The automated delivery of daily writing prompts from my PenMuse website is stable enough now that I want to consider expanding on it.

Cross-posting to Twitter

I’d like to start cross-posting now from PenMuse’s Micro.blog account to a PenMuse Twitter account.

Cross-posting from Micro.blog to Twitter is the most straightforward and easy way of doing it. It’s nothing more than another way for people to get a daily writing prompt.

The drawback to this is that I’m not exactly the greatest Twitter fan although I do think it’s the lesser evil of the social media platforms.

While I am moving away from Twitter, it doesn’t seem right to set up an account there when I won’t be really using.

The benefit though is that I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing it for others. Others who don’t use RSS feeds, Micro.blog or visit websites that often. Maybe they just want to use Twitter.

A random afternoon prompt

Each morning the newest writing prompt is published through the site’s main RSS and JSON feeds. I’d like to add another feed that publishes a random feed for the afternoon.

There is one problem with this though. Some of the writing prompts in the collection are seasonal, so I would need to exclude these off until at some point they could be considered based on the time of year.

Staying within the constraints

PenMuse is just a playground app. It’s place where I can experiment with a few coding ideas and techniques and see them working in a product environment. I also don’t spend more than a couple of hours a week on such a app.

To do this the playground app has a few constraints on it.

  1. It needs to be free.
  2. It needs to be something people will use.
  3. It needs to only take up a couple of hours of my time a week.

These constraints take out of my hands decisions that would stop me using PenMuse what it is for. A place to experiment with some Rails code.

These two new features aren’t going to give me any problems coding wise, but it’s going to put PenMuse in more places.

Also these features are still small enough that I can do them within the confines of a couple of hours a week.