Show HN: Something I built for Nanowrimo | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Something I built for Nanowrimo

7 pointssiromoney12 comments

I built constellational.com two days before November began, hoping it would help me write. It's just a blank canvas. The url updates itself as you type. You can send a different version to different people or bookmark the latest url for yourself.

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I like it a lot. Lots of potential for versioning.

I feel any real load could kill the server though (or your AWS budget!), so maybe trigger the save when I stop typing for half a second. Seems to lag a little when I type quickly.

I'd like to be able to save certain URLs as different versions to share. Could come in handy for collaboration or editing too.

Yeah it's really fragile, please be nice. https://github.com/arpith/constellational

The plan is to eventually use websockets ("magic") instead of foolishly POSTing, but is it possible that watching 'input' is the real mistake here? Perhaps I should just save every two seconds (or half second, as you suggest).

What would you suggest about saving urls? I couldn't think of anything easier than just bookmarking.

With each new URL you could store the previous ID and use that to build out a chain. It might be fairly expensive to do that dynamically, but there's no reason you couldn't serialize all of the previous IDs in a single column.

IMHO POSTing is fine, but you definitely want to wait a couple seconds each time.

Most urls are not worth saving, but you're right, it's time to make a feed.

I dig. Very neat. I would throttle the URL thing so that it only changes the URL if the user has stopped typing for, say, 2 seconds or something. That way it doesn't generate a new URL for every letter you type. Other than that, very cool.

Sounds like a good idea. Should probably fix scrolling first though.

It will probably break under the slightest load though; clickable: http://Constellational.com

I like the idea behind this - it would be sort of automatic version control for writing if you added the ability to view your url history.

What's your tech stack?

The url changes a bit too frequently for that. Static page served from s3 (through cloudfront) that POSTs to nodejs app that writes to s3. Can clearly be abused.