pageoftext.com

Gordon McCreight showed off his latest silly creation, pageoftext.com, at the last WikiWednesday. It’s a silly concept, and it’s got a silly lack of features. What’s really silly is how useful this silly little concept is. It’s considerably simpler than Writeboard, slightly more featureful than the various Pastebins, and better than both.    (M4D)

pageoftext.com is a collaborative text editor on laxatives. All features you might think you need have been flushed away to oblivion. There’s no formatting, no registration, and no security. Editing happens in plain text. The URLs are human-friendly, which is good, because you’ll need to remember them if you ever want to find them again. Gordon does have a remind feature, in which you describe what’s on the page, and then he tries to find it for you.    (M4E)

It’s great for when a bunch of people — especially normal people — need to edit a file together quickly and easily. You don’t have to go through the normal hullabaloo of logging in, because you don’t have to login. You don’t have to describe the markup, because there is no markup. It’s totally task-focused.    (M4F)

This, in theory, is what Writeboard was supposed to be, except I think it’s a whole lot better. When I use Writeboard, I’m constantly reminded of what it’s not, as opposed to being excited over what it is. Writeboards are no easier than a Wiki to use, but they’re much less useful.    (M4G)

I love pastebin (known as nopaste in some circles) for a lot of reasons. Pastebin emerged because developers collaborating on IRC needed a Shared Display. It’s brain-dead simple, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. pageoftext.com addresses a different goal than pastebin, but it has similar affordances, and could be used the same way.    (M4H)

Gordon has been militant about feature creep, which is a good thing. That said, I started a page suggesting new features. Feel free to add those there. Or, if you prefer not to think about such esoteric things, you can add some Philadelphia-area restaurants and reviews to my Philly restaurants page. (I’m visiting Philly for the first time next weekend, and I need some good cheesesteak recommendations.)    (M4I)

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