I’m thinking of posting a Friday update each week to share progress each week, and thoughts on what is next, starting with this week. It is an odd week to start with because I did not actually do any development work this week. I am trying to take a few days or a week off from this project at the end of each month to avoid getting tunnel vision. I want to step back at the end of each month, remind myself what I am trying to do with the project overall, then come back and look at the to-do list of product features with fresh eyes.
With that in mind, I’m going to try to finish out the basic features next month to make this a more viable platform for individual bloggers. That allows me to deliver forward progress for authors on the platform, while giving me some time to continue discussions I’m having with more specific audiences with more robust requirements for their content.
Expectations for May should be around improvements to the UI on the published sites, expanded options for importing data, and the start of features to integrate with other services. If I get those elements complete, I’ll work on the technical underpinnings of the platform.
I’ve just pushed a few changes that are worth sharing:
Document Comparisons - this is a heavily requested feature in most scenarios. It allows an author to bring up a prior version of a document next to the current version, and see what has changed between versions. This initial solution for document comparisons is fairly raw. All it does is a simply display and give you an option to use the earlier version. I have a longer-term vision to allow you to edit them together, then push the results back to the editor. But I want to kick the tires on the current version for a while before I make it more complex.
New Editor! The editor for authoring documents has been replaced with something completely new. While it is not going to make much different to the system today, it is a far more flexible solution that will allow future features to be developed more quickly. It also gives almost complete control of the editor’s behavior to the dev team (me), which means as the system grows I should be able to avoid hitting walls because of “how the editor works”. For all of you creating documents, it should be a fairly small change. That being said, editors are notoriously difficult to get right, so I expect people to find bugs and problems. Send them to support@turtledocs.com so we can work on getting them resolved.
This is the feature I've been looking forward to creating, and the one that makes this system more than just a toy project.
There are two way to save content - Drafts, and Published.
When you save as draft, every save creates a new version. You will see a 'View Version History' button on top of your content form, and can then see a list of all of your drafts.
Any draft can be viewed, which will load it into a dialog for review, and then you can load it into your editor to revert back to that version.
There is also a button to directly load the version into the editor, if you already know which one you want.
When you save as Published, you are prompted for a comment. This allows you to have an ongoing private commentary about what changed over time, and why you made edits.
You can also leave the comment blank if you don't need that feature.
When the published content is saved, the draft versions are deleted, so even if you make many edits over the lifetime of your content, you won't be flooded with old versions.
Saving content as Published does not actually publish it - it just is ready for publishing, The next time you go to 'Site Management' and Publish your site, only Published documents will be visible to the publc.
I'll put together a demo video of it later this week.
I've added some options in the Site Management page to offer some pre-selected color schemes for your published site. The overall colors and UI of the authoring app is likewise updated - I'm going for bolder colors than many other apps choose, hoping people will enjoy a less washed-out look in their tools. Hopefully everyone likes green?
I've also put in a number of improvements behind the scenes which should improve the performance of the site. I'm still seeing some latency if the site has been idle for a while, especially when hitting public sites. I'll continue to research that, but the improvement are sufficient that I believe the site is usable now. If anyone finds otherwise, please me let me know at support@turtledocs.com.
A few new updates to the app this morning:
The initial design of the app only had a 'Save' button - you could create new content, but whenever you published the site, all documents would be written to your public site.
I realized that did not give people much flexibility for drafting documents they did not want to publish. It also would prevent me from recovering the site properly if I ever needed to bring it back from backups, as I wouldn't know which documents to publish or not.
So I updated the buttons when editing content. 'Save as Draft' marks content as a draft that will not be published to your site. 'Save and Publish' marks it to be published. Nothing goes to your public site until you publish from the 'Site Management' page, but this gives you freedom to have a more diverse workflow as you create your content.
When I first wrote this app, it was just for myself and I was focused on creating history timelines, so all topics were sorting in ascending order by date. That is not realistic for everyone, so you now have choices of whether to sort by date, or by headline. You can also choose ascending or descending order. The listed content when working in TurtleDocs will respect your selections, but more importantly your public site will be published with your selected sort order.
An RSS feed has been included when sites are published since day one, but it wasn't linked anywhere. I added an icon and link to the RSS from the top header of the home page of your public sites.
While I still anticipate improving the UI of the public sites, I took a step towards better sites with additional choices in how to lay out your content:
Note that the layouts that depend on subtopics do not show in the 'Edit Topic' dialog unless you add subtopics. Which brings me to...
As the prior note implied, Topics now have subtopics. I wanted to provide one more layer of granularity to organizing your content. They are completely optional, but if you want an additional layer of organization of your content, you can type out a list of subtopics in the 'Edit Topic' dialog, which makes them available when editing content, shows in the Content List, and expands the options for public site layouts.