Draft: Write Better Report. Plus many other handy tools added.
There are many neat Draft announcements today.
- Context aware comments
- Image hosting
- Twitter publishing
- Character count
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Improved collaboration
And the coolest thing. A Write Better Report. Easily see reasons why your published writing is or isn’t getting traffic.
Write Better Report #
As I promised, Draft isn’t just an online editor. My goal is to make us better writers by investigating the tasks we have as writers and making those tasks simpler and easier.
One mistake I keep seeing people make, when they publish their writing, is that they don’t pay enough attention to attributes that might affect how much traction that writing will get.
They’ll publish 2000 word posts, when their audience would prefer 500. Or they publish on Friday night, when no one might be paying attention and Monday morning might be a better idea.
I wanted to make this type of analysis a lot easier to understand, and help people, including myself, learn what makes our writing get more attention than other writing.
So I’ve launched a feature that’s a little experimental, but I’ve had so much fun using it, I wanted to let you use it already.
If you have any publishers setup in Draft’s settings, you’ll get a Reports button on your home page. (Setup a Twitter account, for example, to get this button.)
If you click that button you can get a report like this.
What the report tells you is how many Tweets on average your published writing is getting, broken up by various data points: when you published, what day, post length, and reading level. And you can see what attribute is outperforming others.
Draft is using the Flesch reading level. The higher the number the lower the reading level. From Wikipedia, “90.0–100.0 is easily understood by an average 11-year-old student. 0.0–30.0 is best understood by university graduates.”
This way you can see if the audience that likes to follow your writing might prefer your days when your writing is more or less sophisticated.
If you use Draft’s publishing features to publish to Wordpress and Tumblr, your data will automatically be available in this report.
But if you publish somewhere else or want to add previously published stuff, I’ve got you covered. You can manually record publications you made.
Just go to edit or view a Draft document (or create a new one) and click the Manually Publish menu item.
Record what, where, and when you published this document.
After you add some data points, you might see some trends in your writing. Maybe you shouldn’t publish on the weekends? Maybe publish in the mornings? Maybe you should make your writing a little easier to understand? Maybe it’s too short? Or too long?
There’s a lot of neat possibilities to explore with this report.
Context aware comments #
Click the comment bubble in the lower right corner.
You can also add comments with the new action menu at the top right.
Comments are context aware. If you quote text from your document you’ll see it underlined in your comment. Hover over that quote, and you’ll see where that text is in your document.
Image Hosting #
You can now easily add images to your documents. Just use the menu again at the top right, or Shift+Ctrl+I. Pick an image from every cloud service or your local computer.
Draft will host your image for you and properly format the image to embed it nicely within your text.
Twitter Publishing #
Use Draft to write and collaborate on your Tweets!
Go to Places to Publish in your Settings to add as many Twitter accounts as you like.
With the new character count feature below, you can make sure to keep the Tweets under 140 characters (yes, it is aware of url shortening on Twitter’s side in its count).
Character Count #
Click on the word count at the bottom right of the page to flip it into a character count.
What’s really neat about the count is that the setting will carry over to collaborators. So if you are working on a 500 character email in character mode, your collaborator will also get put into character mode.
Keyboard Shortcuts #
Added keyboard shortcuts for common formatting: bold, italics, and links. As well as images and comments. Take a peak again at the action menu for what they all are.
Improved collaboration #
Before this week if you had a collaborator, they could only see one version of your document. After they made edits, their version wasn’t updated with your latest, making back and forth collaboration difficult.
That’s all been fixed. If you make further edits to your document after your collaborator is done, let them know to take another look at your document, and they’ll automatically be updated to your latest version. If they had any changes that you didn’t accept, they will be moved to a backup draft.
And that’s it. :) It’s been one month since I publicly launched Draft, and the feedback and use has exceeded everything I expected.
Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy these new features.
To stay up to date on Draft, my Twitter account is a good place:
https://twitter.com/natekontny
Or the official Draft Twitter account: