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

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

#71

Post by mambodog »

27182818284 wrote: post #69
mambodog wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to be on that side, but with Reddit's success and their use of Markdown I've decided that it is OK for even the non-technical audience. (Though there still should be the little "formatting help" button like they have nearby)

Reddit provides enough value for its users for them to invest the effort to learn some Markdown. This is due to Reddit's content and community being the main sources of value for the user, not it's text-formatting features. I couldn't say the same for this app. If they can't pick it up in two seconds, I think most won't bother.

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

#72

Post by akkartik »

joshfinnie wrote: post #63
akkartik wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least linkify urls. It's trivial; use http://daringfireball.net/2009/11/liberal_regex_for_matching... Interestingly I chose 5 letters as well for my url shortener. e.g. http://twitter.com/akkartik/status/7915316453580803

Link to updated article: http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matchin... Save you a click.

Ah, didn't know about that, thanks.

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

#74

Post by vvpan »

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…

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. Agree on the first point.

Markdown formatting I actually did implement, but commented out for the first "release". It will be a somewhat restricted markdown, along the line of reddit.

I am not sure what you mean about the branding. If you could elaborate, I would be greatful.

The feedback button should go, I agree. Thanks again! I decided to follow the "let users tell you what they want" strategy, so it is great to get feedback.

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

#75

Post by danielh »

francoisdevlin wrote: post #61
danielh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ ./tidypub -t "How about this?" This is a python script I just wrote. Unfortunately, the white space gets lost. Try https://gist.github.com/721676

Does anyone else appreciate the irony of a Python app losing whitespace?

I definitely do, but just for record, it's the browser not rendering the white space. It is there if you look in the page source.

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

#77

Post by vvpan »

zbanks wrote: post #7

Looks really awesome. I dig the clean interface/presentation. The app is done well enough where nothing is overtly bad or glaring. That being said, I do have a few light thoughts & suggestions. - I agree a source textbox for citations would be nice, but it's not too pressing considering you can include it at the end. In a similar vein, an author box would be nice too. - Any reason why the URLs are 5 letters long? Not…

Thanks for the feedback. Much-much appreciated.

I was thinking of adding an "author" field, and now that you and some other people mention it, I think I will follow through with it.

Honestly, you seem to have put much more thought into URL shortening than I did. I am using just letters for the character set. Shortening the URL sounds like a good idea. And removing the O's and l's is also something that I think I would do. Great suggestions, thanks!

Markdown is actually in the code, but commented out for the "release" =) So it should be coming soon. Thanks again.

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

#78

Post by vvpan »

danielh wrote: post #60
shorbaji wrote: post #47

Nice! How about a script for a *NIX command line? $ tidypub -t 'Any Title'

$ ./tidypub -t "How about this?" This is a python script I just wrote. Unfortunately, the white space gets lost. Try https://gist.github.com/721676

You would need to double the whitespaces if you wanted new paragraphs.

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

#79

Post by vvpan »

LiveTheDream wrote: post #21
vvpan wrote: post #2

My point was to be able to publish readable "blog posts" on sites like HN and reddit without an actual blog. I'd love to hear feedback on whether it might be useful, and if not, what might make it so.

You can also do this by emailing anything (e.g. text, pictures, YouTube link, gist URL, etc) from any email address to post@posterous.com. Of course, future emails to the same address are tied to the same blog, so if anonymity is your goal (including no association to a previous anonymous post), that option wouldn't work. Nice clean look & feel though. It looks almost exactly the same as what my Readability bookmarkl…

Weeeelll... I was somewhat inspired by readability, so a resemblance is not coincidental.

I have seen posterous, but I was going for something even simpler. The email to post idea is pretty cool though. Thanks a lot for the feedback.

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

#80

Post by vvpan »

abi wrote: post #16

I like it. One minor suggestion: Put your tags in the head because right now, I'm seeing ugly flashes of unstyled content ( http://www.bluerobot.com/web/css/fouc.asp/ ).

Thanks for the suggestion. The website is actually in need of much cleanup, even though it is small. I was trying to roll it out asap, in fears that otherwise it would never see the light of day.
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