Just b/c of a submit on HN 1 year ago, 2000+ people use this tool every month. | Hacker News Reader

Just b/c of a submit on HN 1 year ago, 2000+ people use this tool every month.

mytextarea.com

24 pointsJRambo19 comments

1 year ago, I made a simple online text editor and only shared it on HN.

Now, over 2000 folks use myTextarea every month :)

Last months analytics: 2,078 visitors 34.3% returning visitors 65.7% new visitors 61.9% search traffic 31.2% direct traffic 6.8% referral traffic

Any idea what they use it for? What's the advantage over all the other pastebin websites in the wild?

Probably because it is so clean and free of buggery.

I don't think that's the term you meant: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/buggery

Well, it IS true.

Thanks for the laugh. Learning something new every day :)

This is pretty cool, congratulations!

First of all, I have a question: how do you store the users' text? Do you store it on your server (a db) or is is local storage/cookies or something like that?

And some feedback: I would make the little save icon slightly bigger (probably have the size in %).

Thanks for your reply. The the users' text is saved with HTML5's local storage.

Do you have any monetization plans?

That was never the intent. A sponsor would be nice. Any tips?

It would be useful if you had some idea of who your public is. Then you could place some (hopefully unobtrusive) affiliate links for some product/service of their interest.

I need to be able to use a monospaced font.

Might make that possible, soon.

And an even better feature would be monospaced font + code coloring. I bet there is some open-source lib that could do that.

Maybe I'm too stupid but I don't really get an use case for that 'tool'.

I know one: When I have some text from a website or a document with markup, I always paste it to Notepad++ and copy it again before I put it in a document. This way Word or Powerpoint or something isn't messing with existing formatting or anything(I know there are many options to paste without markup and so on but to me, this is just easiest :-) )

It keeping track of number of words / characters is not bad either ^_^.

I'll remember this if I'm ever on a machine without the option to install Notepad++ or something :)

Personally, I just paste it either to the URL bar or with ctrl+shift+v (Chrome, Chromium) into a text field (thinking browser, writing an email)

ctrl+shift+v doesn't work with Google Hangouts, thought.

I use a neat little utility called Puretext for this.

http://stevemiller.net/puretext/

You've never popped open a text editor and started writing things down? I have a dozen notes scattered all over my hard drive because I do that all the time to capture ideas. For some people, it's quicker and easier to open a tab than to open microsoft word. More stable, too.

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