Word count: 270 words
Reading time: Just over 1 minute
This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help writers. Today I discover a variant of WrittenKitten!
I know just enough about things technical to make myself truly dangerous. I’m not afraid of technology (which is a good thing) but I don’t always fully understand how it works (which is where the dangerous part can come in.)
Fortunately, my latest discovery relates to kittens — so how scary can that be? I’ve written before about the tremendous writing tool called Written Kitten. If you haven’t tried it out yet, take a moment to go do that now. The site rewards you by giving you a fresh picture of a kitten every time you write 100 words. Better yet, there’s a matching one called Written Puppy, which offers the same reward with photos of dogs.
I can’t recall what prompted me to start thinking about this service recently, but I began wondering why there could be a written kitten and a written puppy but no written parakeet, so I took a closer look at the URL. Here it is:
http://writtenkitten.net/?search=kitten
Do you see what I saw? Yes! It works. Just replace the word kitten with parakeet and you will have customized your own little reward factory. It took me only a few seconds to realize that ANY word can be inserted into this URL and the tool will still work. So you can reward yourself with a photo of a beach, a fireplace or even a kitchen countertop.
Don’t go too crazy now!
