A 4 a Way
Published: May 17, 2026
Brevity is the soul
The Writing
I want to make this: a writer’s site, for a club of 4 writers to start with, but expandible to a loan club cycle of 6 to 12 (ie bi-monthly or monthly). Each of us pays a sum, based on a 600 word (A4 page) article size, per word, with the price per word shared by us four. For example, at 600 words, & R1,00 per word, we each are paying R0,25c per word. We can adjust that “going rate” per word as we wish.
Markdown.
A side-purpose is to introduce Markdown, rather than Microsoft .docx format, as a standard. This is not just because I hate M$. It is because .docx is a hectically stupid format. .docx is actually a zipped XML file. If you unzip it, you will find all your text - somewhere in there - but you won’t want to.
Like everything Microsoft, it is a way of making the simplest thing complicated, and ugly, like a pharmacist window full of toilet rolls. They want us roll our eyes up, abdicate our good sense and (more importantly for them) cents to them. Sorry, I literally will not buy it!
When you open a Markdown file, all your beautiful writing is plain to see, with an underscore here, an asterisk there, a hash character there. No XML to see here!
Stokvel Authors
On a one article per month each basis, that’s 4 articles per month, one by each of us four (intitially). The articles are accepted by us all, against the criteria of - did we:
That is: we are not just paying each other for nothing. We have to come up with something minimally robust and interesting.
The Finances
If we contribute 25c per word on a targetted 600 words, that is R600 per article as a starting figure. Based on some criteria (who has the biggest family?) the full amount we each contribute is totalled and passed to members sequentially, round and round as we go along:
- Member 1, week 1. R600 (4 x R150)
- Member 2, week 2, R600 ditto
- Member 3, ditto 3
- Member 4, ditto 4
We will need to agree on MO for payments.
Techincal details (Jasper)
Login with a supplied QR Code, to …
A site written in plain HTML, CSS & Javascript, domain name “A4AW.africa” or similar, will take the form of a mini-editor. Member-writers will write in it, using Markdown format (simpler than Word, tiny file sizes - important to keep hosting costs free/low).
Articles to be saved in free Supabase, rendered by Hugo when published. The whole aim is tiny, fast, free. Authors will see, on phone or PC, a small text-area style editor, with Italics, Bold etc as a Markdown cheat sheet. There will be a toggle to view the HTML result.
We will be paying one another. Nobody will actually make any money. It is a way of sharing and saving. We will get our money back, that’s all. It goes without saying that exploiters/defaulters get once chance only. On the first cheat, we are out. There is no second chance.
There is no point to writing shallow junk. We all will agree to publish a piece. The stokvel is the stokvel: we pay whether we write or not, that is the nature of a stokvel. We pay, we get.
And that is my < 600 words on A 4 A Way.