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Txt.fyi
- averageweather 10y agoIs it wrong to be bothered by the lack of favicon?
- alanfalcon 10y agoThe monospaced font is a downer, but the clean colorful pixel logo makes me happy. Overall this strikes me as a project borne of a sweet domain name, but I still dig it.
- Entangled 10y agoNot bad, a better font and a fix in markdown for fenced code and good to go: https://txt.fyi/+/39c4f224/ https://txt.fyi/+/39c4f224/ Also, a way to make ninja edits with a cookie for 24 hrs.
- lordelph 10y agoI like this, but be ready for 'questionable content' like dox and password lists. Dealing with that crap was why I stopped running pastebin.com :)
- shshhdhs 10y agoHave you ever done an AMA? I imagine that would be interesting..
- tomcam 10y agoDitto. Those who ignore history etc
- lordelph 10y agoI don't think I have that many interesting stories, it was just the time involved with dealing with emails from irate individuals, companies, and (occasionally) law enforcement agencies!
- tradersam 10y agoStill would be interesting, pastebin probably had almost every user-type imaginable.
- KirinDave 10y agoHonestly what I'd love to know is how you scaled it and how you would/wouldn't scale it again.
- sameerds 10y agoBut in an AMA, it's the audience that asks interesting questions, with you discovering that your stories are more interesting than you originally thought they would be!
- i336_ 10y agoI was trawling through /bestcomments, saw your comment extracted on its own, and opened this thread to suggest you share some life stories. And then I see others have requested AMAs too. pastebin is, after all, the #1 site. And you did (more or less) say you stopped running it due to stress/"interestingness" :) Like another commentator said, you would've gotten one of everything. So please do consider it. :)
- return0 10y agothey will most likely get spam first, as they allow links. from those seo people
- Trundle 10y agoIf they're not indexed then I can't see the value.
- return0 10y agoit happened to something similar i did many moons ago , even with nofollow. i dont know why
- tyingq 10y agoNofollow links seem to help with getting the target indexed. So, the spammers create their second and third tiers of actual content on sites that do not use nofollow. However, they'll use anything with any kind of links to get those tiers crawled and indexed.
- return0 10y agoi guess thats what they did. funny, it seems they got penalized regardless somehow, because i started getting emails asking to please remove the spam they posted. Edit: It seems some of them were trying to damage competitor's SEO ranking by posting irregular links. SEO is wild west.
- tyingq 10y agoThankfully the old "blasting links" type of SEO is pretty much dead now.
- Trundle 10y agoWhen you say something similar do you mean also not indexed, or do you mean you ran a text submission site with nofollow links?
- problems 10y agoIsn't that easy to deal with? Sit back, relax and wait for a court order or your own ISP's demand kind of thing? That's been my policy when running this kind of thing in the past - maybe I've been living behind CloudFlare and OVH for too long.
- rsync 10y agoWe (and by we, I mean, I) launched "Oh By"[1] last year which is very, very much like what is going on here, but with deliberately human-readable and recognizable codes ("Oh By Codes") .... Do you have any comments ? Of course we had pastebin very much in mind - not as a model to follow but as an analogous service in some ways. Our message is limited to 4096 characters so it isn't quite as useful for large docs ... but it's much easier to pass around the "code" chalked on the street ... [1] https://0x.co https://0x.co
- desireco42 10y agoThis is genius. I love it.
- Esau 10y agoThat's interesting. I am surprised I didn't see the mention of this last year.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- austenallred 10y agoHahaha, I built something just like this site once, just to see what would happen. Wouldn't this be fun? No auth, no rules, no permanent database, just plain text that hangs out for a while (though people could reply to it - ours was more like a forum). The ones with replies jump to the top, everything else slowly falls off into the abyss where it can never be found again. Literally had people posting ASCII-rendered child pornography within 24 hours
- ninov 10y agoSo, like 4chan but without images?
- austenallred 10y agoya pretty much
- i336_ 10y agoApart from the last line, that site design sounds like a lot of fun. I'm guessing you went "okay this isn't going to work" and killed it - or is it still quietly buried somewhere? Also, did you keep the code? Might be a fun startpoint for others to springboard off of.
- austenallred 10y ago> Apart from the last line, that site design sounds like a lot of fun "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" :) Nah the code is gone. Wrote it in <24 hours, and it wasn't really worth keeping.
- i336_ 10y agoHehe. Gotcha. Thanks for the reply!
- sametmax 10y agoGod i feel you. Everytime a pastebin close we get a surge of dox / warez / child porn activity on http://0bin.net http://0bin.net. Since by design we can't monitor it we just get notified after the fact by concerned citizens mailing us. One month our mailbox is empty, the other one it's report day every day.
- pjc50 10y agoHow confident are you in your legal shield that, although you know your service is being used for child porn, you're claiming not to be responsible for it? Edit: I see you're behind whoisguard but hosted in Bulgaria, which is probably uninterested enough in chasing you.
- jordanwallwork 10y agoOh cool I'd not heard of this before but it looks awesome. Good work
- zump 10y agoThe internet is horrifying.
- nicky0 10y agoThe internet reveals the horrifying nature of humanity.
- Walf 10y ago*of the worst of technically literate humanity.
- tripzilch 10y agoIf you're implying that the technically literate are either better or worse in this respect (or even just differently distributed), you might want to back that up with some arguments. Maybe you tried to say something else but otherwise I don't see the point of this remark.
- Walf 10y agoNo, I'm highlighting that nicky0's phrasing over-generalises.
- canabisjunke 10y agoIs there any way to prevent bots from hitting publish ? There are these script kiddie trolls you know!
- brilliantcode 10y agosmall page size, secure static html file, loads fast and viewable on mobile device. What sorcery is this??! Page size is not even 1mb and there's no React front-end component :)
- overcast 10y agoThe connection has timed out The server at txt.fyi is taking too long to respond. The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments. If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection. If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
- esMazer 10y ago"Whoa there. txt.fyi's under heavy load. Come back soon!"
- drivingmenuts 10y ago> Search engines are instructed not to index posts Oh, I'm sure the internet archive guys will honor that request. /facepalm
- Qub3d 10y agoThey do! If you create a "robots.txt" file [1] and use a disallow flag, they will not scan the site. Ex: http://web.archive.org/web/20070103112847/http://www.infoceptor.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070103112847/http://www.infocep... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
- nimchimpsky 10y agolol, its always extra amusing when someones sarcastic, negative, unfunny, and smug comment is immediately disproved.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoYep, my bad on that one. I was thinking of archiveteam.org.
- bovermyer 10y agoSeems like a cool idea, and the creator is pretty responsive on Twitter. I offered to assist with the infrastructure as a way of supporting the project.
- beschizza 10y agoI appreciate it, too!
- beschizza 10y agoHi! Creator here. It's getting a good kicking right now so I took down the "new post" page. Everyone's fyis are still live and well. I wanted to make a publishing widget so minimal it would operate without fuss on a $5 digitalocean plan, and I think I almost succeeded!
- mozumder 10y agoHow many requests-per-second are you getting right now? What's the CPU utilization like with this level of usage? What's the back-end stack? What's the normal latency like? I'm just wondering why it would go down due to heavy traffic, when all it serves is basic text?
- firefoxd 10y agoHello creator. You can handle the traffic and db insert on a cheap digital ocean plan.[1] My server purred with hn traffic. [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request
- KirinDave 10y agoI'm really curious what ended up being the thing that took you down.
- 10y ago
- hrodriguez 10y ago> and know the form of your voice is out there forever. Lots of these types of sites usually have some limit. That is, if the page hasn't been visited in 6 months - out it goes. Curious what the time limits are. Also, unable to test (site under heavy load) but is there an edit link that's made available after making a post? From the comments, that doesn't appear to be the case. So if I wanted to use it as a knowledge base for something, I wouldn't be able to keep updating it. I think this is the missing (basic) feature.
- Kametrixom 10y agoThat's really the point, to be as minimalistic as possible. The less features something has the less points of failure are possible. If you need a certain feature, use something else.
- GrumpyNl 10y agoIm getting this all the time This site can’t be reached txt.fyi took too long to respond.
- mc42 10y agoThe whole "main" page being under 2kB is an adventurous thing indeed. Overall, interesting implementation and incredibly clean layout (CSS is 541b.) What languages are the site written in?
- NoGravitas 10y agohttps://txt.fyi/+/834a4ca2/ https://txt.fyi/+/834a4ca2/
- huula 10y agoI like the simplicity. But essentially this is something like pastebin right?
- djsumdog 10y agoYea, it's essentially a minimalistic pastebin for markdown
- tbirrell 10y agoI like the idea. I've used services like this before. I do wonder if monospaced font is really the best route. It makes anything longer than a couple hundreds words a pain to read.
- petters 10y agoThis. Bringhurst's fantastic "Elements of Typographical Style" is still relevant.
- searchfaster 10y agoNever realized how uncomfortable it is to read a paragraph of monospaced font text, even though I read 1000s of lines of code in monospaced font without any issues.
- photojosh 10y agoNo paragraphs of comments in your code? ;)
- searchfaster 10y agoNo.. may be my code is just not worth commenting ;)
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 10y agoIMO the only reason why it's unreadable is font size.
- adito 10y agotry !professor https://txt.fyi/+/3c5c8a2b/ https://txt.fyi/+/3c5c8a2b/ It makes the page unstyled
- etjossem 10y agoAgreed. Since it accepts Markdown for blocks of code, the default should not be monospace.
- 10y ago
- Kametrixom 10y agoJust a test: https://txt.fyi/+/18d9428d/ https://txt.fyi/+/18d9428d/
- rosalinekarr 10y ago> no database Where is the data being stored then? Some kind of key value store or filesystem maybe?
- mcpherrinm 10y agoIf I had to guess, from a quick poke about: You POST your uploaded doc to 'do.php', which renders into an html file and puts it on disk, which is served by Apache. That's about as simple as you can get. Let the web server do what it does best (serve files).
- dualogy 10y ago> or filesystem maybe For text files?! Get outta town ;)
- aratno 10y agoSome markdown features aren't working, like code blocks and newlines (by ending a line in double-spaces). Also, unknown routes don't 404 nicely; they just hit the Apache default.
- robotmay 10y agoA preview option would be nice but otherwise I like how simple it is.
- drops 10y agoPlease work on typography.
- wooshy 10y agoI like how simple and easy this is to use. At what point would costs of hosting something like this become too much?
- shopkins 10y agoNice. Similar to https://telegra.ph https://telegra.ph, https://write.as https://write.as, and https://bold.io https://bold.io.
- wlkr 10y agoThere's also http://txti.es/ http://txti.es/ which is by the same creator as http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- esMazer 10y ago> http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ this is pure gold! and check the end of the source... xD
- rtehfm 10y agoAnd then there's http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
- unrelevant 10y agoAnd finally, https://bestmotherfucking.website https://bestmotherfucking.website
- fiatjaf 10y agoAren't people who visit Hacker News already familiar with a ton of ways to publish anything they want instead of soon-to-cease-to-exist service that only serves raw text? I say this not to be mean -- I understand where you're coming from, I myself have written a "pure plain text" service in the past and thought it would be revolutionary due to its simplicity.
- dvt 10y agoI don't think its author thinks its revolutionary (at least it doesn't send off that kind of vibe). Just a neat personal project that some people might find useful. Pretty cool nonetheless.
- komali2 10y agoMaybe it'll land the guy a job if he show it off during an interview. Who knows? I like it, it's neat.
- maxerickson 10y agoExpectations seem measured: https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834582107569655810 https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834582107569655810 Hopefully it can become a good contribution to the independent web: a place to put words without any fuss or fury. https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834599500039729164 https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834599500039729164 Seeing how something this simple reacts to such events would be interesting. I'll be as transparent and open as I can (the latter is a reply to a post to the platform about difficulties running a similar service)
- shmageggy 10y agoSince the site is already experiencing the HN hug of death, it makes me wonder how doable it would be to make something like this but backed by a P2P store, possibly verified by blockchain
- isanganak 10y agoMost people publish something on the internet hoping it reaches as many people as possible, otherwise what's the point?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- andreineculau 10y agoif anyone is interested in a on-premise minimalistic pastebin-like service, I ended up writing https://github.com/andreineculau/tastebin https://github.com/andreineculau/tastebin
- NickBusey 10y agoFYI The Demo link is broken.
- travelton 10y agoDoesn't look like you're using it, but if so... This is leaking in the source: define('NONCE_SECRET', 'XXXXXXXXXXXX'); Edit: Now that it's back live, you might want to change the secret.
- beschizza 10y agoThank you!
- rrix2 10y agoLooks great, but it's sort of unfortunate that the author doesn't seem to have seen the work on microformats[1] that the IndieWeb community has been working on. Being able to pull microformats out of the posts to reconstruct feeds, automatically embed txt.fyi post summaries, syndicate to facebook/twitter/etc (with comments backfed in to it) is super nice for low-bandwidth sites like these, you can add a lot of useful value for little more a few extra HTML classes. The core of a lot of this, the "webmention" standard is a W3C recommendation, even.[2] [1]: http://indieweb.org/ http://indieweb.org/ http://microformats.org/ http://microformats.org/ [2]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
- asymmetric 10y agoI feel so sad that microformats havent gone mainstream yet. They're such a good idea, and so easy to use, yet 99.9% of websites don't bother. Instead I have to, e.g., manually select a street name and enter it into a OSM search field. I wonder, why haven't thet gotten more popular?
- Waterluvian 10y agoMaybe this is a joke. Maybe I'm missing the point. But I think the point is not to have these things. To make it as vanilla as possible.
- zichy 10y agoMaybe "vanilla as possible" is not desirable if it means that your markup is non-semantic. I like that Txt.fyi tries to be as simple as possible, but there are some UI anti-patterns like the textarea placeholder instead of a matching label. It would be pretty easy to add the proper HTML elements like <header> and microformats.
- lexicality 10y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but after a quick look through the first two links I have no idea what microformats are. Even the about pages appear to be nothing but buzzwords and acronyms. Is it like schema.org microdata?
- cyphar 10y agoI would consider http://ix.io/ http://ix.io/ to be even more "dumb" than this. And it has a command-line client too.
- iso-8859-1 10y agoThe age of ix.io (apparantly running since 2009) makes it a lot older than almost all these services.
- libpcap 10y agoNo previewing before you actually post?
- Sephr 10y ago> no database Incorrect. This uses storage on a server to store post data. When I first read that I thought this would be a distributed p2p platform of some sort. The p2p web platform being worked on at OFTN makes it very easy to create a truly static version of this website (100% client-side p2p logic & data distribution) without a server database. You will be liable for illegal content uploaded to your server (when notified of its existence), so you will be required to remove content from your server when you receive court orders/DMCA takedown requests/etc. With a proper p2p tracker-based system, you can simply forward legal proceedings to the ISP of infringing users, and avoid the legal time sink involved with this kind of site.
- blhack 10y agoI think what they mean is that the files are stored as static files on a disk. I believe most people would call this a "document store", to contrast it with a RDBMS, or colloquially, a database.
- derefr 10y agoIt's not a relational database, but it's a database. A filesystem, where the directories represent tables and the files represent records, is effectively a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_database_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_database_model.
- beschizza 10y agoI have been enlightened!
- imadfy 10y agoSomeone is going to implement file storage using this. :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kin 10y agoLegible is subjective. I personally find the font and spacing quite difficult to read actually. Conceptually reminds me of an old writing platform I used to use called QuietWrite. Loved it while it lasted.
- toephu2 10y ago"know the form of your voice is out there forever." I doubt this site will still exist in 5 years.
- beschizza 10y agoI promise that so long as I can pay my domain name dues and maintain backups, the stuff posted to it will remain online e forever, even if posting new stuff has to end for whatever reason
- beschizza 10y agoI promise that so long as I can pay my domain name dues and maintain backups, the stuff posted to it will remain online e forever, even if posting new stuff has to end for whatever reason
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nichochar 10y agoSo, pastebin?
- mattbgates 10y agoVery simple, to the point. Great tool. These types are becoming more popular for people who don't really care to blog and just want to get something up quickly. I think pen.io were the ones who pioneered the idea of it. So many others followed and I wrote something similar: https://mypost.io/ https://mypost.io/ It allows for much more user control including easy HTML and CSS usage with the ability to set your own URL. It hasn't receive as much thrill as your product has on Hacker News, but it is being used worldwide.
- MJSplot_author 10y agoI just want to chime in and say that I've had a look and a quick play with mypost.io and think it looks awesome. Like many of the links on this HN thread, but with way more feature. As you are allowing HTML entry, how are you protecting against Javascript inside user created pages?
- mattbgates 10y agoI appreciate your great feedback. I barely had any influence when writing it, but all I knew was that I wanted to be able to write HTML and CSS -- and help my visitors with learning the basics, without having to even sign up for an account. All HTML is allowed though iframes seem to be so/so -- sometimes they work, sometimes not. There is certain Javascript that is allowed, but others I've had to disallow. The way I've been able to allow it and monitor it is through BBCode. Basically writing [script src=myjsfile.js][/script] or something like [script]alert('hey there');[/script] is how you can get Javascript on a post but it does go through a filter beforehand to scan for any potential harmful code. Trying to write javascript the original way doesn't usually work. At one point, I had Javascript as a main feature in the Advanced Options section, but I've since removed it, as I saw its potential use for abuse. As more and more users are using it from around the world, it's kind of interesting to see the clever "hack codes" people come up with. For the most part, I've mostly filtered out all "dangerous" code, but it still arises occasionally as the Internet evolves and more people are clever. Mainly with the hacks I've seen: people using it to redirect directly to their own spammy websites. People creating divs that block MyPost but show a message on top and you can't do anything but go to the person's website or link. I've been able to filter these types of codes and prevent them from being entered into a post. The thing with Javascript though, there are dozens of ways to write the same code. I even had to build my own captcha as people learned how to automate the creation of mass-posts. Some Russian guy emailed me (it was in Russian, but the translator basically told me he was pissed off because I added the captcha), but I knew it was him who created about 2000 posts in less than an hour. They then learned how to somehow bypass the Google Recaptcha and so I ended up building my own, which fortunately, at the moment, has successfully stopped bots from being able to automatically post thousands of posts at a time. I'd rather people use it for its true purpose: getting webpages up on the Internet in seconds; learning how easy it is to code, etc. than to have hundreds of thousands of "spam" posts on the website. So those have been my battles since creating it: fighting bots and fighting people who are coming up with clever ways to "hack it".
- derefr 10y agoIt's a pastebin, with somewhat-nice formatting. I think half the "pastebin problem" has been solved by just avoiding setting up your own backing store (and frequently your own input step), and instead being a presentation-proxy for a more "raw" content-editing service, like Github Gists. For example: http://gist.io http://gist.io There are a few services like that; what I'm still yearning for, though, is one that either 1. has a real design team focused on making its pages "read" well, like Medium does; or 2. does have accounts, to let you set up a custom theme for your pages. (Though you can be creative about this, for example by letting the Gist include a JSON/YAML/TOML/whatever properties file that specifies the theme, and by making the themes Github repos that the service just pulls and caches on first use rather than needing to own itself.) A service that offered either of these would finally fulfill the promise of letting me separate "writing" from "blogging", such that I wouldn't really need a "blog", just a microblog containing links to my own posts.
- knolax 10y agoIt can host more than just plaintext https://txt.fyi/+/36d433e6/ https://txt.fyi/+/36d433e6/
- ecesena 10y agoSorry for being annoying, but the text area says "Write." and the button "PUBLISH". I'd keep the same case and punctuation.
- vzaliva 10y agoGopher reincarnation?
- diiaann 10y agoConsolas is not the most legible option for reading non-code.
- arisAlexis 10y agohow does it differ from pastebin?
- bvrlt 10y ago> "Long live the independent web!" I see how you can call this independent (eg. not a big hosting company), but for me the independent web is people hosting their content and keeping control on it. The ideal case is everyone hosting on their own machine (the old WWW?)
- ekevjn 10y agoLady and gentlement: http://imgur.com/n4Qo0yb.jpg http://imgur.com/n4Qo0yb.jpg
- duke360 10y agohttps://txt.fyi/+/33ffa358/ https://txt.fyi/+/33ffa358/
- rusk 10y agoSo I had a go of this. I pasted in Yeats' Second Coming [0] (feels somewhat salient these days) to see how it looked [1]. For the most part it looks okay, but visually it adds too much space between lines and the gap between the two verses has been eliminated. I guess what's happening here is the usual HTML thing of compressing all whitespaces. I would just be concerned that if a plain-text medium is being used then whitespace becomes more important for formatting and it should perhaps be preserved. [0] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/second-coming https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/second-coming [1] https://txt.fyi/+/f765eda5/ https://txt.fyi/+/f765eda5/
- jpl56 10y agoI followed the links and got rickrolled. Wasn't it the real purpose of this website? ;-) Great!
- libeclipse 10y agoIt seems to me like this is just a lightweight pastebin clone with some extra privacy and markdown support. I don't see the value. Feel free to enlighten me -- anyone.
- zhte415 10y agoTried some ASCII art, but it appears multiple adjacent spaces get collapsed into a single space, meaning this isn't the platform I was hoping for for ASCII needs. Plus, the line spacing eliminated the possibility for sane multiple-line ASCII. Definitely hipster not true oldskool. I will live and dream...
- greatNespresso 10y agoJust curious, how long did it take to build ?
- lettersdigits 10y agogreat service (ux, speed, no bloated BS JS/CSS). But the domain is difficult to pronounce (say) in my head, which is really bad, brand-wise .