September 10, 2020: New Cowriters Website

Cowriters (formerly 200 Words a Day) is entering a new phase on September 10, 2020.

I spent the last two years asking myself how to make writing a sustainable lifestyle for everyone. After much consideration, I decided 7 months ago I needed to reinvent 200 Words A Day, to better help our members develop or maintain a daily writing habit, and make the most of their content.

When I created 200WaD on November 22, 2018, I didn’t expect much of it. I was a 24 years old web developer trying to figure out how I could make an impact with my apps, so I simply decided to follow the river, living from day to day, to see where it lead.

After a year and a half of work and about $3,000 in revenues, I hit a roadblock. The writing industry, including writing apps, is a competitive space: if you stop evolving, you die. But after coding for so many months, more and more technical problems kept appearing. The technological choices I made back when I started came to limit me. Like an old car, it became more costly to patch things up rather than to buy a new one. 

This is when I decided it was time to work on a new state-of-the-art software architecture, one that would allow us to get more readers, become better writers, and grow our content. It was time to buy ourselves a new Tesla, if I may say so.

The new website solves problems some people encountered: drafts not being saved, interface not working on mobile, limited search results, difficulties to go through old posts, etc.

The application is 80% faster to load thanks to the new technology stack (NodeJS + Preact), allows articles to better perform at Search Engine Optimization through static file generation, and is available as a Progressive Web Application—meaning you can write without an Internet connection and all changes will be automatically synchronized when you return online (and download the app on your desktop using Google Chrome).

The user interface has also been completely revamped to improve its feel and make any task more pleasant to get done. You will for example be able to jump from one draft to another directly from within the text editor, comment specific parts of an article, or easily manage posts inside a collection.

More important changes are to be announced, but I’ll let you discover them a week before the official launch, on a dedicated website.

My wish, as always, is to better serve your desires and interests as writers through this platform. Once I’m done with the colossal task I started 7 months ago, I will of course want to hear from you about what you want to see and what I should work on next. With technical problems out of the way, I’ll have the strength to move mountains. I have plenty of ideas but I’ll need everyone’s input, and the support you’ve provided me since the beginning. 

In the meantime, take care,
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