Last year’s offerings were pretty awful, and I should probably warn you that one of them is potentially upsetting. And yes, that was the winner.

And while 2019 was a good start, 2020 was a particularly awful year, for obvious reasons, and with a larger team we had even more horrific delights to choose from. Again, be warned, a couple of these might turn more sensitive stomachs.

You perhaps won’t be surprised to find that the last of those, the Reservoir Dogs-esque severed ear, was the winner. Well done to everyone, especially new arrival Natasha for her winning horrific entry.

Roll on next year!

Joining the team

I like to believe that the best is yet to come. For many of us (myself included), that idea was fully tested by the uncertainties of this past year. 

Thankfully, the best part of 2020 arrived for me in the form of a position with Readable! I am the newest member of the Customer Success Team. I am grateful for the opportunity to join such a kind, forward-thinking company. Laura and Dave have made me feel right at home.

Getting your content noticed

As a former journalist turned communications specialist, clear communication isn’t just something that’s important to me. It’s my livelihood and passion. I know how vital it is to hook readers and keep their attention. Now more than ever, we are competing against countless distractions. We need to take advantage of every opportunity to get content noticed. 

ReadablePro is your secret weapon.

My background

I have been a professional communicator for over 15 years. I’ve worked in print, broadcasting and corporate settings. A tool like ReadablePro is invaluable. In the age of COVID-19, I’ve seen even the best communicators struggle to create content that informs rather than confuses. 

With ReadablePro, you won’t be on that list. 

Driving your success

Only ReadablePro offers such unique tools and features backed by a help team of professional communicators. For me, there is no better place to make my home and I am grateful to be here. 

So, should you need some direction or if you have any questions, just let me know. This Canadian gal always has a smile on her face and a strong cup of coffee at her side. It will be my pleasure to help you! 

“What’s a handbook?”, you might ask. A handbook is a document, or collection of documents, which cover company policies, expectations and processes. That will typically include things like the company holiday policy, disciplinary procedures, dress code, office rules, and so on.

They are usually quite dry and quite long. Worse, though, as an employee you only usually get to see them after you start working for a company. And that isn’t great – the job ad you responded to might include lots of lovely-sounding policies and ideas, but the handbook might include a whole lot of rules that make those worth less than you thought.

I had exactly that experience in a previous role myself. The original job advert made it sound like employee education and career development were important to the company. I’m going to paraphrase to spare their blushes, but “We give employees the opportunity to go on courses and spend work time learning and deploying new skills.” is a fair representation of their sales pitch.

A few months in, I had an opportunity to go on a local two-day Python course. Although most of my work was PHP, Python was something we were being asked about as a company and we had nobody with the relevant skills to take on those jobs. I asked about it … and was presented with a screenshot from the company handbook, which made it very clear that going on a course was not something that could be done on company time and that under no circumstances would the company help with the costs.

It felt like a bait-and-switch and left a sour taste. I didn’t ask about courses again and, in the four years I spent there, I can count on one hand the number of courses my various colleagues attended – always on their own time and funded out of their own pocket.

If I’d had the company handbook in advance, I’d have been that much better informed about the job I was applying for. That’s good for the prospective employee and for the company doing the hiring. It manages expectations and sets the tone for the working relationship before the company and employee have even spoken.

In early 2020, I was pointed towards the wonderful GitLab handbook. It’s monstrous, complex, deep, inspiring, thoughtful, and comprehensive. If you were considering working for GitLab, you could read that thing and know exactly what working there would entail. Contributing to the handbook is ingrained in the company.

Seeing GitLab laid bare like that was like a bucket of ice water, a serious jolt to the system. Of course our handbook should be public. Of course candidates should be able to dive into the details of what working with us is like before applying. Of course we should contribute to it as a standard working practice. Of course it should be always a draft, never completed, because the company is always going to be growing and evolving.

GitLab is a little larger than Added Bytes and 10,000 pages of content is quite a way ahead of where we are today. But our handbook comes from a similar place. While our handbook is smaller, the result is similar – if you were considering working for Added Bytes, that collection of documents should help you understand what that’s like, from our flexible holidays to our social media policy.

When I was going through the process of turning Added Bytes from a small one-man web development agency into a small three-person product company, there were a few issues I had to address. Things like … what hours we would work, what days we would work, and how much holiday everybody could take.

When you’re working alone and it’s your own company, decisions about holidays are simple. Can I afford to take a break? Can I find someone to cover my obligations while I’m away? How long can I take away from earning? How badly do I need to step away from work? You answer those questions, and you make a decision about where you’re going to go and how long for. Simple.

But for employees, making the decision in most companies is a little different and rather more simple. How much “holiday allowance” have I earned, how much do I have left, and how much will I need for later in the year?

My problem with the traditional model is that it forces people to ration their time off. We believe in working to live, not the other way around, and that means putting family and personal needs first, and rationing your days out of the office doesn’t fit that model at all.

The idea that someone would be unable to go to a family event because they had “run out” of days is crazy to me. Similarly, it makes no sense to the business to have someone who is burning out not take time away from the business to recharge because they need to “save” the time for later.

Looking back at when I was an employee myself, what I wanted from a holiday system was just to be treated like an adult. I was capable of managing my own time and understanding what the business needs from me. Now, as an employer, I wouldn’t hire anyone that I thought wasn’t capable of the same. So that’s the way we approach it as a company.

I’m also a firm believer in measuring performance rather than attendance. Someone arriving early and leaving late is no good if all they are doing is staring vacantly at their screen because they’re in a funk. Productivity is a tricky thing to measure, but it has been pretty well established by now that well-rested people do better work.

This is well-trodden ground now, at least when it comes to people thinking about the problem. I found these articles by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Steve Konves and Mathias Meyer really helpful when it came to getting my thoughts in order.

What’s Wrong with “Unlimited Holiday”?

Unlimited holiday is a lovely concept, and in my wide-eyed and idealistic view it always seemed like an obvious solution to the issues with traditional holiday systems. But on reflection it has several significant problems.

Perhaps the biggest of these issues is that of expectation management. As an employee with the standard (in the UK) 28 days of holiday, you know how many days you have available to take in a given year. Those are your days and you are owed them as part of your total remuneration for working for the company.

With unlimited holiday, there is no set number of days. Instead, people need to form their own idea of what is acceptable and what is expected. Some will default to the standard 28 days. Others will take their cues from colleagues. The lack of clarity immediately leads to confusion, potentially to stress, and to imbalance – where one person might end up taking full advantage another may not feel confident doing so.

Most people will end up looking at their manager or the company owners to see what they are doing and that sets expectations too. If the boss is only taking 10 days a year, then that becomes “standard”. Yes, it’s different for the boss, but without anything else to look to for guidance, that becomes a problem.

Second, unlimited holiday isn’t really unlimited. In no company with unlimited holiday is it OK to take 364 days off in a year. It’s a misnomer, and it starts the conversation about holidays off on a bad footing.

Conversely, it fails to ensure people take enough holiday. The whole point is to make sure your team are well rested, not stressed about having to choose between cousin Jimmy’s wedding and seeing their kid sprint to victory on their sports day and putting their wellbeing first. In some companies, an “unlimited holiday” policy translates in reality to people taking less time off than they were under a traditional allowance system.

Similarly, people feel guilt when taking holidays already. When the holidays are from a set allocation that’s less of an issue as everyone is going to take the same time off. But when it’s imbalanced, some people will worry about the burden their holidays place on others, which can discourage them from taking time away.

Depending on the specifics of the system, people may not be paid for unused holiday – that being the amount of holiday they would have accrued under a traditional system, and that they would usually be paid for on leaving the job. That has led to a widespread backlash against unlimited holiday by people who see it as a cynical ploy by companies to simply pay less.

In the EU, we have minimum requirements for holiday allowances. Saying “unlimited holiday” in your contract may not be enough to satisfy the requirements of that directive.

So, it seems pretty clear that “unlimited holiday” needs a rebrand and far more clarity. It needs to be fairer, legally defensible, and needs to make sure it doesn’t backfire and lead to people taking less time off.

We have Flexible Holiday.

In the end, we devised a system which, we hope, combines the best of all worlds. At least, that’s what we’re hoping – we’ll write in future about how this works out for us. Our policy:

• Treats people like adults, empowers them to take the time off they need and trusts them to manage their time and work.
• Manages expectations. There’s a minimum expectation, and there’s guidance for what we think is going to be pretty typical.
• Reduces uncertainty. Booking holiday over 20 days isn’t stressful, because you know where you stand and what is reasonable.
• Gives the company the discretion to ensure the system isn’t abused.
• Makes it simple for us to show we are adhering to the obligations we have under UK and EU law.

So without further ado, here it is:

The Added Bytes Holiday Policy

To make it a little easier to keep track of holiday taken, we make a distinction between company closures and holidays. The company is closed for a week over Christmas and on bank holidays.

How Much Holiday?
In a standard year, people have:

• 11-ish days of company closures (Christmas and bank holidays)
• 20 days of remaining statutory holiday allowance
• Discretionary holiday with no set upper limit

How Much Is Too Little?
There is a company-wide minimum holiday expectation of 20 days per year for full-time employees (not including company closures, pro-rated for part-timers). Unused statutory holiday is not rolled over, so it’s definitely better to use those days!

How Much Is Too Much?
The company expects that people will opt to take around 25-35 days of holiday per year, not including company closures. Some years it will be more (and that’s OK), some will be less.

Does the Company Pay For Unused Holiday?
Unused discretionary holiday is not paid out when someone leaves. However, statutory holiday is accrued as it would be in any other company and unused statutory holiday is paid out when someone leaves.

For example, if someone leaves the company six months into a holiday year (which runs January to December) having taken ten days of holiday (not including company closures), they will have four accrued days left and get paid for those untaken days.

To Be Continued …

Company culture isn’t something you can set and forget. It needs to evolve as the company grows, and it depends in part on the people in the company too. So we expect to revisit and refine this over time as we grow and as we face new challenges.

But for now, this feels like it gets the balance right. It’s the policy we mean by “unlimited holiday”, but with clarity and managed expectations.

Now, I’m miles off my minimum, so I’m going to book a week off to make the most of another great British summer.

I know what it’s like to struggle to cut out the fluff and simply be direct. When studying English in school, you’re taught not to think of yourself as a writer or critic. It seems more acceptable to write about your opinions hypothetically, never bold enough to say, “I think”.

By the time you get to higher education, you’re unlearning this process. Old habits die hard, and it’s harder to unlearn something than learn something! The fact is that this meandering and apologetic style is difficult to read. A difficult piece of writing isn’t always well-written.

You have seven seconds to grab a reader’s attention. In those seven seconds, there’s no time to be agonizing over what you write. Simplicity and clarity of message are key.

I’m here to help you achieve that with the tools we’re offering to you, the writer. You have great ideas – Readable is here to help you communicate them strongly to your reader.

But we can’t provide that service without you and those great ideas. I’m here to listen to your needs as a user and champion your success. By communicating with you, I’ll be helping to make this tool even better.

When I worked at a bookshop, I wrote some blog posts for our campus branch. One of these was an Author of the Month article. The subject of my piece was my favorite short story writer, Raymond Carver. His minimalist writing style has inspired me to write more simply and to a greater audience.

I obsessed over writing this article. For me, the devil is in the detail. I was so worried about perfecting my writing that I forgot the importance of my audience. Readable would have been a great tool to tell me I was using too many long sentences, my writing style infected by the nineteenth-century tomes I was reading for homework.

The sky is the limit with ReadablePro – but, we need your feedback. What aspects of readability do you struggle with the most? I’ll tell you what I always struggle with – too many adverbs. Stephen King would be going through my writing with a red pen.

Please leave a comment below telling me what your biggest challenge is. What features would you love to see to help you with it?

I’m an English MA graduate who loves unputdownable books, 35mm photography and writing. One of the most gripping novels I’ve ever read is The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I found my role here through the best in digital marketing recruitment, Clockwork Talent.

It’s a pleasure to meet you!

Whether you’re a copywriter, marketer or online store, ReadablePro gives you the power to make every word count.

ReadablePro is a uniquely powerful content writing and readability tool. One that pulls all of the major readability algorithms together into one, including:

• Flesch-Kincaid
• Gunning Fog
• SMOG index
• and our own unique readability rating

Quickly and easily solve common problems. Such as:

• unclear messaging
• too many words, or syllables
• jargon infested text
• passive voice
• adverb use
• and much more

Dave Child, Readable’s founder commented “We’re constantly looking at how our subscribers use readable.io and couldn’t be more excited to release ReadablePro.

“The Readable community have been great at giving us ideas on what they would like to see next. Along with great ideas on what would make their writing life easier. ReadablePro delivers these, and more, through an all in one app that has readability at its core.

“Subscribers, old and new, will enjoy a far more advanced and fluid user experience. They can score as they type, have access to a wide array of readability tools and analyse entire websites – all within seconds.

“ReadablePro is the most complete readability tool on the market. One that will be continually enhanced for user experience. Our readability algorithms will only continue to get smarter.”

ReadablePro features

• Cutting edge accuracy. Trustworthy algorithms verified by over 1,000 automated tests and hand-calculated scores.
• Score anything. We score anything – web pages, Word documents, PDFs, Markdowns and eBooks.
• URL + website scoring. Analyse an entire website in just a few minutes.
• Industry-leading algorithms. The world’s most respected and trusted readability algorithms.
• Readability API. Build readability right into your website CMS or other software with our powerful API.
• Content analysis. Monitor the sentiment and tone of your content to ensure a consistent voice.
• Keyword analysis. Monitor the keyword density of your content so it looks on-topic to search engines.
• Integrations. Make readability scoring available everywhere with our Dropbox and Slack applications.
• Readability reports. Generate reports (white-labelled for your clients) and have them emailed to you regularly.

]]> https://addedbytes.com/blog/joining-the-readability-movement/ Thu, 04 Jan 2018 16:42:47 +0000 https://addedbytes.com/?p=593 January, the start of a new year and the start of a new adventure for me as Chief Marketing Officer for Readable.

To say I’m incredibly excited would be an understatement. I’ve been looking forward to day one since first meeting the Readable team.

Clarity of message has been a passion of mine through my digital career. A mantra of “keep it simple” can often be heard coming from my lips.

Creating content that is simple, clear and strong is what Readable is all about.

All the websites I’ve worked on or managed had the same challenge – seven seconds to grab users attention. If you can’t get across your message within that window, forget about it. Time to start again.

I would have loved to have Readable as a tool when working on a website with 50,000 pages that were being cut to 5,000.

The 50,000 pages included content as short as one sentence through to thousands of words that had no place being on a website.

The quality was also poor. Made up of long, drawn-out sentences that mostly served the authors ego rather than the reader.

Running the content through Readable would have saved us months of work by giving us a clear report of what our content writers and authors needed to change. We could have taken that report and written a focused content strategy.

Over the coming weeks and months, I look forward to building on the great work the Readable guys have been doing.

We’re bringing to you new and improved features and essential content that will aid your writing skills by inspiring, educating and entertaining.

I’m a keen photographer, music lover and DJ/producer. My ideal way to spend time is with my family, friends and a good bottle of white wine.

Have a fantastic 2018.

Somewhere, deep in the back of my brain, is a little memorandum. It says, simply, “Write Book“.

I can go for long periods without giving that thought any attention. But then, when I least expect it, some experience or observation will bring it crashing out of my long-term memory, barging into my frontal lobe and demanding that it become my focus immediately.

This is, I think, what it is to be a wannabe author. I have nothing but admiration for the people who make writing their primary goal, who struggle day after day to get their book finished and in front of agent after agent and publisher after publisher. But that life isn’t for me. I’m a founder-coder, and that’s what occupies my waking hours.  So it is, unfortunately, rare that I get to write.

Sometime in mid-2015, while my beautiful wife was getting used to the idea of adding two more urchins to our growing herd, I sat down for what would be perhaps my third long stint of writing. I kept it up for about two weeks, at the end of which I had about the same word count as when I started but with a completely different story.

It was at that point that I became frustrated with the tools I was using. I had tried a few things – Evernote, Google Docs, Scrivener, PlainText, markdown files in Dropbox – but nothing sat well. They were all missing something. A programmer can procrastinate like nobody else, and I am no exception. I downed my pen, and started to spec out my ideal tool. I came up with this list of requirements:

• Must work online – I was writing mainly on a Chromebook, and wanted synchronisation with my other machines
• Must have inline notes – notes which are associated with a specific piece of text. If the text moves, the note has to move with it
• Must have centralised character management – I get hung up on character names, and that should fix that problem for me
• Must back up to Dropbox or similar – I want a copy of my work in my control at all times
• Must have a “distration-free” mode
• Must have word counting and streak tracking 
• Must have timelining and outlining features for organising my thoughts

The last few months have been a little tumultuous. Perhaps the biggest thing to happen was that my lovely wife Lindsay and I are now expecting our first baby, due early next year. This is exciting.

It’s also helped bring some clarity to my work. I’ve been with the same web development agency in Brighton for a few years, and although the people there are lovely, there’s no opportunity for advancement. I’ve been stagnating for a little while, though it wasn’t easy to see at the time.

So, I made the decision to go it alone. I handed in my notice in August, and today marks my first day working for my very own company.

It’s not a decision I’ve taken lightly, and it’s not without risks. But if it goes well, it will offer a level of financial security and professional opportunity that I suspect no agency work can match. My successes will be mine to own, and so will my failures. I can’t wait.

I’d also like to take a moment to thank Lindsay for her support. It would have been very easy for her to resist or reject this change, especially with a baby on the way, but she supported the decision from the start and has been incredibly helpful.

What’s The Plan?

For the last four years I’ve been wrangling code deep in the bowels of the likes of Magento, MODX, Drupal and OpenCart, and I don’t expect that part of my work to change much. However, I will be taking this opportunity to get involved with the rest of the stack – hosting, marketing, integrations, extensions and more. I’m also looking forward to spending more time with Python, node.js, redis, elasticsearch, SQLite and other technologies that, so far, I’ve really just dipped a toe into.

Even more exciting, this move offers the potential for me to spend more time working on my own projects. Cheatography and Readability-Score.com have been running for a while but lacking the attention they deserve. Newer projects, on which I’ll write more shortly, have also suffered from a lack of available time.

This decision should allow me to turn more of the ideas floating around my head into actual working websites, with a view to then becoming profitable ventures. I suspect one of my biggest challenges is going to be avoiding taking on too much, and balancing client work and personal projects.

Here We Go!

To begin with, though, my focus is on making sure I have an income that can comfortably provide for myself and my growing family. So I’ll be taking on freelance projects and focussing on the things I know best and that I’ve spent the last few years with.

I’m enthusiastic, capable and, as of about an hour ago, available for your project!

[Edit: In 2016, I stopped taking on freelance clients and Added Bytes became a product company. Looking back on this decision now … it feels like it was a huge risk and one of the best decisions I ever made.]

Way, way back in 2004, I wrote a piece of code to analyze the readability of text using the various algorithms that had been developed for the task. I made a small but useful tool to analyse readability and threw it up on the site, not giving it a great deal of thought, and moved on to the next thing.

Thanks to the magic of Google, and your collective enthusiasm for readability scoring, that little tool turned out to be more useful than I expected. The traffic has grown and grown, and a steady stream of requests and ideas showed there was a real need for something that was even more powerful.

So, over the last few months I’ve been quietly working on something new, taking the original tool as a starting point and building on it. The result is Readability-Score.com.

What Is It?

First and foremost, the same tool that you were using free when it was part of this site is still free now. You can copy and paste, and score, your text all day long.

The additions are the new Premium tools. Premium is a subscription service which allows you to access more powerful versions of the same readability scoring software. You can use it to score URLs, score files, even bulk score text from a spreadsheet if you like. And the best bit is the price – this is a Pay What You Want service. The suggested price is $10/year, but you can specify how much you would like to pay when you sign up.

Subscriptions are handled through Gumroad. Renewals are automatic, and you can cancel any time.

What Are The Premium Tools?

We think the URL Scoring is going to be our most popular addition. Instead of copying and pasting text from another site, you can just drop in the URL, and it will go off, fetch the page, process the text and give you a score for the readability of the page. You can specify a single portion of the page (if you’re familiar with element IDs in HTML) and it will just score that part of the page – good for helping prevent navigation and footer elements from skewing your text scores.

There’s now a quick and convenient bookmarklet, for sending the URL of the page you’re browsing to Readability-Score.com.

Next, there is now a handy bulk processing feature, for people with lots of text or URLs to score. It takes a CSV, processes the text or URLs within it, and emails the results back to you.

Finally, there is a file processor, which you can use to analyse your Word documents and PDFs (more formats to be supported soon).

Anything Else?

One thing I’ve spent a lot of time on is the syllable counting in the new site. Syllable counting is a tricky prospect. Consider the following sentence, for example:

“I moped about, hopeful that my moped would be back on the highway soon”.

Sound innocuous? There’s a pair of homographs in there (two words, spelled the same, that sound different) – and these have different syllable counts depending on which of the two words you mean. Words can be almost identical, with the same order and number of consonants and vowels (and it’s that order you generally use to calculate syllable numbers) – “sired” has one syllable, while “sided” has two. Throw in prefixes, suffixes, plurals and compound words and you’ve got yourself a challenge.

Syllable counting is a minefield, with a small set of rules and a massive set of exceptions to handle.

That said, I’ve spent some time building and working through a batch of test data and have come up with a set of rules to take on the task. It helped tremendously having the work of Greg Fast (creator of Perl module Lingua::EN::Syllables) handy for reference, and setting up a decent set of unit tests allowed me to experiment with different rules until I found a combination that works. I expect to find more and more exceptions as time goes on, and the syllable counter rules can be expanded to account for them.

That’s All Folks

Readability-Score.com has been a long time coming, and I’m really excited to be able to show it off. I’d love to hear what you think – please let me know by email or in the comments below!