Helium Upgrade Update!
At long last, Helium has taken steps to improve some of their article writing and submission capability. As a writer in Helium, there are always ways I am looking out on how better tools can be used to improve my articles. The following points are referenced to Helium‘s improvements in the month of Oct 2008.
- Spell Check your article
- Embed links in your article
- Preview your article
- Check your word count
Very often, spelling mistakes causes severe rating penalty when reviewed. It does not help when Helium did not have such a function before. And it was a hassle typing in WORD then cutting and pasting into Helium before posting. A technique I used to get around this was to use Firefox which has an inbuilt spell-checker. But apparently, I don’t have to do so anymore with Helium‘s new spell check capability.
Sometimes, it gets very cluttered when I have to input resource links into the article for easy reading reference for users. I find it ugly to put in brackets with my link quotes at the end of the article too. Readers have to take the effort to cut and paste the links too.
Do note that Helium has strict rules in placing certain links in the article too. No linkbacks to your website that contains your personal information or to products that you are selling. I am not too sure why this is so but those are the rules.
Just like having no spell-check capability, having no preview options makes it difficult for writers to spot their own mistakes. And it is a very huge hassle to always leapfrog your article, especially if the mistakes are too small for the regular reader or rater to spot always. And to always send corrections via emails to the Helium administrators takes some time and burdens them with too much seemingly unnecessary work.
Helium has a 400 minimum word count for each article to be written. Some of us often just aim for the 400 word mark. depending on the title topic. Some of us love to go long on the topic we enjoy writing about. There are pros and cons of writing a long or short article. The former makes it difficult for readers to rate and the latter makes it less substantial.
The word count feature allows us to track our pace of writing and deliver quality articles.
These new features are handy to help users have a better writing experience. Hopefully, we can see more of such improvements in the future as well.
