

Show HN: Etherpad meets Markdown for a minimal company wiki - akrymski
http://enterprisewiki.co

======
hvs
I appreciate what you've done here, but when I hear the words "enterprise
wiki" (as your URL implies) and you can't paste MS Word formatted text into
it, I feel a disconnect. I'm not saying that is how it should work, or is a
feature that I would like, but if you approach an enterprise with this and
explained that they would have to use something called Markdown to update it,
they would laugh in your face. Most, if not all, non-technical users of
software do not want to (or simply cannot) write markup in any form.

Nice work, though. I really like it.

~~~
akrymski
Sorry for the URL - admittedly we didn't spend long on it :)

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zitterbewegung
I have a issue with the name. Why not call it markdownwiki instead of
enterprise wiki. Immediately I know what your wiki is and does. Good work on
the execution though.

~~~
akrymski
Thanks for your feedback. We've built it for ourselves initially, didn't give
the name much thought. Will have to see where it goes.

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vailripper
I've been looking for a really nice simple wiki, but targeting the business
market with no security besides a URL with a guid isn't going to cut it.

~~~
akrymski
the URL is random so it's harder to crack than a password, but you're right -
we'll be adding proper 'accounts' later, and some more features if necessary -
it's an MVP at this stage.

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proexploit
This looks great and I love the ease of use, however I just can't use it yet.
I could spend a lot of time putting info into this but there's no question if
it will be gone any day. For me to trust it enough to use it, I either need to
be able to install it to my own server or want to pay for it.

You should really add a minimal homepage with an email signup as well if you
intend to work on this more. The product is self explanatory so I don't need
marketing text but I'd love to be able to be notified if you come out with
accounts, open-source it, add a paid plan or allow installs to my server.

All in all, great work and congrats on shipping something!

~~~
akrymski
Thanks, we've built it for ourselves and wanted to see if anyone else would be
interested first. Would happily add accounts and charge a small subscription
fee for it. How many dollars per month would it be worth to you?)

~~~
bradleyland
I'm interested in it as a library or an open source tool that I can integrate,
but as a paid product, I believe it falls a little bit short of an MVP.

What's unique about what you have here is the realtime collaborative editing.
We use NestaCMS (which also understands Markdown) hooked up to a Dropbox
folder in a few places. The functionality is similar, but there's no in-page
editor, and we can't collaborate in real time.

Both of those things have value to me, but I have serious reservations about
jumping on to a wiki product that I can't control. Documentation is a complete
pain in the ass. When I put time in to it, I need to feel 100% confident that
I won't have to abandon it at a future date; either because I run up against a
feature ceiling, or because you disappear. And if I do have to leave, I need
to be able to get my information out of the system.

------
2arrs2ells
Very cool!

I was a bit frustrated by not being able to select text when in "view" mode
(text selection worked fine in markdown mode - using latest version of Chrome
on a mac). Is this a side effect of the iOS shortcuts?

~~~
akrymski
ha, thanks for spotting that bug, yeah its the gesture library causing issues
... fixed now.

~~~
Elrac
I confirm text selection is working fine for me now - in Chrome.

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melchior
Nice. Good job reducing UI and common interactions to a minimum. The auto-
updating structure on the left also encourages a proper hierarchy for the
document.

I want it. Where do I go?

~~~
agscala
I want to know more about it also. It's weird, I tried going to the homepage
and I just get redirected back to the linked wiki.

It's almost like they don't want customers

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rsync
I'm having a problem toggling back and forth with [esc].

I am using Safari 5.1.7 ... hitting esc always toggles it from normal to
markdown mode, but toggling back to normal is difficult ... I have to click
around in the different panes a few times and keep hitting escape, and
eventually one of them will work.

Is it indeed supposed to toggle back and forth with escape, pressed once,
regardless of which pane your mouse is in ?

~~~
splatcollision
This is due to a bug/weirdness with how Safari deals with using the ESC key
for a hotkey with javascript.

Safari actually fires key events for the escape key hundreds of times per
second.

This can cause some unexpected behavior if you don't do some clever javascript
to handle this bug.

I came here to comment on the same issue - hitting escape to edit will work
for the first toggle, but afterwards to say 'i'm done editing' the key handler
gets called too many times and the markdown flickers on and off like crazy.

Also: escape is not really a normal key for 'edit this text'. It would be
better to put an explicit 'edit' link, it's more understandable for your
users.

Overall though I like how simple it is, and love the use of Markdown.

~~~
webjprgm
ESC is used to exit a mode in VI. So it could be good for "I'm doing editing
this text" in that sense.

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StavrosK
Can you enable slashes in keys? It would be nice to get subpages by adding a
link to enterprisewiki.co/wiki/myguid/somepage from my wiki. Still secret, but
much better for organization, and you can add it with one trivial change.

~~~
akrymski
meanwhile you can use /wiki/password-page-name

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fudged71
The one thing I believe that all collaborative editors need is accountability
for edits. It would be great if you can build a simple sign-in and track all
operations based on which user is committing them. Then you can do some neat
things like rolling back the document in time, or just removing the edits of
certain users. Just a thought.

I love the idea of a collaborative and intuitive web-based editor that works
on mobile platforms. Nice work!

~~~
akrymski
sure, that's coming in the future

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crisnoble
This is amazing, I would totally use it to keep quick notes and ideas. The
escape key toggle between markdown and formatted text is my favorite feature.

------
rsync
Is this something we can purchase and self host ? Or is this something you
plan to make available only as a hosted wiki service ?

~~~
akrymski
It's a hosted service, we have no plans for a downloadable version for now.

~~~
CCs
I wish for something like this + <https://telegr.am/> :)

With Telegr.am I could do most of the edits locally and check it in to GitHub.

With this I could do small adjustments, changes while at the customer etc. and
still have the full history archived in GitHub.

------
krebby
Love the execution. Would be great if it could have history snapshots in a
git-style. I'm looking to replace my github-hosted markdown docs (fairly
numerable # of files), and this looks awesome, just needs to feel more solid.
would love to help develop it!

------
petekoomen
This is gorgeous. We've been looking for something like this. I'd use this for
our company as soon as you

\- support google apps authentication \- allow us to pay for it (I don't trust
free services)

~~~
akrymski
Thanks! How many dollars per month would you pay for something like this?)

~~~
Elrac
(I'm a different user)

For a reliable universal private notepad like this, I'd pay $2 per month. That
sounds cheap, but I'm talking personal use, not business.

~~~
akrymski
Thats great! What features in particular excite you? As a personal user my
guess is you don't care much about collaboration, but more about security &
mobile access?

------
AdamGibbins
This is pretty sweet, it's a shame it doesn't appear to be open source.

~~~
akrymski
We may open source it later if we have time to clean up the code :)

~~~
jamesgeck0
Open source would be awesome, particularly because I really want to use this
for a personal website. I have a feeling that that's probably not a use case
I'd be happy with if I couldn't get in and modify things.

~~~
fudged71
Yes, I feel the exact same way. There are specific functionalities that I
would need.

------
Johnyma22
Dokuwiki is a Free / open source Collaborative Wiki

Etherpad has various Wiki functionality available by enabling plugins

Etherpad also has WikiMedia/Wordpress etc. integration

------
BUGHUNTER
Cool! What are your concepts for implementing SSO, I18N, L10N, RBAC and maybe
any kind of (automated) workflow management? It´s enterprise, isn´t it?

------
dguaraglia
Heads up: scrolling on my Nexus 7 is horrific. I wonder if it's some
javascript issue.

EDIT: forgot to specify I'm using Chrome as the browser

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dergachev
Good stuff! Now if only someone were to implement something like this as a
front-end to editing Github's README.md files.

------
piascikj
I like what you're doing here. It looks very simple and clean and I like that
there's keyboard control with esc.

------
acgourley
Etherpad clones tend to go away, not sure what it is about them. How do we
know you'll stick around?

~~~
akrymski
It's an mvp at this stage, if we introduce paid plans we'll stick around :)
For now we're using it ourselves if that's any consolation

------
rustc
Looks neat!

What tech stack are you using on this?

~~~
akrymski
thanks! node.js

~~~
rustc
Any JS frameworks? Are you using Etherpad Lite?

~~~
drhayes9

      curl -O http://enterprisewiki.co/bin/app.min.js
      uglify -b | vim -
    

Looks like they're using Showdown for Markdown functionality, sharejs for
concurrent editing, node-browserchannel for async communication... Or, maybe
Closure's BrowserChannel?

I would _love_ to see an end-to-end "here's how we built this" blog post for
this kind of project. Very nicely done!

~~~
dergachev
I'm very excited about fixing wikis, and I'm really impressed to see that OP
has some very similar ideas about it.

Because of this, I found it worthwhile to burn 1-2 hours to de-minify his
Javascript, which mostly required figuring out what all his inlined JS libs
are.

<https://gist.github.com/4321959>

To save you a click, here are the JS files he uses:

[https://github.com/EightMedia/hammer.js/blob/master/jquery.h...](https://github.com/EightMedia/hammer.js/blob/master/jquery.hammer.js)

[http://code.google.com/p/rangyinputs/source/browse/trunk/jqu...](http://code.google.com/p/rangyinputs/source/browse/trunk/jquery_plugin.js)

[https://github.com/jeresig/jquery.hotkeys/blob/master/jquery...](https://github.com/jeresig/jquery.hotkeys/blob/master/jquery.hotkeys.js)

[https://github.com/EightMedia/hammer.js/blob/master/hammer.j...](https://github.com/EightMedia/hammer.js/blob/master/hammer.js)

Modified version of [http://code.google.com/p/jquery-
elastic/source/browse/trunk/...](http://code.google.com/p/jquery-
elastic/source/browse/trunk/jquery.elastic.source.js)

[http://code.google.com/p/webapptools/source/browse/trunk/wat...](http://code.google.com/p/webapptools/source/browse/trunk/watools/crawler-
ui/chrome/content/prettify/prettify.js?r=380)

[https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/showdown...](https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/showdown.js)

[https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/extensio...](https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/extensions/table.js)

[https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/extensio...](https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/extensions/prettify.js)

[https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/extensio...](https://github.com/coreyti/showdown/blob/master/src/extensions/github.js)

<http://sharejs.org/channel/bcsocket.js>

<http://sharejs.org/share/share.js>

<http://sharejs.org/share/textarea.js>

~~~
akrymski
you could have just asked :) see the post below - it outlines the libs used,
the rest probably aren't the best choices anyhow, took 2 days to put this
together so it's hardly an example to follow :)

