

Show HN: Something I built for Nanowrimo - siromoney

I built constellational.com two days before November began, hoping it would help me write. It&#x27;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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ashdav
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.

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

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whichdan
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.

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

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Jemaclus
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.

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

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siromoney
It will probably break under the slightest load though; clickable:
[http://Constellational.com](http://Constellational.com)

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poissonpie
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?

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siromoney
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.

~~~
siromoney
By which I mean: bookmark the versions you like!

