
Show HN: Notably – a simple tool for sharing markdown notes - chris140957
https://notably.cc/#/?v=1
======
stevekemp
I implemented a similar idea a couple of years back, originally as a set of
Perl CGI scripts. Nowadays the code is powered by a simple golang server:

[https://markdownshare.com/](https://markdownshare.com/)

The service gets a ton of traffic, and some of it is content I didn't expect.
For example I see a bunch of IoT devices logging IPs and temperature details.

At one point a group of students were sharing (binary) notes with each other.
They'd each upload a gzip/base64 encoded binary and that was eating a ton of
bandwidth. In short expect to be abused.

~~~
chris140957
this is a good point, will get some safeguards in place

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OJFord
Nice, some comments:

1\. I don't see details of retention anywhere, are you just storing
indefinitely at the moment?

2\. No sign-up is nice, but have you considered even just using cookies for
'my past notes'?

3a. ```Code blocks``` render as `inline code` in editing mode, which looks
worse than not doing any 'preview' of them in edit mode at all IMO.

3b. ```lang hints (in the manner of Github flavour) are ignored, though some
syntax highlighting is done with or without them.

3bi. This seems to mean that keywords from other languages are highlighted as
if a keyword in the language used.

3bii. The syntax highlighting colour scheme used is not very colour-blind
friendly.

4\. Two users (uh, tabs) can concurrently edit, but each others' edits are not
seen until refresh; so last to stop typing (=> save) wins.

~~~
chris140957
Thanks for the feedback:

1\. The backend is graphql/django/postgres and yes, the notes are currently
being preserved indefinitely. At some point I might add a cron job to remove
the empty ones

2\. I'm thinking of adding a notebook option eventually, but still considering
the best way of doing this in terms of not compromising the current look and
feel, which I like the simplicity of

3\. for these three points - the markdown editor itself is an open source
solution () and not my own creation, so these issues are limitations of this
library. I may fork it and make some fixes at a later date, although some of
these issues may be fixable with simple css

4\. good point, i'll try to implement some kind of a lock here

~~~
bhl
For 3, I'd recommend using as an editor
[https://codemirror.net/mode/gfm/](https://codemirror.net/mode/gfm/) and then
markdown-it to render it to a preview. It has variable height support too:
[https://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html](https://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html).

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chris140957
Hi, I just launched notably. It's a simple app that lets you share any kind of
text note, and supports markdown syntax

I created this mostly as a way of sharing notes between other developers. We
use MS Teams at work and the interface for copying and pasting code snippets
in and out of there is terrible

Notably requires no sign up - you can just create and share notes straight
away. It's also completely free

~~~
austincheney
This is fantastic. I am working on a peer to peer file system sharing tool in
the browser. Soon I will add a text messaging component and I want it to
support markdown cleanly just like this.

Excellent work

~~~
bhl
Are you starting from scratch or building on top of existing libraries?
Curious to know because for text editors, there's systems built around CRDTs
like automerge and yjs.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-
free_replicated_data_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-
free_replicated_data_type)

~~~
austincheney
I am starting from scratch. All the file system libraries I could need are
provided by Node. All the data structures I am having to create just pass
messaging which connects user interactions to the structures already in place.

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rkudeshi
Weird bug I've never seen before on any other site: I can't use the swiping
feature on the Google Keyboard on an iPhone. Using swiping on the iOS 13
built-in keyboard worked fine though.

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yukaii
Shameless plug here :p

[https://hackmd.io/](https://hackmd.io/)

HackMD also allows creating markdown notes anonymously. You can share the note
with a link, and start realtime collaboration. Welcome to give it a try!

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asaibx
Sounds like a great idea, but the site just brings up a blank page in both
Firefox and Chrome on Android.

~~~
chris140957
i'm actually not able to reproduce you're issue on either of my android
devices

~~~
asaibx
Just to let you know, I updated to the latest version of Chrome (Android) and
it seems to be working fine now.

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anotheryou
default for a share link should be the preview

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chris140957
this is actually true. I've just pushed a small change to change this now

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anotheryou
that was quick, cool :)

Edit on the shared link is also a bit dangerous as there is no colab-
collission detection. But there it really depends on the use-case.

I always wanted to set up a web renderer that I could quickly paste to (but
was too lazy to actually do it), just to quickly show something to others.

~~~
chris140957
It was never really my intention to disable edits in these cases - there is no
separate view for editing/viewing notes. I am considering adding a lock to
stop people editing the same note simultaneously, but I've got no plans to
disable the edit button at the moment

~~~
cyborgx7
Maybe, instead of locking something in, just have a read-only link and an
editable link for every note, without being able to derive the edit link from
the ro link.

Otherwise, maybe someone should implement this purely as a frontend to
volatile.wtf

Now that I think about it, I kind of want to implement that.

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growt
Doesn't work that well on mobile Chrome (Android). You might want to test
that.

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coleifer
Gist.github.com. it even turns them into mini git repos you can clone and
fork.

~~~
chris140957
This isn't really intended to do the same thing as gist

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lfender6445
this is an absolutely beautiful markdown implementation.

