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Show HN: Something I built for Nanowrimo
I built constellational.com two days before November began, hoping it would help me write. It's just a blank canvas. The url updates itself as you type. You can send a different version to different people or bookmark the latest url for yourself.
- siromoney 13y agoIt will probably break under the slightest load though; clickable: http://Constellational.com http://Constellational.com
- poissonpie 13y agoI like the idea behind this - it would be sort of automatic version control for writing if you added the ability to view your url history. What's your tech stack?
- siromoney 13y agoThe url changes a bit too frequently for that. Static page served from s3 (through cloudfront) that POSTs to nodejs app that writes to s3. Can clearly be abused.
- siromoney 13y agoBy which I mean: bookmark the versions you like!
- poissonpie 13y agoAgreed. Still, I like the concept. Nice work!
- siromoney 13y agoThe in-between part is here: https://github.com/arpith/constellational https://github.com/arpith/constellational
- Jemaclus 13y agoI dig. Very neat. I would throttle the URL thing so that it only changes the URL if the user has stopped typing for, say, 2 seconds or something. That way it doesn't generate a new URL for every letter you type. Other than that, very cool.
- siromoney 13y agoSounds like a good idea. Should probably fix scrolling first though.
- ashdav 13y agoI like it a lot. Lots of potential for versioning. I feel any real load could kill the server though (or your AWS budget!), so maybe trigger the save when I stop typing for half a second. Seems to lag a little when I type quickly. I'd like to be able to save certain URLs as different versions to share. Could come in handy for collaboration or editing too.
- siromoney 13y agoYeah it's really fragile, please be nice. https://github.com/arpith/constellational https://github.com/arpith/constellational The plan is to eventually use websockets ("magic") instead of foolishly POSTing, but is it possible that watching 'input' is the real mistake here? Perhaps I should just save every two seconds (or half second, as you suggest). What would you suggest about saving urls? I couldn't think of anything easier than just bookmarking.
- whichdan 13y agoWith each new URL you could store the previous ID and use that to build out a chain. It might be fairly expensive to do that dynamically, but there's no reason you couldn't serialize all of the previous IDs in a single column. IMHO POSTing is fine, but you definitely want to wait a couple seconds each time.
- siromoney 13y agoMost urls are not worth saving, but you're right, it's time to make a feed.