WideWord

The first release was done a few minutes before heading out to Norway on a little relaxer trip. Needless to say it was less than polished.

I have now done a small release that fixes a few things:

• I’ve made it a bit prettier (subtly speaking that is)
• I’ve enlarged the text entry boxes to a more realistic size (what was I thinking of)
• The document creator can now kick a participant out as well as delete a document
• Made the URL’s look a bit nicer
• Displays document information in the sidebar
• Added a link to Textile documentation
• Textile now uses paragraphs instead of hard breaks. I’m not sure why RedCloth performs hard breaks as standard?

If you haven’t tried it out yet go to WideWord.

BTW. I am really happy with the Database migration tools in rails.

As I am now free from 9-5 kind of work I’ve started work on a bunch of tiny support web sites for StakeItOut that originally were part of the built in feature set of StakeItOut.

So the first mini site is WideWord, which is basically an online collaborative writing app. It is super simple and uses capability security instead of logins. Capability security allows you to login with a code in the url. It was also designed with heavy encryption of all the data just like in StakeItOut as well as we only offer https (encrypted connectivity that is). My next step is writing the webservice api’s that will allow StakeItOut and anyother service to integrate with it.

What is different between this and say the excellent Writeboard or any other online collaborative document writing system?

In short for the average user, probably not much. If you are happy with Writeboard please carry on using it. Some people like vi, some emacs and others (you know who you are) notepad.exe. I needed something like this to integrate with StakeItOut and a few other systems I am planning. It is free to use and so is writeboard, so you’re not taking food out of the mouth of anyone if you use them or not.

The main differentiating factors of WideWord now:

• Encrypted storage
• Encrypted connection
• Even less fields to fill out to get started

The following is stuff I plan to implement before removing “alpha” from the name:

• Open web services API
• Read only sharing

Also it is all very simple. Including server setup I have probably written the existing version in less than 10 hours.