I’ve been noticing that more and more authors are showing word meters on their websites. Word meters are these are those little guys (this one is from Writertopia):
I’m starting to think that they’re rather a good idea. I’m not sure the information is that valuable for visitors to the website, although it’s interesting, but it certainly is crucial for the author. What better way of keeping track of your own writing progress than sharing it with the world. There’s the element of public statement there that means you want to be sure your word meter keeps going up each week. You need to show people you’re committed to your writing and are getting the work done regularly. I’ll be installing some on this website very soon.
But which one? As well as the one above, Writertopia has some featuring cartoons which are quite fun. Here’s an example:
And what’s more this latter one features a mood meter. You can select any of 7 options that range from ‘very frustrated’ at one extreme, to ‘joyful’ at the other, and your cartoon will reflect your feelings. Is that neat, or what!
Check out Writertopia’s meters here.
At http://honorless.net/progressbar.htm you’ll find a progress bar that uses straight HTML code. It’s compact, loads quickly and does a good job.
This next counter, the NaNoWriMo meter here, can be used for any writing of course, not just NanoWriMo. You can choose what colour you want the bar to be and again it’s HTML based, so very straightforward to use. You can change the 50,000 total word default setting too.
WordPress has a number of word meter plugins that you can use if you have a WordPress site. Progpress is probably the best one to use.
So, a few to choose from there. I think they’re a very handy little gadget and hope you agree.
Finally, here are a couple of sites which use them so you can see them in action: