

Show HN: Real-time Wiki - ronreiter
http://document.ly

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edtechdev
This would be very popular indeed if a WYSIWYG editor was used instead of a
markup language.

There has been study after study showing how the wiki markup syntax is a
hurdle to participation on wikipedia, to the point where wikipedia is now
finally, after 12 years, working on a wysiwyg editor:
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/21/jimmy-wales-on-new-
editing-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/21/jimmy-wales-on-new-editing-
platform-this-is-epically-important/)

There are so many free and open source wysiwyg editors that can be easily
plugged into a site: aloha, tinymce, ckeditor, etc.

~~~
alexchamberlain
We really need to get people out of the habit of using WYSIWYG editors.

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jules
This is a very naive view of reality. WYSIWYG editors are superior in almost
every way for almost all users. I used to force markdown on people too, but
WYSIWYG is really a killer feature for most users. It requires far less
learning, the features are more discoverable, it's quicker to edit even after
they manage to become proficient with markdown, and there is no mental
translation from what they're editing to what it's going to look like. But
also other features that you might not immediately think of are very
important, such as the ability to copy-paste from their existing word
processor documents and preserve markup. Editing rich text with a plain text
editor rather than a rich text editor is to most people like editing your
photos with a hex editor instead of Photoshop is to you: not the right tool
for the job, unpleasant, slow, requires learning, requires mental translation,
and can't easily copy paste from existing material.

~~~
altcognito
It is comparable to the difference between digital cameras and film cameras. I
see results sooner.

Sure, I can take good film pictures if I know the lighting conditions, shutter
settings, business about f-stops but being able to see how you failed sooner
is a big plus.

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niggler
Got past over-quota issue and gave google permissions, but Chrome OSX shows
nothing when you login.

JS console shows:

    
    
        Uncaught ReferenceError: goog is not defined socket.js:43
    
        Uncaught Error: Load timeout for modules: text!templates/context_menu.html require.js:26

<http://requirejs.org/docs/errors.html#timeout>

~~~
ronreiter
Try refreshing... It's a non-optimized version so it doesn't always load
right.

~~~
niggler
Same issue (3 hours later) but now I can't even load the page to logout :/

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tarr11
Can you explain how this is different / better than Google Docs? I can't tell
from the home page.

~~~
ronreiter
If Google docs is an alternative to Word, then this is an alternative to
Sharepoint.

As opposed to collaborative document authoring, collaborative knowledge
management allows things like collaborative document arrangement, a better
permission system, links between documents, better searchability and more.

~~~
bengillies
Indeed. Google Docs suffers a lot from discoverability and, while you can
collaboratively edit on it, it feels too much like a locked down blob of
content and so suffers from a lot of the same problems that Word suffers from
(in my experience with it at least): it's hard to know when it's changed; when
someone updates it, you get an email; when someone writes something, they have
to "share" it with with you before you know it exists; WYSIWYG is a terrible
way of editing content.

I'm not sure how many of these problems this solves, but Wikis in general
solve many of them.

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duck
Is this going to be freeium? I really recommend putting a pricing page up even
if you don't know what the pricing will be, just to make it clear... hard to
even try something (and I want to b/c it looks very useful) without knowing
that important detail.

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Skoofoo
Very neat! I have thought quite a bit about how to make wikis easier to work
with, but I don't know if I'll need to anymore because you pretty much nailed
it! Real-time markdown editing is a great idea.

A few things:

* Making an ordered list right after an unordered one and vice versa doesn't render properly.

* New pages always become children of the first page, and I don't know how to turn them into root pages or make them in the first place.

* Signing out doesn't work.

* Clicking away while editing a page title doesn't save it.

* Public links and history are on top of my wishlist for this.

~~~
ronreiter
Thanks!!!

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seletz
Oh man -- this __almost __fits a perfectly for me. I just wish that
reStructured text was supported, but I could live with markdown. Yeah, I'm
old-school.

It would be awesome if this service supported dropbox and stored all files
there -- using a simple directory structure. This would allow me to edit my
files using VIM during the day, and I'd have a super easy search UI.

I currently keep daily notes on dropbox using rst files (one per day) -- so
this would fit my workflow perfectly.

~~~
ronreiter
reStructured text will be eventually supported if people will like
document.ly's workflow scheme.

The service should support Dropbox eventually, but the structure of the
documents is kind of a problem to arrange as a set of files and folders.

~~~
seletz
Hmm - why would the document structure difficult to map to a filesystem
structure? Just map every document type to a folder, and the contents of the
documents to individual files in the folder.

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wturner
When I signed out of the application it didn't forward me to a logged-out
verification page or give me a model that tells me I've signed out. It kind of
just hung there without letting me edit anymore. When I sign out I like a very
robust verification that tells me I've signed out. It looks great regardless.

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ceejayoz
Over Quota

This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again
later.

~~~
ronreiter
Fixing. Strange, I was supposed to get a Google start-up package, apparently
that doesn't work.

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jes5199
I've been seeing demos of this sort of thing since 2003 and yet no real-time
collaborative editor has actually caught on. Does anyone have any intuition as
to why? I'm baffled - it sounds like a good idea to me.

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onecreativenerd
The export feature would be really awesome if it could handle larger
documents!

Also, sharing a document with someone else seems to throw an exception when
they try to sign in...

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lukifer
Finally, the real-time Markdown wiki I've been waiting for. Love it.

What's the business model? I would be sad to see this acquihired and disappear
in a puff of smoke.

~~~
ronreiter
A SaaS freemium model for large teams, and server deployment for large
organizations (non-cloud solution).

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luchs
I get an exception in Opera:

    
    
        Uncaught exception: document.body is not defined -- do not create socket from script in <head>.

~~~
ronreiter
I actually did not check it on Opera. Will check. Thanks!

In any case, it doesn't load well because it loads a lot of Javascript
asynchronously (no production version yet). Just refresh it.

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Bjoern
Is there some Open Source solution in the similar spirit as document.ly? Would
love this, but has to be running inside the company only.

~~~
ronreiter
I will provide a hosted solution someday.

~~~
Bjoern
Thanks, that would be great!

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Johnyma22
Also see Etherpad, ShareJS and Hackpad

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kibibu
Small nitpick that may affect your search results - your meta tag description
is "Bootsrap theme".

~~~
ronreiter
Thanks :)

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lightningstorm
I love how you improved over bootstrap to create nice and very aesthetically
pleasing design.

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balajiviswanath
Very cool design and concept. I loved how you used Bootstrap for this.

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teddyknox
Also the site is apparently "temporarily over quota".

~~~
ronreiter
Please wait a few minutes, it'll take a few minutes to re-activate.

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meej
How might this compare with HackPad?

~~~
ronreiter
The concept isn't much different, but the permission model is. document.ly is
very similar to Asana and Trello (allowing every user to participate in
multiple projects and inviting anyone in the world to view and edit any
document), while Hackpad aims for a standard B2B marketing strategy.

