Writer’s Residence grew out of my own career as a freelance writer and so I feel a special connection with all the other freelance writers out there who are trying to succeed in this very competitive business and make a living through writing. Freelance-Zone.com has a similar mission, and this week they’ve been so kind as to feature an interview with me on their blog.

Click here to read the interview, and while you’re there, have a poke around the rest of their website – they have loads of useful articles and business advice for freelance writers.

Writer’s Residence [Freelance-Zone.com]

We’ve put our directors’ hats on and created a screencast for Writer’s Residence. This screencast shows you how to get started with an online writing portfolio. Just click on the image above to play.

By popular demand, we’ve added the ability to customize page titles in Writer’s Residence.

This allows you to rename the tabs shown on your website.

To edit page titles, log into Writer’s Residence and click on “Settings” it in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Then click on “Page titles” in the gray menu bar.

Here, you can rename the Page titles. For example, you can rename “Résumé / CV” to read “Résumé” or “CV”:

Click “Save” to save your changes and check out your portfolio to see how it looks.

We hope this new feature will allow you to better customize your portfolio. Any questions? Contact support – we’re happy to help!

I’ve just added this new theme. It’s great, clean, simple. Select it from the Themes tab.

By popular demand, we’ve added a categories feature to Writer’s Residence. You can now add custom categories for your writing samples in the management site. These categories will then be displayed in the Writing Samples section of your online portfolio (see image above).

To add categories, sign in to Writer’s Residence and click on the Writing Samples tab. There you will see a link for Categories.

Click on the Categories link and you’ll be taken to a screen where you can add, edit and delete categories.

Once you’ve added categories, they will appear when you add and edit your writing samples. You can find them below the main sample text:

We hope this new feature will help you better organize your writing samples in your portfolio. Any questions? Contact support.

we moved the service over to our new server this morning. This should mean better service for you all. If you have any concerns about the move or notice anything that isn’t working quite right please let us know.

We’ve also introduced a categories feature for your writing samples.

In the writing samples tab you can now create categories. When you edit or create a sample you can add it to one or more categories. Any categories that contain samples will be displayed on your portfolio so that customers can filter your samples by category.

Of course you don’t have to use categories at all, it is just there if you want it.

Thanks,

Monica & Tim

we’ve added a feedback forum to discuss new features or anything you’d like to see us fix or change.

We can’t always promise that we’ll make the changes you’re looking for but we’re very keen to hear how you’re using the system and how we can make it better.

Our over-arching goal with Writer’s Residence is to make it very easy for writers to create a portfolio site that editors want to see.  We’re not going to be able to be all things to all people but I’m confident that we can be more things to our customers who value this goal.

You can active the feedback forum by clicking the red feedback tab on the left hand side of management screen pages once you’re logged in.

Thanks very much,

-Tim

We’ve upgraded our server to give it more RAM.

What will that mean for you?

It will mean we can handle more traffic as we grow and keep your websites running quickly.

Another quick note, we’ve added a new default theme.

Of course there are lots of other themes to pick from and we’ll be adding more over time.

Thanks,

-Tim

You can now reorder entries within your résumé/CV which makes it much better for adding new jobs, qualifications etc. Click on the Reorder link next to the section you’d like to change.

We’ve doubled the individual picture and attachment upload limit to 10mb from 5mb for larger scans of tear sheets and the like.

There are a bunch more fit and finish improvements like:

• Title based links for writings samples. Rather than /samples/8 in the link you now have /samples/this-is-the-title-of-the-article. This will help with search engine optimization on your site.
• Recent blog entries are listed in the dashboard to keep users up-to-date with the goings on at Writer’s Residence.
• Your information is now pre-populated into the résumé/CV and contact information pages so less typing is required.
• Clicking the sign in link on the home page will take you straight to your dashboard if you’re using the “Remember Me” sign in feature.

We really hope you find the improvements useful and, as ever, please let us know if there’s anything we can do for you.

Thank you,

- Monica and Tim

Users of Writer’s Residence now have a new theme to choose from. We’re pretty excited about this one – it’s our first theme that uses an illustration for the header rather than a photograph. We like the cool, bright colors and hope you do to!

To activate the new theme, sign in to your account and click on the Themes tab.