Comment by chipsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipsy | Hacker News Reader

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This sounds like something I want to use. Some impressions:

The first thing I did was edit my profile, but I found that it doesn't give me enough feedback about errors. I tried changing everything all at once(of course) and then got greeted with the previous defaults. It took some trial and error to figure out that it wasn't accepting the RGBA PNG I had picked out for a profile picture. I'd also like a direct link to the markdown formatting docs, or even just a quick summary, on the profile editing screen.

My profile finished, I proceeded to look in my Dropbox folder. The README is not formatted for Windows Notepad and appears as one long line of text. I switched to NP++ and continued to write a "hello.txt" containing a link and an image. It shows up, so I go back and edit the README, too. Everything is in order, but what is this "cloud+arrow" button? Inspecting it reveals it's publishing, but I don't feel confident about whether I've published hello.txt until I log out and check.

I might continue using this. Some last thoughts:

I will probably want options to organize posts. There isn't enough documentation to know if I already have them.

I found myself wondering if there was a shortcut for marking up the image that would let me point to a folder inside Dropbox without tabbing out to find the public link.

I may not want the displayed title of README to be README.

Thanks for the feedback. Some quick responses:

- You're absolutely right, we definitely need more error feedback.

- We're planning on writing a Markdown tutorial on site and building a browser-based editor (based on Ace, most likely). Will take this under advisement.

- I need to test with more variety of profile images. I held back on doing this until I could abstract away the entire image handling code.

- We wrote all the text files on a Mac so we're probably seeing some problems with Windows vs. *nix line-endings. I'll address this tomorrow.

- You're not the first person to be confused about how we're handling publishing, so we'll address this in a UI update.

- In terms of publishing images, we want to be able to process more than just text files in your Dropbox, so eventually you'll be able to relatively link to images instead of having to host them somewhere else. Our browser-based editor will let you browse your Dropbox and select images.

- We do support custom titles (and summaries) using the MultiMarkdown formatting syntax. Just make the first line of your text file look like this:

    Title: The title I want
    Summary: A summary of my text file

And that will customize the title and give you a summary. If that title line is missing, it'll just set the title to the filename.

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Again, thanks for the feedback and I hope you can give it another go once we make a few tweaks. I really appreciate you input.

Do you have any sample sites who are using your service? If so, you should feature them on the front page.

Not just yet, we're waiting to roll out our theme engine before we feature anyone.

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