Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

tidypub.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 99 posts

Re: My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

#51

Post by mambodog »

extension wrote: post #43

I love this! Tons of places to dump text on the web but I've never seen one that gives you a clean page. Suggestions: - Set a cookie and let the poster edit/delete the page after it's published. They will make typos, mess up the formatting, post while drunk, etc. - Markdown formatting. You need at least bold and italics. You could even have a small toolbar. I don't think the editor needs to be super minimal, just the…

I'm not sure if I would agree with Markdown, depending on your audience. I'm of the opinion that trying to teach the concept of markup to ordinary people is always going to alienate some non-technical users.

I'd just suggest adding buttons for bold, italic & link. That way you can still keep it simple. I'm all for having a ruthless approach to unnecessary features.

Re: My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

#52

Post by GrayRoark »

Veera wrote: post #34
cuchoperl wrote: post #3

It is useful to share bits of a larger text. A "source" text box to input the URL of the source would be great. Thanks!

//A "source" text box to input the URL of the source// If the source already has a URL, then why is it needed to create a another (short) URL for that source again! a URL shortener (bit.ly, goo.gl) could be used in that scenario. :)

You could just send part of the text or you could just want a text with a cleaner look.

Re: My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

#54

Post by Xuzz »

Tarski wrote: post #46
greyman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Can't you use browser's print button?

When I print preview in firefox, the margins seem to big. All the text is squished into a narrow column.

I think it just needs a @media(print) stylesheet then? (Or whatever the actual name is.)

Re: My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

#55

Post by jrmg »

I love it.

Don't listen to those asking for markdown, WYSIWYG editing and the like - keep it simple. /Maybe/ do some detection to identify links and linkify them, but that's it. The instant usability and beautiful /enforced/ styling are its strong points, adding more customisability just dilutes this, IMO.

Re: My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

#56

Post by heyitsnick »

Charuru wrote: post #20
masterj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://blettr.com/ seems closer, with support for photos, videos, and privacy controls as well.

This has got to be one of the most terrible domain names I've ever seen.

I'd like to see you do blettr.

Re: My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

#58

Post by modulow »

mambodog wrote: post #51
extension wrote: post #43

I love this! Tons of places to dump text on the web but I've never seen one that gives you a clean page. Suggestions: - Set a cookie and let the poster edit/delete the page after it's published. They will make typos, mess up the formatting, post while drunk, etc. - Markdown formatting. You need at least bold and italics. You could even have a small toolbar. I don't think the editor needs to be super minimal, just the…

I'm not sure if I would agree with Markdown, depending on your audience. I'm of the opinion that trying to teach the concept of markup to ordinary people is always going to alienate some non-technical users. I'd just suggest adding buttons for bold, italic & link. That way you can still keep it simple. I'm all for having a ruthless approach to unnecessary features.

On the other hand, when faced with a blank text box, some more technical users will type in Markdown out of habit. Adding basic Markdown support while also having a couple buttons for bold/italics/link is an easy way to support both audiences.

Re: My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful?

#59

Post by envain »

i built exactly this last year, over a weekend ... it's at http://reduce.li

Though i dont maintain it anymore, there's basic visitor tracking by adding a + to the generated url, just like bit.ly.

Very soon, online pharmacy bots started spamming me!

In retrospect, looking at all the positive feedback here, I feel that where I went wrong was adding bloat like picture uploading/url shortening etc...

Post reply on HN