Thingler - real-time collaborative todos with Node.js & CouchDB | Hacker News Reader

Thingler - real-time collaborative todos with Node.js & CouchDB

thingler.com

79 pointscloudhead35 comments

So we can see this in action with multiple people: http://thingler.com/2bc64a49abc2d42d9bee2beb032c2a59

Woohoo, exploding with XSS bugs.

Hmm, based on the fact that every recent Node.js demo I've seen recently without exception has had pervasive XSS attacks, perhaps the Node.js community should build themselves some safer HTML generation and handling libraries stat, and crown them as "the way to do HTML".

Not that there's anything even remotely unique about Node.js on that front.

It handled Unicode well - ☃

Ahh ... that link brings me to a strange place.Avoid.

Fixed @:)

By the way, full source code available at: http://github.com/cloudhead/thingler

Seeing people chatting using this thingler app, I realize I would love to live-chat with people about the top Hacker News stories.

Basically, each top story would have its own chat room. In the landing page of the app, I can see each room and the number of participants.

Later, I would love to be able to upvote pieces of chat so that people can easily find relevant discussions in the chat.

Can't speak for HN but chat, like video comments, seems to prove difficult for many communities. Such features can be added but whether people use them or they fall into non-stop trollery is anyone's guess.

#startups on irc.freenode.net is reasonably active though and would usually appreciate a discussion on topics coming up on HN :-)

Wow, look like the StackOverflow thought of a similar application! http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/chat-now-in-public-bet...

Sounds like a good idea. However the upvote would have to have a time limit, like upvoted in the last 24 hours. Otherwise powerful arguments will own the top 10 forever :) Essentially, it would look like ASK HN, live.

Isn't CouchDB fully capable of doing this by itself? Why add the Node.js layer? (Genuine question)

Yes, but not well. I'm using a commit-style approach to synchronize clients, so the document is never sent as a whole. I might be wrong, but I don't think couch can do that on its own. Even so, it gives me an extra layer of control, which I like. I considered making a CouchApp, but I didn't want to feel restricted.

I'm not that familiar with CouchDB-only apps but it seems to me that with node you get access to any number of other libs/technologies you may need. What if you want to aggregate a twitter feed? Connect to MongoDB for logging? Memcache? Do some image generation/processing? Websockets? Etc.

If you didn't add Node.js no one would have upvoted it. Node.js is so hot right now.

Looks good. Although, playing around with it, I found that sometimes it randomly multiplied some of my items. Weird

I got the same weird multiplication problem.

Yea I can't figure that one out, it seems to be only on firefox.

It happened to me on Chrome.

Safari (iPad) too

I love how people are using it for chat.

very nice. I wrote a very similar app last year but sold the domain (todomu.com) last week.

May I suggest base32 encoding the ID to produce a short url such as thingler.com/a3d instead of that massive md5 hash?

Good idea, it's something I've been meaning to improve.

Nice. I was actually working on a similar project for a minimal realtime chat. Couch's new _changes api is pretty nifty for stuff like this. (http://books.couchdb.org/relax/reference/change-notification...)

Good work. I love the minimalism.

Whoa the refresh is really fast on it. This feels almost like a chat system.

I get blank screen in FF and nothing but a logo and some links in IE.

missing some xss checking i see... seemed to have went down after a bunch of people started playing on it

Yea, I really gotta look into that!

Would love to be able to:

1. set my own url

2. set a password

3. create categories

Great job.

There's an easter egg which allows you to do #1 @:) - I'll let you figure it out.

#2 is something I'm looking into!

#3, would tags have the same effect, or do you mean something else?

Thanks

I was thinking of dividing categories. I could divide by projects or by team members name. it would allow me to see what everybody is up to in one look.

Ah I'll think about that. I'm planning on having cookie-based history, with a drop-down at the top, so you can switch between recent lists easily. But I have yet to figure out how/if I'm going to have usernames and the like.

Using the dividing categories, if people put their names as categories, you could see each other's todolist without needing a username mechanism.

I am not a big fan of having to switch from one list to another. Tadalist does that, and it makes the application useless.

Maybe you can simply allow to see several lists at the same time in the same page. People would name their lists by projects or by people and they could see it all in one page.

found the easter egg :)

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