Poetica | Hacker News Reader

Poetica

poetica.com

153 pointsBrajeshwar40 comments

This is a really neat idea. Poetica could fare very well as a service that facilitates web copy proofreading, I think.[0]

The only thing I've noticed from the start—and I've been thinking about before—is long onboarding process. Perhaps it's better to walk the user only through the essentials at the beginning, and then offer deeper demos of particular feature sets on demand. IMO the 7 items at a time rule should work here. (It's very good as it is, just pointing out space for the improvement.)

(I also think it could be worth a lot in enterprise—monetization could involve, say, offering some specific third-party service integrations, paid support for more than three users working on one document, etc. Though I'm not at all in a position to give advice on this.)

[0] This is a problem that I'm facing currently, working with a small business. They need to be able to publish news stories, announces, etc. on the website. However, currently I'm not allowing them to do that, as I know their copy always requires careful proofreading, and frequently rewriting. I'm not sure how to deal with this currently—I've been thinking of rolling out a custom little service that would put all edits into a review queue, but I'll have to approve my edits with the staff, too, and complexity of such service escalates.

I work on the Web team at Belly, and we just transitioned our blog and most of our website content over to be powered by prismic.io. It's been a wonderful experience so far - prismic is a great tool, and the team over there has been super helpful.

Prismic uses an idea of "releases". Essentially a writer can create content and then submit it for a release. An editor then has to approve the content (ot leave comments/edits) before it actually gets published. This has been a really great workflow for us so far.

I should be putting a blog post on tech.bellycard.com explaining everything in detail by the end of the week.

For the record, here's the blog post: https://tech.bellycard.com/blog/static-all-the-things/

Prismic looks great, but a bit too complex for my use case. In addition, the intuitiveness of Poetica UI looked appealing to me as I'm working with not very tech-knowledgeable users.

I'm definitely looking forward to reading your post, though.

So started using it for collaborative editing -- it's awesome overall, I think this has a lot of potential!

Two minor gripes: 1) No replies to comments ... comments with collaboration need to be conversational 2) No ctrl-z / ctrl-y (expected in any editor, and an annoying realization)

Thanks for building this!

I'm not sure why there are so many negative comments here. This seems like a very well-executed collaborative document editing system, especially with "the button" that allows you to edit anywhere. Sure you can use Git or Word or whatever, but I feel this is super lightweight and easy. Great for small team/startup blog posts where you want to get everyone's feedback.

Here is an article from techcrunch about poetica

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/17/twitters-founding-engineer-...

It reminds me of brackets notation, a plain-text compatible way to correct: https://github.com/raphaelbastide/brackets-notation

Too intrusive.

I'm signing up with mailinator and still it tries to use my google account.

this is awesome, I still believe that annotation is one of the areas in web development most in need of improvement. clean design, intuitive ui, great start.

> import and share with your team for feedback

Ah, got it. At first I thought this was a service which actually provides the (people) editors who read over your material, which would be great for me, since I don't actually have a 'team' to share stuff with, and there are times when I'd really want a 2nd or 3rd opinion before publishing.

I tried out the product anyway, and it's nicely oriented around editing. I'm used to collaborative editing using MS Word ('track changes') or Google Docs, neither of which come with the fancier hand-written-looking edit design.

I have real problems using ctrl+right arrow/left arrow to skip words, and Home/End keys seem pretty broken, up and down keys do random things at random times.

For a collaborative editor, the editing is pretty dire.

The details on the set of markup features is rather sketchy. The collaboration part looks nice, but can it do math well?

I'm not trying to be a spoiler here, but something like github can be used for collaborative editing as well. So maybe this is just for the technically challenged?

Yes. For example, my girlfriend teaches English literature to teenagers, so this tool could be very useful when they have to write and she has to correct the essays.

I was really looking forward to an online collaborative document editing tool for one of my future projects. Poetica looks really promising at first glance! I did try out draftin before this. But Poetica seems to be much more user-friendly and interactive!

Keep up the good work! Feedback:

- delete (document) doesn't seem to work

- change history would be good, potentially so I can revert a change if I change my mind later

- the app is clean, intuitive and responsive. I'd love to know a bit more about which JS framework you used, etc.

Anyone want to quickly take a edit over parts that I'm writing? https://poetica.com/drafts/ae8308ac0c06d059a4fd9f06

I saw a demo last year in a tech meetup in Berlin and was one of the beta users of Poeti.ca. I really liked the product and it's nice to see that they've shipped it finally.

Best of luck.

Another headline completely bereft of any information.

... and a misleading name to make it complete.

Another comment completely bereft of any.. actually, fair point.

If you already use Word, why not use the built-in proof reading feature? I'm not sure the "real time" feature is that useful.

A lot of people are not using Word anymore. Poetica is useful for people like me. Also, if you watched the video, there is Chrome extension integration to existing publishing platforms like Wordpress.

I'd also expect that they would introduce professional proof-reading services that you can order with a single click (similar to Draft)

It's long since I used Word, probably 10 years or more. I don't even use LibreOffice very often, usually just Google Docs, which is not very good for getting feedback on your writing.

It says:

>Write wherever you like

But then:

>When you need help with your words, use the Poetica Button for Chrome

Does this imply I'd need to use Chrome to use this?

You can paste/import in many different ways, independent of browser.

The 'Poetica Button' is only available for Chrome at the moment, but I would very very surprised if they don't implement it for other browsers (based on demand) soon.

I believe so, but it can import from Word/ODF/RTF and other document formats (see footer).

I hate it when sites require a social platform to login

also after I typed my email address (gmail) it showed oauth connect using Google. why not ask directly ?

The guy who founded this company is the guy who invented oauth ;-)

As I understand it the idea is that your email address is your identity so you only need to remember that (which most people are capable of) rather than having to a) remember your username/password (which can at least be stored in LastPass, etc for you) or b) having to remember which one of the social login buttons to click on.

If you signed up with a yahoo email address for example, it would (I think) let you login with a yahoo account instead.

that's all you have to say?

It's true and important why wouldn't it be enough?

If a social login button is the biggest of your worries, god help your poor soul.

It's a sad day in the community when you detract from the release of this site by chosing to point out and upvote the negative feedback. The least you can do is follow the general rule of thumb to provide some positive feedback followed by any qualms you may have.

My first inclination was to comment this is a cool idea and was glad to see that it had integrations with GMail and Wordpress. For Wordpress specifically, there's draft mode, but that doesn't afford you feedback directly in context of an article.

Well, if the social login prevents him from signing up, he obviously can't even try the product. So how could he have any comments about the product itself, whether positive or negative?

Here's a less blunt version of @sixQuarks's complaint, which I think is completely valid:

Poetica has unnecessary friction in the signup process, and the very existence of this friction implies that the founders might not have thought long & hard about what kind of users they want to attract. IMO, people who write a lot and use Markdown to do so are more likely than the general public to be concerned about the privacy implications of social login and therefore wish to avoid it. Poetica also seems like the kind of product that could benefit from a quick online demo right on the landing page, but the founders chose to require signup first. Both of these factors are surely detrimental to their conversion rate.

I'd like to recommend to the author using Persona[1] as a (potentially extra) sign in solution. There are clear benefits to third party auth, but "social" authentication has its problems. Persona solves that.

[1]: https://login.persona.org/

You took the words right out of my mouth. Thank you

Negative feedback is more useful than positive. Saying "nice site" tells the creator nothing. Pointing out a flaw tells the creator something possibly in need of improvement.

No, spell check is not enough. You need total surveillance everywhere, even when writing in your browser. That still seemed to be one of the holes: Who surveils what you write but don't post? No more, the solution is “Poetica”. Another beautiful name lost to sinister practice and totalitarianism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com