Shelly did a great job with this site - for all of its simplicity, it was more than I hoped for. She’s made things seamless for me to use, and seamless for visitors to read. When I write, all I have to do is write - there’s no need for me to mess with anything else to get the job done. The design is exactly what I was looking for, and the speed with which she put it together was beyond expectations. I highly recommend her!

Andrew needed a website.

Actually, Andrew needs to write. He’d done blogging before, but it was on a more personal level. His secret, though, was his desire to write fictional stories - to get these tales out of his head. However, Andrew - by trade - is not a writer. It’s his own personal passion, and although being published is not his focus, he’s not putting the idea aside.

He knows his limitations, and wanted something clean and simple that would focus solely on his writing, and honing the craft.

He wanted a touch of personality to it, but nothing that would detract from the main object: the words, and stories he wants to create with them. He only needed a slight bit of functionality: to have reliable word counting. Other plugins he had tried were inaccurate, and since he wants to possibly become published (and actively participates in many set exercises for practice), an accurate word count was necessary, so a custom function was written for him that counted only the words he wanted to count, and ignored all else.
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Okay, so here we move on to Part 4 of my “taking too long to add to this” series

I had a client this week who is an author. He does some work on practice lists, and wanted a spot to gather his writing together. The thing that he wanted was something that would count the words within his posts - since many of his lists require practice pieces to be under a certain word limit (or they just want to know how many words there are).

I found a few plugins, but when I went to test them, the word count was always off. One of my test posts was 301 words long, yet the different plugins would vary anywhere from 320 to 350 words. There were different reasons for this, and to me, it wasn’t worth troubleshooting 200 or so lines of code in the plugin to figure out why.

So I wrote my own function instead: and it took all of 10 lines (if you count the commented sections, and the two lines it took to create the function).
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