Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

typelit.io

81–90 of 394 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#82

This is a cool site, though I did notice something that I haven't seen anywhere before: the URL paths are JSON objects. Is there a reason for this? For example, for "The Call of Cthulhu", the URL is this: https://www.typelit.io/chapters/%7B%22bookTitle%22:%20%22The... Why not just use this? https://www.typelit.io/chapters/5f468ca35e91c10be0883a57/The... Also, the JSON object is fault tolerant and will display whateve…

Hey I'm glad you asked! It's the way Nextjs handles urls with more than 1 param. If I prettify the URL then for some reason the page can't access them. Don't know if they've improved on it yet (or, who knows, maybe I'm just using it wrong) but it'll be fixed eventually.

The URL parameters are:

{"bookTitle": "The Call of Cthulhu", "displayTitle": "The Call of Cthulhu", "language": "English", "bookId": "5f468ca35e91c10be0883a57"}

Why do you need all the others besides "bookId"?

Changing "bookTitle" and "language" don't seem to do anything. Changing "displayTitle" does change the displayed title, but why can't you get that using the bookId?

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#83
post #76

Very cool, I'm also more interested in the "retype a novel to get better at writing" rather than "typing fast", but as I'm French, I'd love to type some french novels. Would you be able to add a simple DIY mode where I first copy-paste a text (for instance that I get from Gutemberg), and then it is either stored locally or uploaded to your server, so I can type it?

Hello! There are a few French novels on the site already -- just use the language select above where the books are displayed to show them. As far as as using your own material, I'm planning on adding a feature like that sometime in the future. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#85

Neat project! Would be an interesting way to read a book. Not sure if this is a built-in feature for typing practice. But one small obstacle I encountered was that if I missed a space or I put in an extra character, but kept typing, then everything that came after was in red (wrong). May be hard to implement, but maybe letting a single mistake show in these instances without marking everything that follows as a mista…

Hello! That's definitely not supposed to be happening. If you don't mind me asking, what browser are you using? In the meantime, Chrome should work ok

The same thing happened to me. I'm using Chrome on a mac.

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#86

This is a cool site, though I did notice something that I haven't seen anywhere before: the URL paths are JSON objects. Is there a reason for this? For example, for "The Call of Cthulhu", the URL is this: https://www.typelit.io/chapters/%7B%22bookTitle%22:%20%22The... Why not just use this? https://www.typelit.io/chapters/5f468ca35e91c10be0883a57/The... Also, the JSON object is fault tolerant and will display whateve…

This comment can’t be read, perhaps use code block formatting, or remove the http and domain info, so we can see what you mean? The link is getting truncated when it displays.

That's a fair point. I was expecting people to click or hover the links to see the examples, but for really showing how the paths are formed, this would make sense to do.

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#87
post #59

That's a cool idea. I once made a similar site but for a completely different purpose -- language learning. Unfortunately I never finished it but it's still in my TODO list. The workflow was: - you read the sentence - the sentence disappears - then you type from memory - every time you mistype something -- the next couple of words appears for a few seconds and you keep typing That way you not only learn to type that…

The schtick of the Pimsleur Method was to train by starting with a chunk at the end of a sentence, and prepending until one had recall of the entire sentence. That way, once you get over the hump of the newer material, still fresh in mind, it's all downhill revising the older.

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#89
Great idea. A suggestion: you can gamify the WPM by making it always visible and giving three indicators: a WPM of the previous page, a WPM of the previous paragraph, and a "realtime" WPM based on the average of the last 5 words or whatever. Phenomenal work!

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#90

This is a cool site, though I did notice something that I haven't seen anywhere before: the URL paths are JSON objects. Is there a reason for this? For example, for "The Call of Cthulhu", the URL is this: https://www.typelit.io/chapters/%7B%22bookTitle%22:%20%22The... Why not just use this? https://www.typelit.io/chapters/5f468ca35e91c10be0883a57/The... Also, the JSON object is fault tolerant and will display whateve…

Hey I'm glad you asked! It's the way Nextjs handles urls with more than 1 param. If I prettify the URL then for some reason the page can't access them. Don't know if they've improved on it yet (or, who knows, maybe I'm just using it wrong) but it'll be fixed eventually.

That's interesting. Thanks for pointing me towards Next.js. I wasn't aware of that framework, but I'm checking it out.
Post reply on HN