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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?

#21

Post by LiveTheDream »

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 bookmarklet turn out.

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

#22

Post by A1kmm »

hboon wrote: post #10

See Infogami. It's not available anymore, but maybe some use ideas there. http://web.archive.org/web/20061107190837/http://infogami.co...

It also seems very similar to the (crowded) pastebin space, which according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastebin have been around since at least 2002.

To be honest, I think it would be hard to get a profitable business out of your idea (the cost to acquire customers would probably exceed the lifetime present value). However, I suspect that profit isn't necessarily your intention here.

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

#23

Post by thenotself »

Why not expand on the concept that people could use a place to store an annotation of any sort. That way, if I want to leave people text, photos, a presentation, an embedded video, etc, I can do that without the need to create a blog or let that person see a full history of other things I've written. Another idea would be to generate a QR code for the page.

That being said, I can't think of very many times I've needed something like this. If I had more to say on a topic than I wanted to leave in a comment, I'd blog about it. If I knew the person, I'd email them.

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

#24

Post by Tylergillies »

thenotself wrote: post #23

Why not expand on the concept that people could use a place to store an annotation of any sort. That way, if I want to leave people text, photos, a presentation, an embedded video, etc, I can do that without the need to create a blog or let that person see a full history of other things I've written. Another idea would be to generate a QR code for the page. That being said, I can't think of very many times I've neede…

+1 for QR code gen

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

#25

Post by chancecarroll »

icco wrote: post #12
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…

I agree with the points here. Markdown seems like a great idea. Maybe have a toggle for what the post is in (Markdown / Plain text)? Also I'd like to see a post date on the page. Finally is it open source?

I agree with having both the post date (optional?) and the markdown option, I like the idea of being able to toggle markdown, you could still default to plain-text and so preserve perfect backwards compatibility. Also I can't help but wonder about expiration dates and the ability to edit or delete, maybe have an optional password?

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

#27

Post by chancecarroll »

Tylergillies wrote: post #24
thenotself wrote: post #23

Why not expand on the concept that people could use a place to store an annotation of any sort. That way, if I want to leave people text, photos, a presentation, an embedded video, etc, I can do that without the need to create a blog or let that person see a full history of other things I've written. Another idea would be to generate a QR code for the page. That being said, I can't think of very many times I've neede…

+1 for QR code gen

+2 I think that would make a nice, easy, useful way to tie a digital comment to the physical world, QR graffiti tied to a manifesto anyone?

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

#29

Post by crizCraig »

To get rid of the cutoff gray background after pressing the feedback tab in Chrome, you can add "html {height: 100%}" to your CSS. This adds a vertical scrollbar though, but again just in Chrome. I had to deal with this on my Get Satisfaction widget too.

Nice service by the way. I love the low barrier to posting. Like pastie.org, but for publishing.

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

#30

Post by entrepreneurial »

Not sure if this was said, but add a little text editor like in gmail so one could add links, etc. The main point of what your trying to do is so people can add this text to twitter, facebook, etc. Like a mini published text based website. Great Job!
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