically publish tweets on each new article post and add a twitter feed to your sidebar.
• WP-Polls – The poll feature is part of the core of this site. I use this plug-in to record the votes for each monthly writing contest. I configured this to only allow registered users to vote and allow only one vote per person.
• WP Super Cache -This cache tool creates a static version of the whole site and speeds up the load times.

Over time I plan to add some Amazon integration to help users find author related books. I may consider adding a forum but the articles and comments might be sufficient. We’ll see what the community wants as it grows.

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