
My first tiny "weekend project": readable text hosting. Useful? - vvpan
http://tidypub.org
======
extension
I love this! Tons of places to dump text on the web but I've never seen one
that gives you a _clean_ page. Suggestions:

\- Set a cookie and let the poster edit/delete the page after it's published.
They will make typos, mess up the formatting, post while drunk, etc.

\- Markdown formatting. You need at least bold and italics. You could even
have a small toolbar. I don't think the editor needs to be _super_ minimal,
just the viewer.

\- Make sure the branding and links at the bottom are visually distinct from
anything the user could enter. Maybe give it a grey background or invert it or
something. Fixed positioning is also an option, but might be too annoying.

\- Remove the Feedback tab from the viewer.. really spoils the aesthetic.

~~~
mambodog
I'm not sure if I would agree with Markdown, depending on your audience. I'm
of the opinion that trying to teach the concept of markup to ordinary people
is always going to alienate some non-technical users.

I'd just suggest adding buttons for bold, italic & link. That way you can
still keep it simple. I'm all for having a ruthless approach to unnecessary
features.

~~~
27182818284
I used to be on that side, but with Reddit's success and their use of Markdown
I've decided that it is OK for even the non-technical audience. (Though there
still should be the little "formatting help" button like they have nearby)

~~~
mambodog
Reddit provides enough value for its users for them to invest the effort to
learn some Markdown. This is due to Reddit's content and community being the
main sources of value for the user, not it's text-formatting features. I
couldn't say the same for this app. If they can't pick it up in two seconds, I
think most won't bother.

------
zbanks
Looks really awesome. I dig the clean interface/presentation.

The app is done well enough where nothing is overtly bad or glaring. That
being said, I do have a few light thoughts & suggestions.

\- I agree a source textbox for citations would be nice, but it's not too
pressing considering you can include it at the end. In a similar vein, an
author box would be nice too.

\- Any reason why the URLs are 5 letters long? Not to undervalue the
popularity of the service, but you could easily start out with 3 letter
abbreviations, which would give you ~150k URLs.

\- For that matter, what is your character set? Are you using just letters, or
alphanumeric characters? Again, I'd prefer the former since you aren't going
to get a significant boost from the extra choices. You might also want to take
out 'O', 'o', and 'l' so its unambiguous when written out.

\- Finally, although I'd be weary of allowing crazy markup systems, it might
be good to implement a lightweight format such as Markdown. Nothing too fancy,
but it's nice to be able to add _emphasis_ without having to SHOUT.

For fun, my comment on tidypub: <http://tidypub.org/moAbu>

~~~
jules
> Any reason why the URLs are 5 letters long?

What has Twitter done to this world? I for one would like to see the title you
type appear in the url.

~~~
zbanks
Actually, it's more of an issue with writing down the URL and passing it on.

Less characters means its harder to screw up. Question marks and random
letters make non-techie people anxious. If its short, it at least helps.

------
vvpan
My point was to be able to publish readable "blog posts" on sites like HN and
reddit without an actual blog. I'd love to hear feedback on whether it might
be useful, and if not, what might make it so.

~~~
LiveTheDream
You can also do this by emailing anything (e.g. text, pictures, YouTube link,
gist URL, etc) from any email address to post@posterous.com. Of course, future
emails to the same address are tied to the same blog, so if anonymity is your
goal (including no association to a previous anonymous post), that option
wouldn't work.

Nice clean look & feel though. It looks almost exactly the same as what my
Readability bookmarklet turn out.

~~~
vvpan
Weeeelll... I was somewhat inspired by readability, so a resemblance is not
coincidental.

I have seen posterous, but I was going for something even simpler. The email
to post idea is pretty cool though. Thanks a lot for the feedback.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Being able to send an email and get the URL back without having a full blog
set up like posterous would be awesome. It really could become an anonymous
blog.

------
jrmg
I love it.

Don't listen to those asking for markdown, WYSIWYG editing and the like - keep
it simple. /Maybe/ do some detection to identify links and linkify them, but
that's it. The instant usability and beautiful /enforced/ styling are its
strong points, adding more customisability just dilutes this, IMO.

------
shorbaji
Nice!

How about a script for a *NIX command line?

    
    
      $ tidypub -t 'Any Title' < foo.txt
      http://www.tidypub.org/wHzf3
      $

~~~
danielh

        $ ./tidypub -t "How about this?" < tidypub
        http://tidypub.org/doHLm
    

This is a python script I just wrote. Unfortunately, the white space gets
lost. Try <https://gist.github.com/721676>

~~~
francoisdevlin
Does anyone else appreciate the irony of a Python app losing whitespace?

~~~
danielh
I definitely do, but just for record, it's the browser not rendering the white
space. It is there if you look in the page source.

------
FraaJad
Aaron Swartz did it first with <http://jottit.com/>

~~~
mike-cardwell
Jottit works without JavaScript and also has a HTTPS version:

<https://jottit.com/>

There is also a HTTPS-Everywhere ruleset for it in the current development
branch.

For those reasons alone, I would always choose jottit over tidypub...

~~~
ido
Why is working without js an advantage? Do you often browse on browsers that
do not possess a js interpreter?

~~~
mike-cardwell
Because I choose to disable it by default for security and privacy reasons.

There is _no_ good reason that this site should require javascript. _Nothing_
it does is improved by the javascript requirement.

------
abi
I like it. One minor suggestion: Put your < link > tags in the head because
right now, I'm seeing ugly flashes of unstyled content
(<http://www.bluerobot.com/web/css/fouc.asp/>).

~~~
vvpan
Thanks for the suggestion. The website is actually in need of much cleanup,
even though it is small. I was trying to roll it out asap, in fears that
otherwise it would never see the light of day.

------
cuchoperl
It is useful to share bits of a larger text. A "source" text box to input the
URL of the source would be great. Thanks!

~~~
Veera
//A "source" text box to input the URL of the source//

If the source already has a URL, then why is it needed to create a another
(short) URL for that source again! a URL shortener (bit.ly, goo.gl) could be
used in that scenario. :)

~~~
GrayRoark
You could just send part of the text or you could just want a text with a
cleaner look.

------
FraaJad
To add to my earlier comment:

Jottit <https://jottit.com> has the same minimalist interface, but has a lot
more features to offer.

    
    
      * "WYSIWYG" editing with Markdown syntax.
      * Custom subdomains
      * Access control
      * https
      * Custom theming etc.,

~~~
mileszs
I don't think they're after the same thing, despite the similarities. TidyPub
is pretty, readable, and, to use a term from the site, 'classy'. It's about
ONE entry. One page.

Jottit is about making a website -- multiple pages, themes, etc. It's more
like a quick wiki. It's certainly not as readable or pretty, but is quite
utilitarian -- not a bad thing, just different.

So, despite the two both beginning the process with a simple textarea and a
button, they're not the same, and neither should strive to be the other.

~~~
FraaJad
Nothing stops the user from using only the frontpage of jottit that provides
the exact same functionality with no additional complexity.

------
Detrus
It's useful as a user interface experiment. Most blogs require signing up
before posting. This lets people post first, maybe get some traffic, then you
can gradually suggest new features based on how each user uses it.

I doubt you'll get enough users though.

------
mrleinad
Could you tell us something about how it was built?

~~~
vvpan
Well, that is not an exciting story. I used Django. And, oh yeah, its on
shared hosting... for now...

------
crad
Nice looking service. I'm not sure it's something I'd use but I could see it
being used. One thing to look out for is spammers.

I find that the most of spam that I get on paste site I run is deplorable link
spam for illegal content. I'm not talking about warez or torrent links either.
I ended up having to write a filtering to look for keywords and url to content
analysis and then submit content that triggers the filter to the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Best of luck.

------
hboon
See Infogami. It's not available anymore, but maybe some use ideas there.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20061107190837/http://infogami.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20061107190837/http://infogami.com/)

~~~
A1kmm
It also seems very similar to the (crowded) pastebin space, which according to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastebin> have been around since at least 2002.

To be honest, I think it would be hard to get a profitable business out of
your idea (the cost to acquire customers would probably exceed the lifetime
present value). However, I suspect that profit isn't necessarily your
intention here.

------
ryanwaggoner
Looks very nice. Maybe add a button to toggle between light and dark
interface?

~~~
vvpan
That's a great idea! When making it I was really torn between a dark and light
scheme. You solved the dilemma. Thanks.

------
envain
i built exactly this last year, over a weekend ... it's at <http://reduce.li>

Though i dont maintain it anymore, there's basic visitor tracking by adding a
+ to the generated url, just like bit.ly.

Very soon, online pharmacy bots started spamming me!

In retrospect, looking at all the positive feedback here, I feel that where I
went wrong was adding bloat like picture uploading/url shortening etc...

------
entrepreneurial
Not sure if this was said, but add a little text editor like in gmail so one
could add links, etc. The main point of what your trying to do is so people
can add this text to twitter, facebook, etc. Like a mini published text based
website. Great Job!

------
vandahm
I like this a lot. I can already think back to a number of times when I or a
friend could have used this. I can't imagine it being simpler to use, and I
like the nice, clean presentation of the text.

------
kmfrk
Another similar project is <http://wrttn.in/> (it's a royal pain to spell). Is
it true that tidypub really has no admin link to edit the original post from?

------
kqueue
This is one feature of <http://stk8.co>

<http://stk8.co/Wpbbbc>

But stk8.co supports links as well, like:

<http://stk8.co/gkbbbc>

:)

------
InclinedPlane
Interesting, merits further development I think. The idea has merit but not
quite just in this current form, you need to find some other missing element
to marry it too perhaps.

------
mike-cardwell
Nice. If you were to use the placeholder attribute for the title box, and
change the publish button to a "submit" type input, then it would work without
requiring JavaScript...

------
jm3
Good idea but logo not readable. <https://skitch.com/jm3net/rnqge/logo-not-
readable>

------
thenotself
Why not expand on the concept that people could use a place to store an
annotation of any sort. That way, if I want to leave people text, photos, a
presentation, an embedded video, etc, I can do that without the need to create
a blog or let that person see a full history of other things I've written.
Another idea would be to generate a QR code for the page.

That being said, I can't think of very many times I've needed something like
this. If I had more to say on a topic than I wanted to leave in a comment, I'd
blog about it. If I knew the person, I'd email them.

~~~
Tylergillies
+1 for QR code gen

~~~
chancecarroll
+2 I think that would make a nice, easy, useful way to tie a digital comment
to the physical world, QR graffiti tied to a manifesto anyone?

------
StudyAnimal
Text should be fully justified, rather than just left justified.

Ligatures would be nice too, but I guess that is dependent on things outside
the apps control.

------
pmiller2
Interesting. What I like the most about it is that it ends up looking very
similar to my Readability setup. :-)

------
vinutheraj
How about adding a print button/link on the same page as the text ?

~~~
greyman
Why? Can't you use browser's print button?

~~~
Tarski
When I print preview in firefox, the margins seem to big. All the text is
squished into a narrow column.

~~~
Xuzz
I think it just needs a @media(print) stylesheet then? (Or whatever the actual
name is.)

------
cscheid
This is great. MathJax support would kick ass too.

~~~
vvpan
Ah, I was looking for something like that. Thanks for the pointer! This is a
feature which I, personally, would like to see soon.

------
lisper
Your competition:

<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability>

~~~
natep
Not really. Readability is for content that's already online. His
'competition' is sites like pastebin.

~~~
lisper
That depends on what you think the product is. Tidypub is
pastebin+readability.

------
baby
What about pastebin ?

------
daniel_iversen
very neat.. nice work!

------
10smom
great idea

------
crizCraig
To get rid of the cutoff gray background after pressing the feedback tab in
Chrome, you can add "html {height: 100%}" to your CSS. This adds a vertical
scrollbar though, but again just in Chrome. I had to deal with this on my Get
Satisfaction widget too.

Nice service by the way. I love the low barrier to posting. Like pastie.org,
but for publishing.

------
mkramlich
neat idea, nice spike at it. i could see this filling a certain use case for
some folks.

