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Writely is rightly amazing
Submitted by pfaffman on Fri, 2005-11-18 07:02. :: OSS
Wow. This post over at Weblogged
mentioned Writely in passing. I hadn't heard of it, but now I have
and it's pretty cool. The post said "Who needs Word?" which is
something that I've been saying for about 10 years now, but for
entirely different reasons.
I still insist on doing all of my writing
in Emacs, the One
True Editor and allowing LaTeX do the formatting. But
then, I'm a freak. The other reason that I'm on board with "Who needs
Word" is that OpenOffice.org seems to me a
suitable replacement for most of the planet, especially K12 schools.
(I have to admit that Excel's graphing package is a good bit cleaner,
but I don't think that matters much for K12 students.)
But that's not important now.
This Writely thing is a web-based editor that lets you save files to the Writely.com server. You can choose to make it public, and it gives you a url like this: http://www.writely.com/Doc.aspx?id=afh34wghv4sd. That makes publishing a document on the web pretty darn easy. But you can also make it blog stuff. With a bit of fussing I was able to get it to put stuff on my Drupal Blog. I had to go back in with drupal to assign it to a topic and such, but it let me write it with a pretty darn nice graphical editor right in Firefox. It's mighty fine. I'll still be inclined to use emacs when at my computer, but this looks like a tool that I might use more often. Oh, and you can also share documents so that multiple people can edit them. The possibilities of that are pretty darn interesting.
My concern is that my content is on their server, or, worse, that they have my (admin) username and password for my blog. (I suppose I should set up a separate user for writely to use to post stuff on my server.)
Anyway. This is cool. It may even be as cool as gmail. What I'd like to see (and what I'd like to see for something like gmail) is an Open Source version so that I can do this and keep the files on my own server. I'm pretty sure that there are pieces of this already done and it would take just a bit of glue to get them all together.
If you're a programmer and a student at UT and would like a project for an independent study or whatever, I'd be interested in working with you on such a project.
But that's not important now.
This Writely thing is a web-based editor that lets you save files to the Writely.com server. You can choose to make it public, and it gives you a url like this: http://www.writely.com/Doc.aspx?id=afh34wghv4sd. That makes publishing a document on the web pretty darn easy. But you can also make it blog stuff. With a bit of fussing I was able to get it to put stuff on my Drupal Blog. I had to go back in with drupal to assign it to a topic and such, but it let me write it with a pretty darn nice graphical editor right in Firefox. It's mighty fine. I'll still be inclined to use emacs when at my computer, but this looks like a tool that I might use more often. Oh, and you can also share documents so that multiple people can edit them. The possibilities of that are pretty darn interesting.
My concern is that my content is on their server, or, worse, that they have my (admin) username and password for my blog. (I suppose I should set up a separate user for writely to use to post stuff on my server.)
Anyway. This is cool. It may even be as cool as gmail. What I'd like to see (and what I'd like to see for something like gmail) is an Open Source version so that I can do this and keep the files on my own server. I'm pretty sure that there are pieces of this already done and it would take just a bit of glue to get them all together.
If you're a programmer and a student at UT and would like a project for an independent study or whatever, I'd be interested in working with you on such a project.