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Your World of Text, my current side project. Requires FF3+ or Safari 4, I think.
- bdr 17y agoAn explanation from the author: This isn't a startup, it's just an idea I thought would be cool. I'm announcing it on HN first, hoping to get technical and aesthetic feedback before I throw the URL around. The two browsers in the submission title are the only ones I have on this machine. Right now it doesn't run as smoothly as I'd want in FF3. There are a couple big optimizations ideas I have, but I was comfortable enough to post this without them. Was that a mistake? If you can try it out in some other browsers I'd appreciate that. I have no idea what IE will do. That's all. Hope you have fun.
- ekiru 17y agoIt also works fine in Chrome.
- yread 17y agoworks OK in Opera 9 and 10
- anigbrowl 17y agoLooks like it already arrived at 4chan :)
- davepeck 17y agoThis is oddly entertaining. Could you explain how you represent the "world" in the AppEngine data store? (Also, could you use cookies to bring me back where I left?)
- bdr 17y agoIt's really simple. This was my first App Engine project. There's only one model, Tile, that has contents, namespace, and x/y coordinates. The contents field is a string representing the text in this tile. The namespace tells you what page the tile belongs to (e.g., /newsyc), and the coordinates are relative to the starting position. Namespace, x, and y are part of the keyname, so contents is the only model property. I don't create a tile until someone writes to that area. I don't want to use cookies, but I'm thinking about implementing some kind of directions feature. ("Where am I?" "How do I get to X?") But I also want to keep the system really simple, so I don't know.
- davepeck 17y agoI assume you only construct a tile if someone types in it; not if someone simply scrolls over it? How large are the tiles?
- bdr 17y agoCorrect, and 8x16.
- davepeck 17y agoGot it. I ask because the tile size will seem to directly impact the amount of data store contention (aka the number of db.TimeoutExceptions). It would be an interesting study to look at contention rates (percentage of failed datastore reads) vs. tile sizes when the app is under load. (I also assume you make use of memcache, though I further presume that typing implies an immediate db put().)
- bdr 17y ago
- hyperbovine 17y agodoesn't load on my iPod so I can't speak to the functionality but I'd just like to commend you on not choosing some idiotic name like Floovr or Meeerrblap or Dooglity or Phlambo or Hogchaw or Speebu for your project. Makes it that much easier to take seriously.
- patcdr 17y agoIt actually runs better in IE8 than it did in Chrome on my work machine...
- makecheck 17y agoInteresting. :) It works in OmniWeb 5.9 (WebKit-based, though an older version).
- simanyay 17y agohttp://www.yourworldoftext.com/newsyc http://www.yourworldoftext.com/newsyc
- calcnerd256 17y agoDoes it take the path as the name of the world?
- Radix 17y agoYes. http://ianab.com/yourworld/ http://ianab.com/yourworld/
- joez 17y agoMaybe have a minimap feature? In the right hand corner, or a way to jump to the activity? I scrolled around for a while before I found where all the action was. Or a search feature. I think the trending topic is penis right now.
- snprbob86 17y agoI added a top feature requests table with a votes column. Time to get our collaboration on!
- Sephr 17y agoDoesn't work in Shiretoko 3.5.3pre.
- jokull 17y agoIt works in IE4. Just kidding.
- KiwiNige 17y agosame for IE 6 & 7
- pbhjpbhj 17y agodoesn't work in links2 either ;0)
- calcnerd256 17y agohe should add telnet support
- Oompa 17y agoCool, but it's starting to drop some keystrokes for me.
- peteysd 17y agoBackspace doesn't work for me but everything else does - I'm on Chrome.
- mojombo 17y agoSame on webkit nightly. Needs more backspace!
- bdr 17y agoI disabled backspace because I wasn't sure whether it should delete the char before the cursor (better for typing) or under the cursor (more natural if you click on something to delete it). Guess I'll just pick one... or have it delete under only if you clicked there?
- joez 17y agoA few other suggestions: It is too chaotic but I can see you taking this in different directions. You need a way to direct the flow, potentially even in a useful direction (I am thinking Yahoo/Mahalo Answers), or just like a trending topics feature in which different worlds are based on tags. Another thing you could do is to have a reset or form a new world every few minutes. This way there is a new slate. What you will probably need to end up doing in order to monetize this idea is to build a site around it. User profiles, trending topics, different links, regional worlds, answers, /random/, and /ANSI art/ (read: penises)
- rwolf 17y agoIt's painfully slow, and I ran into some glitches (ctrl v outputting only first letter). pretty fun, anyway. what about different (random) colors for different users, and a fade over time so older words decay?
- bdr 17y agoCtrl-v is intentional. I want to keep it "natural" as long as possible, although I'm sure someone will start crafting spammy POSTs soon enough.
- omouse 17y agoI don't get it, what are you supposed to do?
- Hexstream 17y agoRead and write. (You can scroll by dragging)
- jlees 17y agoI love how everything's penis, or gay, or some variation thereof. Scrolling around to find the more erudite conversations was remarkably fun though. I kind of like it just as it is..
- calcnerd256 17y agoif you find the good conversations, try to make breadcrumbs to them, but nothing that attracts vandals
- qeorge 17y agoLike it a lot! Its fun how it is, more features might take away the appeal.
- mcotton 17y agoThat is a really clever idea, I like it.
- cellis 17y agowow that is addictive
- joepestro 17y agoIsn't working in FF3.5, but works fine for me in Safari 4.
- JeremyChase 17y agoWorked fine for me in FF3.5.1
- Raphael 17y agoIs there any way to navigate by keyboard?
- ryoshu 17y agoFun, but someone kept deleting my Angband game.
- petercooper 17y agoThis site proves the old "normal person + anonymity == total retard" maxim. Trending topics seem to be "gay", "penis", and "Django sucks" - lol.
- 3pt14159 17y agoMe and about 5 other people were talking about slashes, for like an hour. Made up a good joke out of it: --Two slashes walk into a bar, one says to the other, "you got to make sure you help me 'escape' from here" Totally had a blast \\\\\
- PostOnce 17y agoTry adding /somesubdir which will give you a private page. The front page is vandalized but in time communities will form around subdirs
- die_sekte 17y agoI'm not sure what it is good for, but it looks and feels awesome.
- zoba 17y agoI had a lot of fun when I drew a face, and then got to watch other people alter (and improve!) it...until someone smeared through it with letters...
- nikolayv 17y agoIt does not appear to work for me in FF3 or Chrome at 6:23 PDT (linux).
- optomas 17y agoWorking here. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080827 Firefox/2.0.0.16 ah. try ff2 maybe? Other possibility is that what ever issue you were having has been fixed in the last five days. Absolutely brilliant idea!
- edw519 17y ago...................I love it!............................ ........cool..........dont' overwrite thiWhere is my dog? .......................................I can't find u..... ..What about zoom?.........*&^*#$&^@*#&@*......this sux... ..........How about timeout?---Can't overwrite for x secs. ...-----.................................................. Why are there no girls in HTML5 Canvas Experiment......... . . ................... ... .... . . .. 8675309 .... ... ..... ... ... Creativity:10 .......... Usefulness:Now a word from... ..a little too slow CCCC OOOO OOOO LL ... ... needs..... CC OO OO OO OO LL . . cut CC OO OO OO OO LL and .. CC OO OO OO OO LL . paste CCCC OOOO OOOO LLLLLL .. ..... . It's lonely down here
- bdr 17y agobtw, this comment made me really happy :)
- auferstehung 17y agoThis reminds me of the 34th Street wall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Street_Wall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Street_Wall
- prosa 17y agoThis reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ You could probably convince people to buy letters close to the "origin".
- diiq 17y agoSo, it's chaos, and a lot of it is junk, but there's a good bit of good stuff in there too. If the interface were better (navigation & editing commands) that would be sweet. Privacy would be a matter of picking a distant enough location, if you could jump to it. I also want zooming, but that would be a pretty major undertaking.
- alex_c 17y agoCool, it's multiplayer notepad! Works in Chrome for Mac.
- dnaquin 17y agoCool buddy.
- cmkrnl 17y agoVery cool :)
- whyleyc 17y agoDoesn't work for me in Mosaic.
- oscardelben 17y agoI'd be interested to know how you did that.
- jhrf 17y agoI enjoyed this immensley. I tried to make a kingdom of "x"s.
- kingkawn 17y ago==. / \ | 6 6 / \ - ) I am God. ) (
- skip 17y agoWorks in Chrome 2.0 on Vista.
- PostOnce 17y agoBrilliant. Obviously the front page is full of spam but this will be super-cool as soon as subcommunities establish what their page will be (yourworldoftext.com/whateverpagehere) and I figure out how to find them. I love it already.
- PostOnce 17y agosubdirectories are case sensitive? pros and cons people, discuss!
- PostOnce 17y agoHate to get spammy by commenting too much, but now that I've been using this for two days, words fail to convey how brilliant I think it really is. It's beautiful. It's art. It's a type of thing people rarely experience. I love it. Thank you for creating it :) edit: i want timestamps saved to some place every 10 minutes so that i can explore it chronologically.