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Show HN: Notably – a simple tool for sharing markdown notes (notably.cc)
74 points by chris140957 on Dec 8, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments


I implemented a similar idea a couple of years back, originally as a set of Perl CGI scripts. Nowadays the code is powered by a simple golang server:

https://markdownshare.com/

The service gets a ton of traffic, and some of it is content I didn't expect. For example I see a bunch of IoT devices logging IPs and temperature details.

At one point a group of students were sharing (binary) notes with each other. They'd each upload a gzip/base64 encoded binary and that was eating a ton of bandwidth. In short expect to be abused.


this is a good point, will get some safeguards in place


Nice, some comments:

1. I don't see details of retention anywhere, are you just storing indefinitely at the moment?

2. No sign-up is nice, but have you considered even just using cookies for 'my past notes'?

3a. ```Code blocks``` render as `inline code` in editing mode, which looks worse than not doing any 'preview' of them in edit mode at all IMO.

3b. ```lang hints (in the manner of Github flavour) are ignored, though some syntax highlighting is done with or without them.

3bi. This seems to mean that keywords from other languages are highlighted as if a keyword in the language used.

3bii. The syntax highlighting colour scheme used is not very colour-blind friendly.

4. Two users (uh, tabs) can concurrently edit, but each others' edits are not seen until refresh; so last to stop typing (=> save) wins.


Thanks for the feedback:

1. The backend is graphql/django/postgres and yes, the notes are currently being preserved indefinitely. At some point I might add a cron job to remove the empty ones

2. I'm thinking of adding a notebook option eventually, but still considering the best way of doing this in terms of not compromising the current look and feel, which I like the simplicity of

3. for these three points - the markdown editor itself is an open source solution () and not my own creation, so these issues are limitations of this library. I may fork it and make some fixes at a later date, although some of these issues may be fixable with simple css

4. good point, i'll try to implement some kind of a lock here


For 3, I'd recommend using as an editor https://codemirror.net/mode/gfm/ and then markdown-it to render it to a preview. It has variable height support too: https://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html.


Hi, I just launched notably. It's a simple app that lets you share any kind of text note, and supports markdown syntax

I created this mostly as a way of sharing notes between other developers. We use MS Teams at work and the interface for copying and pasting code snippets in and out of there is terrible

Notably requires no sign up - you can just create and share notes straight away. It's also completely free


Interesting! I had done something similar, and was thinking of moving it into some kind of public use like this, but with a bit more structure.

Discovered Joplin[0] which does pretty much everything I need, so I'm using that instead. With a shared repository, you could have your notes and be able to find them again in a nicely organized way.

[0] https://github.com/laurent22/joplin


This is fantastic. I am working on a peer to peer file system sharing tool in the browser. Soon I will add a text messaging component and I want it to support markdown cleanly just like this.

Excellent work


Thanks for the feedback! The markdown editor itself is actually just an open source solution, its not my own creation: https://github.com/Ionaru/easy-markdown-editor

I use the Vue implementation of the above library, which is here: https://github.com/F-loat/vue-simplemde


Are you starting from scratch or building on top of existing libraries? Curious to know because for text editors, there's systems built around CRDTs like automerge and yjs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...


I am starting from scratch. All the file system libraries I could need are provided by Node. All the data structures I am having to create just pass messaging which connects user interactions to the structures already in place.


Weird bug I've never seen before on any other site: I can't use the swiping feature on the Google Keyboard on an iPhone. Using swiping on the iOS 13 built-in keyboard worked fine though.


Shameless plug here :p

https://hackmd.io/

HackMD also allows creating markdown notes anonymously. You can share the note with a link, and start realtime collaboration. Welcome to give it a try!


Sounds like a great idea, but the site just brings up a blank page in both Firefox and Chrome on Android.


i'm actually not able to reproduce you're issue on either of my android devices


Just to let you know, I updated to the latest version of Chrome (Android) and it seems to be working fine now.


thanks for the heads up, checking now...


default for a share link should be the preview


this is actually true. I've just pushed a small change to change this now


that was quick, cool :)

Edit on the shared link is also a bit dangerous as there is no colab-collission detection. But there it really depends on the use-case.

I always wanted to set up a web renderer that I could quickly paste to (but was too lazy to actually do it), just to quickly show something to others.


It was never really my intention to disable edits in these cases - there is no separate view for editing/viewing notes. I am considering adding a lock to stop people editing the same note simultaneously, but I've got no plans to disable the edit button at the moment


Maybe, instead of locking something in, just have a read-only link and an editable link for every note, without being able to derive the edit link from the ro link.

Otherwise, maybe someone should implement this purely as a frontend to volatile.wtf

Now that I think about it, I kind of want to implement that.


Doesn't work that well on mobile Chrome (Android). You might want to test that.


Gist.github.com. it even turns them into mini git repos you can clone and fork.


This isn't really intended to do the same thing as gist


this is an absolutely beautiful markdown implementation.




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