yes, as a package, there could be some stickiness here.
in which case, i'd suggest you offer markdown as well, since you want to attract as many people as possible.
-bowerbird
165 karma · joined March 21, 2013
hi. "bowerbird" is my poetry name, if you're wondering. as i am a poet, i consider it my job to tell the truth. and sometimes, it's unavoidable that the truth hurts... but i don't intend to hurt unnecessarily, or unfairly. so do please feel free to e-mail me, or even to call me -- at 310.980.9202 -- if you think i broke that pledge. if you find yourself in santa monica, i'll buy the beer.
in which case, i'd suggest you offer markdown as well, since you want to attract as many people as possible.
-bowerbird
personally, i'd predict zero uptake with textile; it's dead.
and there are so many other notes apps around that i think you will have trouble with uptake even if you add markdown.
if you're doing it for love, or experience, then go ahead; otherwise, you'd need some kind of new angle to break big.
-bowerbird
whether they use it? that's another thing.
-bowerbird
second, i can't help observing that efforts to use contenteditable seem to start with a rush of success -- as the early results are always very impressive -- but then seem to quickly bog down in the particulars.
bug-reports come in which are difficult to reproduce, typically originating from idiosyncrasies in an o.s., or a browser, or (in one thorny case) a _combination_.
and although people have much enthusiasm for solving these glitches at first, the slog is generally endless, and, eventually, it wears down even the most determined.
at least, that's what i have observed, enough so that -- once i started experiencing the bramblebushes too -- i pushed the contenteditable strategy off to the side.
which was easy, since i've been a long-time supporter for light-markup. no, not markdown, since that thing is too primitive, and forked, and fragmented nowadays, and will give you a big dose of misery down the line.
i built my own light-markup -- "zen markup language", extension .zml, based on the project gutenberg corpus.
i have also built a phalanx of e-book authoring-tools over the last 20 years, and it's all come together now.
the trick is making an editor that will be acceptable to both the light-markup adherents _and_ the wysiwyg folks, and i think i cracked that nut. i'd like your feedback on pre-release versions of some new stuff i'll have soon. e-mail me at bowerbird@aol.com if you'd like to play...
and again, best of luck to the guardian people on this!
-bowerbird
one-click output to many formats, including .epub, from light-markup (zen markup) ascii-text-files...
2-pane setup: supercharged textarea on one side, and nicely-formatted live display on the other...
other apps cover the entire workflow, start to end.
i'd love pre-release feedback. bowerbird@aol.com
-bowerbird
markdown is a fuzzy, fragmented, primitive light-markup.
but +1000 on the generalized suggestion for light-markup.
and instead of all the inane complexities of html-plus-css, use a model to give a good default display of the content, but let the user reformulate the display quickly and easily. (the "zoom" nonsense is the wrong way to go about things.)
to sum up: it should be easy to put something on the web, and easy for people to format viewing to their preference.
*
create collaborative-filtering to separate wheat from chaff.
it's more than slightly embarrassing that it's now 2014, and we _still_ haven't done this obviously needed task.
once we saw we could store-and-forward everything freely, it was immediately clear the haystack will grow infinitely, and thus there is a huge need to be able to isolate needles.
*
people have always saved and treasured family photographs... we need to facilitate that human need, and save our history.
*
build in an objective search engine and sharing modalities, so that hundreds of billions of dollars -- literally! -- aren't siphoned out of our pockets to google and facebook.
*
put advertisers in their place -- i.e., the yellow pages. keep their ugly noisy pollution out of our public spaces.
*
make those "public spaces" a collection of _private_ spaces, so i'll retain ownership of, and control over, _my_ content.
*
build in the necessary mechanisms for intelligent discourse, and reasoned public action, to deal with vital issues in the social, political, economic, cultural, and ecology arenas.
*
automate hum-drum work to the greatest degree possible.
elevate societal appreciation for those doing hum-drum work we are unable to automate. garbage-collectors are heroes, just like fire-fighters; the internet can frame-and-praise.
encourage those who are so-inclined to become _artists_: painters, poets, programmers, musicians, writers, whatever. our _creativity_ is the only thing that can save us humans from our extinction, which will soon stare us in the face.
*
strive to integrate the offline and online worlds, so we can eliminate hunger, poverty, and homelessness. _yes,_we_can._
the rich can stay rich, but nobody should be poverty-ridden.
(and if you say these issues are unrelated to the internet, you don't get it, and really should pay better attention.)
*
while i'm at it, stop letting the rich boys use the miracle of the internet as another one of their weapons to wage war.
*
comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
(if the shoe fits, wear it, because this does mean you.)
-bowerbird
no, actually, it was just right.
taking people to the print-set dialog when they have _clicked_a_link_ is not just confusing, it's unsettling.
especially when -- as is common here on hacker news -- someone has opened several different tabs and thus has no idea which caused this totally unexpected situation.
"unsettling" is quite deserving of the "awful" label.
(perhaps that word has an emotional connotation to you. but i'm using it the same way that i would describe, say, a "saturday night live" skit that was worse than usual.)
the "improvement" you have made is thus good... but...
...the current state is still unnecessarily confusing... clickers are shown a "jquery - new wave javascript" page. which is most definitely _not_ what they clicked to see.
you have a perfectly good home-page explaining the service, and how we can use it quite easily, with a button to click to summon up a canned example if we want that. excellent!
_that_ is where the h.n. link should go -- your home page.
welcome people at the front door, and _then_ give the tour.
don't just dump people into the middle of your canned demo, when some of them (certainly those who opened multiple tabs) will not even know exactly how they arrived there, or why.
it would have been a little bit better if your demo content was an explanatory page about gitprint itself. but even then, linking to the home-page is still a much smarter strategy...
maybe you'll think this is "strong" too.
it's not. i'm just telling you like it is.
i don't have any emotion invested. this is dispassionate.
i don't even care if you heed what i say or not.
it's no skin off my nose. i'm just trying to help you.
remember, i was the _only_ person who commented on this when you posted it last week. "good idea", i posted...
so instead of getting criticized this week, you _should_ have said "thank you", and then implemented my suggestion.
there's still time...
-bowerbird
and i'm the person who told you last week that this service is a good idea. it is.
so change the link.
-bowerbird
-bowerbird
-bowerbird
as i said above, in another reply just now, i'm aiming at a "sweet-spot" that _might_ be as nonexistent as you say, i.e., an "average" user who'll edit a few lines of .html.
ideally, s/he should have a good understanding of all the implications and ramifications of those edited lines, too.
all of which should take no more than 3 minutes, total, because that's all the average person will devote to it.
meaning it will boil down to calling a javascript file, plus jquery (or some other package), and _nothing_more._
if it's that simple, this kind of "supercharging" will be used by enough people that it could attain critical mass.
otherwise, not.
and i'm quite sure that, if you actually do the exercise, you'll find that none of the solutions mentioned can be installed in such a straightforward and trouble-free way.
surely not in 3 minutes.
nor with any comprehension of all possible ramifications.
it might be that they haven't been packaged up that way; or it might be that they are complex enough that it won't be _possible_ to "package them up" to be that simple; but -- either way -- they are not now the answer i'm seeking.
i hope this clears up my position. thanks for the dialog.
-bowerbird
so, just to be more specific, even though we are well past the unofficial expiration-date for interest on this thread, yes, i absolutely want something that the end-user can grok _immediately_, because that should really go without saying.
but just as much, i'm thinking of something that a person -- even an average person, with no special "tech" skills, but merely a willingness to actually edit .html source -- could quickly understand and adapt for their own purposes.
see more in the response i will write next for tophwells.
-bowerbird
-bowerbird
famous last words.
i haven't seen an html-based editor i couldn't sabotage, just fooling around with it. and you know what they say about how the world keeps on inventing better fools, eh?
it's true.
now, if everyone who edits your content is experienced with .html, and knows how to avoid the pitfalls, great!
but if you want the general public to touch your stuff, you're gonna find yourself doing some heavy clean-up...
at least if my experience is any guide.
you'll have stuff that might _look_ "right", as long as it stays in the exact environment where it was last edited, but as soon as you move it, it will blow up in your face. because the markup underlying it was not done correctly.
_that's_ why wysiwyg sucks; it "looks" right, but it's not.
and it's not a "short-sighted" view. it's _experience_. painful, hard-fought, bang-head-against-wall experience.
now, perhaps redactor is ahead of everyone else on this, and it knows how to handle these headaches in advance, and if that's the case, i'd love to hear it. meanwhile...
-bowerbird
then post the u.r.l., so i can copy your web-page and have the editor work in a web-page i make in 3 minutes.
then, if you want, we can start up a discussion about why it doesn't have some of the handy features i have come to expect from using _other_ flavors of markdown.
a client-side javascript solution is the correct one, but showdown/pagedown/whatever is not the right choice; instead use chjj's nice script, perhaps in strapdownjs.
but basically, you've missed the important issue here: it's not how to convert text coming out of the textarea; it's how to supercharge the textarea to make it more useful and powerful during the process of composing text within it.
-bowerbird
i mean... seriously. are you actually saying that?
-bowerbird
if you have _specifics_ on "the art of editing content", and the interface you want, i would like to hear them...
-bowerbird
so i would appreciate a thoughtful write-up of them. i know many of them, probably most. but i'm curious.
my target is writers, not programmers, but my intent is to create the best possible tool for those writers. not just a "suitable" tool -- the _best_one_possible_.
-bowerbird
it's "lighter" than all the other light-markup languages.
it's more _powerful_ than the others, including asciidoc.
it's also far more agile, and much easier to understand.
and i won't allow it to be fragmented, like markdown is.
i've coded converters in javascript and other languages.
the javascript minimizes well for inclusion in web-pages.
i have cross-plat apps, and a web-app converter with a.p.i.
output formats include .html, .epub, .mobi, .pdf, and more.
if there's anything i haven't thought of, do please tell me.
you can reach me at my e-mail address given in my profile.
-bowerbird
but there are tweaks that can improve them considerably, where you get the best of two worlds, whichever you like.
i'll be writing up my research in the very near future. (it's wordy to justify the recommendation i've come to, but it's one which is actually very easy to implement.)
-bowerbird
but i'm looking for something an average person could understand and add to an average webpage, with an investment running 3 minutes or less...
-bowerbird
-bowerbird
you've seen other competitors before, and will probably see a whole lot more, and all of them won't be as incompetent as those you have faced down in the past.
ok, for those of you who might not know, peter is the force behind leanpub.com...
which is highly similar to this site, but has been around for a few years already.
so, no, this is not a "new" model, and there _will_ be similar tool-chains that will come soon, and i can guarantee it, because i'll be releasing one that i've been working on for over a _decade_ now.
but we do not need internal squabbling, because killing corporate publishers is gonna be hard, no matter how many of us are committed and dedicated to doing it.
yes, they are dinosaurs, and yes, they _will_ go extinct, eventually, even if we do absolutely nothing. but they are also dinosaurs with _very_ deep pockets, and that's a significant factor in the greedy money-ruled world we have today.
so welcome to the revolution, softcover. strap on a helmet, and let's get to work.
-bowerbird
on the whole, i don't see much value in json, however.
and part of the reason is that you're just storing the presentational information (font, size, color, styling), and not the structural (a.k.a. "semantic") information. (which is the problem with any wysiwyg approach today.)
rethink your philosophical approach on that issue, and make your save-to-file output some light-markup format, either restructured-text (blah) or markdown (blah blah) or my z.m.l. (zen markup language), and i think you'll be on the way to having a definite winner on your hands.
-bowerbird
still lots of room for experimentation, i would say.
-bowerbird
-bowerbird
and i'm fairly sure that paul graham would say that himself.
-bowerbird
> Flattered to see it using marked for the markdown engine.
i am amused as well.
because i just did this the other day:
> http://gitdown.wordpress.com
"gitdown" -- so we can all get down...
*
i also wrote a piece called "markdown considered harmful".
> https://medium.com/the-future-of-publishing/495ccfe24a52
the world needs a new infrastructure for thoughtful documents, including a new text-editor. but from the look of it thus far, this github thing lacks _simplicity,_ by an order of magnitude.
-bowerbird
the film is up for an oscar, and i can guarantee you that the immense applause for alice will be music to her ears in heaven.
-bowerbird
if you don't let people customize your display to _their_ preferences, you are doing it wrong. period. end of story.
-bowerbird