Show HN: HackPad is the best wiki ever(hackpad.com)
hackpad.com
Show HN: HackPad is the best wiki ever
https://hackpad.com
85 comments
About your login issues, I integrated BrowserID to a project I'm working on the other day, and my god, am I in love. BrowserID.org is beautiful and very well made, easy to use and easy for the users to understand (you don't really realize you're at a third party website).
Integration with django took about ten minutes and I don't have to wrestle with all the forgotten password templates and workflows, changing passwords, storing them securely, etc etc any longer. Also, it doesn't depend on Facebook, Google or anyone else (if I want to run the verification myself).
I really hope it catches on, and I'd strongly recommend it to any dev.
Integration with django took about ten minutes and I don't have to wrestle with all the forgotten password templates and workflows, changing passwords, storing them securely, etc etc any longer. Also, it doesn't depend on Facebook, Google or anyone else (if I want to run the verification myself).
I really hope it catches on, and I'd strongly recommend it to any dev.
BrowserID looks interesting, but what about on public terminals? The average user may not understand that they're logged in to your site and BrowserID, and as such would leave themselves mistakenly logged in.
See the BrowserID demo site - http://myfavoritebeer.org/ - as an example of this. Once you're logged in, the "logout" button does not truly mean logout - anyone could log you back in in two clicks.
See the BrowserID demo site - http://myfavoritebeer.org/ - as an example of this. Once you're logged in, the "logout" button does not truly mean logout - anyone could log you back in in two clicks.
That's a good point, they need a "public terminal" option at browserid.org. I'll email them now.
However, considering that it's pretty easy to add two-factor authentication to the provider (in this case, browserid.org) using Google's open source libraries or any other way, I'd say this is a huge net plus. After all, logging in via Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other such provider has the same weakness.
However, considering that it's pretty easy to add two-factor authentication to the provider (in this case, browserid.org) using Google's open source libraries or any other way, I'd say this is a huge net plus. After all, logging in via Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other such provider has the same weakness.
Click "read only", then paste this into your browser bar and hit enter...
Hope this doesn't piss anyone off, just trying to be helpful. Seems like a nice product that people will enjoy thoroughly.
javascript:(function(){modals = {'showModal' : function(){}};})();
Hope this doesn't piss anyone off, just trying to be helpful. Seems like a nice product that people will enjoy thoroughly.
This just hides the sign in modal dialog. Your changes are not saved until you sign in.
It's totally awesome that you're poking around in the code :)
It's totally awesome that you're poking around in the code :)
Haha, glad you're ok with that. Just wanted to play with the editor to get my feet wet, figured others might want to do the same.
Yeah great that he's okay with us poking at code that is being downloaded interpreted and run on our own machines(!) j/k ;-)
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Thank you for making this. I really like it.
A long time ago in a startup far far away a friend and I built something like this. Ours was nowhere near as elegant. We would look for CamelCaseWords to kick off the autocomplete but your use of @ is much better.
Delightful moments: pasting an image url embeds the image. Consider letting me backspace the image to get back to the url.
The multi-user edit seemed very smooth. Better than collabedit to this user.
The task list is nice. I'd love to have a title to the task list and be able to query for and surface all task lists across pages.
Please consider supporting #hashtags if only so you can show a tag cloud. The built-in search is great.
I couldn't figure out how to link to a person.
Finally, for users who login with their own email address, please consider letting them in right away. At most have the confirmation step be something they can complete later. Eliminate friction at every turn.
All in all a really nice product.
A long time ago in a startup far far away a friend and I built something like this. Ours was nowhere near as elegant. We would look for CamelCaseWords to kick off the autocomplete but your use of @ is much better.
Delightful moments: pasting an image url embeds the image. Consider letting me backspace the image to get back to the url.
The multi-user edit seemed very smooth. Better than collabedit to this user.
The task list is nice. I'd love to have a title to the task list and be able to query for and surface all task lists across pages.
Please consider supporting #hashtags if only so you can show a tag cloud. The built-in search is great.
I couldn't figure out how to link to a person.
Finally, for users who login with their own email address, please consider letting them in right away. At most have the confirmation step be something they can complete later. Eliminate friction at every turn.
All in all a really nice product.
Just discovered the refactoring feature.
Select some text. Click "Create Pad" and give it a name. The new pad is created with the selected text and the name links to it. This was a little disconcerting at first but it's absolutely the right thing.
I got the @User stuff to work. I think it matches contacts from my google contacts against other users who have signed up for HackPad. That's reasonable.
Select some text. Click "Create Pad" and give it a name. The new pad is created with the selected text and the name links to it. This was a little disconcerting at first but it's absolutely the right thing.
I got the @User stuff to work. I think it matches contacts from my google contacts against other users who have signed up for HackPad. That's reasonable.
Unfortunate that they don't offer the software itself; I could use this at work, but I don't think we'd be allowed to use it on an external server.
The original Etherpad is open source. https://github.com/ether/pad
"Etherpad Lite" is built on node.js which to me makes it more desirable from a developer standpoint for a number of reasons, mostly for the same reasons one would generally favor node.js over Rhino, so I would definitely look into that one first. https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite
Hackpad might have a few advantages but the basic concept of tracking individual changes with colors is built-in to Etherpad and Etherpad Lite.
"Etherpad Lite" is built on node.js which to me makes it more desirable from a developer standpoint for a number of reasons, mostly for the same reasons one would generally favor node.js over Rhino, so I would definitely look into that one first. https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite
Hackpad might have a few advantages but the basic concept of tracking individual changes with colors is built-in to Etherpad and Etherpad Lite.
I'm also a frequent complainer about exactly this sort of thing.
Maybe there is some space in the market for a B2B company which could package up software like this for deployment within the firewalls of the ultimate customer...
Maybe there is some space in the market for a B2B company which could package up software like this for deployment within the firewalls of the ultimate customer...
Check out Confluence, from Atlassian, for the competition.
If there's demand, we'll definitely consider offering this.
Confluence is the wiki we use where I work and I absolutely hate it (ending tags is like you are opening a tag, so {bold}this would be bold{bold} (example, I don't remember any tags off the top of my head).
If something better came along that helped us rather than slowed us down it would be fantastic.
If something better came along that helped us rather than slowed us down it would be fantastic.
I checked out Confluence earlier this year and wasn't too impressed at all. So agreed, it would be great for something better to come along!
Oh god. I helped support an overly customized Confluence wiki that was to be THE wiki for the entire company one summer. I quickly grew to hate the software quite strongly. Took me a while to be objective about JIRA's other products when I used them later.
JIRA is the bug tracking software. Atlassian is the company.
JIRA is absolutely terrible as well. I can't express in words how much I hate and dislike JIRA, it's horribly slow and bloated user interface and how complicated it makes certain tasks... using it as an Agile tool makes it even worse especially with Greenhopper the add-on.
JIRA is absolutely terrible as well. I can't express in words how much I hate and dislike JIRA, it's horribly slow and bloated user interface and how complicated it makes certain tasks... using it as an Agile tool makes it even worse especially with Greenhopper the add-on.
We use JIRA + Confluence. We are a huge installation. Both work well, JIRA breaks much more often than Confluence, but then again we are adding a ton of records every single day. To be fair, JIRA breaks because some third party programs are really careless about how they call the API (ask for way too many records, and that sort of thing), if we shut off API access (and only allow JIRA access on the web interface), then all is well.
Confluence is very stable. We have a ton of content in it, and without it we are completely dead in the water. It works well.
Yeah the tags are a bit ambiguous, but I have never seen the tags get in the way. Downtime would get in the way much more.
Confluence is very stable. We have a ton of content in it, and without it we are completely dead in the water. It works well.
Yeah the tags are a bit ambiguous, but I have never seen the tags get in the way. Downtime would get in the way much more.
Lots of people here seem to dislike Confluence and Jira. What do you folks prefer?
Having used Bugzilla, Trac, Mantis, MediaWiki, and several other tools I 100% prefer Jira and Confluence...
Having used Bugzilla, Trac, Mantis, MediaWiki, and several other tools I 100% prefer Jira and Confluence...
After a long journey we settled on Basecamp. It is kind of shitty until you nail down your own workflow and the API allows you a lot of scope to do that through automation.
I'd pick any one of those over Jira and Confluence any day.
I tend to use Trac most.
I tend to use Trac most.
I agree... Multi resistant TB is to be preferred, compared to the black plague. :-(
(Mantis might have less capabilities than Jira, but I almost enjoyed working with it. That might have depended on the project. [Edit: On consideration, Mantis was simpler and didn't make me scream from pure hatred.])
(Mantis might have less capabilities than Jira, but I almost enjoyed working with it. That might have depended on the project. [Edit: On consideration, Mantis was simpler and didn't make me scream from pure hatred.])
Yeah, I've had a hard time figuring out why Atlassian's products became so popular. Good corporate sales people I guess. They charge a lot and the software is nearly universally terrible. Can anyone tell me some reasons I would want to use JIRA instead of Trac or Bugzilla?
I promise you that there's absolutely loads of demand from companies for things like this, so long as they can be deployed inside their own network.
On the plus side, you can charge them lots of money. On the negative side, it's not as easy (or cheap!) to market to these people and take care of their needs.
On the plus side, you can charge them lots of money. On the negative side, it's not as easy (or cheap!) to market to these people and take care of their needs.
Couldn't you offer something where you host the UI, but you allow a client to provide their own data source? That way the data stays on the client-side, and they never have to worry about upgrades, since you host the UI?
Github does this perfectly. You get a VM, fire it up and you're good to go.
This is an interesting project, however, as someone who administers several wikis, both public and private I honestly wouldn't give up control of the server side to the cloud ever. The simple reason is data control. I want daily backups of my wiki data. Can I do that with this?
Similarly, where's the source?
Where's the install for private wikis, such as a company's private internal wiki?
Where's the api so I can write plugins?
Where are the plugins?
What is preventing wiki spammers?
Can I theme this for groups?
I see that groups are 'private' based on my invitations to them, but how can I be sure this isn't easily compromised?
Anyway, this looks interesting, but I don't think it can be used yet for any serious wiki work.
Similarly, where's the source?
Where's the install for private wikis, such as a company's private internal wiki?
Where's the api so I can write plugins?
Where are the plugins?
What is preventing wiki spammers?
Can I theme this for groups?
I see that groups are 'private' based on my invitations to them, but how can I be sure this isn't easily compromised?
Anyway, this looks interesting, but I don't think it can be used yet for any serious wiki work.
> I want daily backups of my wiki data. Can I do that with this?
Yes. We back up hourly, and we give you a way to get a full html zip dump with a single http request.
> Similarly, where's the source? / Where's the install for private wikis, such as a company's private internal wiki?
Hackpad is not open-source but would a jar or VM you can run internally do the trick?
> Plugins? Nothing yet - we hope to make something
> What is preventing wiki spammers? Private instances are invite-only (or can be setup to automatically let people with certain email domains in), there's also revision history etc.
>Themes? Not yet.
>I see that groups are 'private' based on my invitations to them, but how can I be sure this isn't easily compromised?
Hackpad always runs on https and we take security seriously. Outside of that as I said - if there's interest we may offer a jar/vm you can run inside the firewall.
Thanks for the feedback / questions!
Yes. We back up hourly, and we give you a way to get a full html zip dump with a single http request.
> Similarly, where's the source? / Where's the install for private wikis, such as a company's private internal wiki?
Hackpad is not open-source but would a jar or VM you can run internally do the trick?
> Plugins? Nothing yet - we hope to make something
> What is preventing wiki spammers? Private instances are invite-only (or can be setup to automatically let people with certain email domains in), there's also revision history etc.
>Themes? Not yet.
>I see that groups are 'private' based on my invitations to them, but how can I be sure this isn't easily compromised?
Hackpad always runs on https and we take security seriously. Outside of that as I said - if there's interest we may offer a jar/vm you can run inside the firewall.
Thanks for the feedback / questions!
if you look for something similar and opensource, you should have a look at etherpad-lite: https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite
It looks neat. Why does it want access to my google contacts?
Why does this request access to my Google Contacts when signing in using my Google Account? No thanks.
We do it in order to let you auto-complete your contact's names in order to invite them to pads. We absolutely never email your contacts unless you explicitly invite someone. That said we understand your concern and hence offer the regular email sign-in option.
Consider saying this explicitly during the sign-up process! I avoided using my Google account to log in, but I probably would have gone ahead and done it if I'd known that you weren't going to email my contacts.
Very neat. I actually had a similar idea 2 or 3 months ago (although I'm sure this is older than that) to modify Etherpad Lite into a wiki to replace the Dokuwiki we currently use at work. I was going to just build a front-end that managed the documents, though, and only pass it off to Etherpad for the actual editing. This is a much more elegant solution, and the "@" linking is genius!
If you were ever considering contributing your modifications back to the community/Etherpad/Etherpad Lite, I would certainly make good use of them. Unfortunately our wiki is a highly integrated component of our custom-built Intranet, so we couldn't make use of a SaaS solution for it. But congrats all the same! I will keep an eye out for potential non-work uses.
If you were ever considering contributing your modifications back to the community/Etherpad/Etherpad Lite, I would certainly make good use of them. Unfortunately our wiki is a highly integrated component of our custom-built Intranet, so we couldn't make use of a SaaS solution for it. But congrats all the same! I will keep an eye out for potential non-work uses.
People seem to be liking it. What I think they like (at least that's my experience with it) is to see the HN community materialize in real time.
Just my 2 cents so that you can try to isolate feedback taking that into account.
Just my 2 cents so that you can try to isolate feedback taking that into account.
Good point. It's very much fun to see more realtime interaction with a forum. You feel less like a lurker and more like a real participant. Still, I think that in itself is good feedback about the product more generally--how you market it--rather than about the specific features.
Quick note: read-only mode isn't very read-only. Pasting and typing quickly still works.
I clicked a checkbox within the page copy, and the entire page suddenly blanked. (It may have just been a coincidence, though.)
Otherwise, looks great. :)
I clicked a checkbox within the page copy, and the entire page suddenly blanked. (It may have just been a coincidence, though.)
Otherwise, looks great. :)
This is probably an IE bug?
I can do this in Chrome windows. I can check a checkbox or type a few letters; I get a popup saying "sign in to make edits", but my changes still happened. I can dismiss the popup and again type in a few more letters before the blocking popup.
I really like the execution of this. It's like the Quick Notes web extension, however my beef with Quick Notes app is that I've lost some notes because I didn't realize that there might be a maximum character limit (not sure if there is or if my notes got wiped some other way).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mijlebbfndhelmdpml...
Could you make this into a Chrome web app, please?
Could you make this into a Chrome web app, please?
Yes, please. I would really like something to replace sidewiki for capturing, sharing, and later finding notes about Web sites.
With regard to saying "the best wiki ever".
I think it's best to show that its the best product (by being the best) rather than to explicitly to say it.
I think it's best to show that its the best product (by being the best) rather than to explicitly to say it.
Or just pull a Fox News™ and add a question mark to the end:
Hackpad: The best wiki ever?
Hackpad: The best wiki ever?
Nice, seems like they are taking some of the features of Microsoft OneNote to the web (checkboxes)
This looks very interesting! I hope you guys keep improving it. I really would like something like Google Wave/Etherpad that is robust and is actually being developed.
I would happily pay money for something like this if the performance and features can be maintained.
I would happily pay money for something like this if the performance and features can be maintained.
This is nice. I'd love it if I could create a company account, invite my colleagues and then know that only those people can access the pads that we make.
Also, ability to download all data as a dump would be nice.
Also, ability to download all data as a dump would be nice.
Is it possible to embed a hackpad in a site? I really looked around for an embed-able etherpad that can be easily made available into pages for users to collaboratively note down stuff ...
You could use any Etherpad Lite site [0]. Probably also works with the "heavy" Etherpad.
[0] https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Et...
[0] https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Et...
Some iPad bugs: I can type newlines and backspaces, but no characters. And when I leave the site, my keyboard stays open on whatever site I visit, which is really strange.
I think the best feature of a wiki is that you can edit it anonymously without logging in. I just won't bother contributing to wikis that require logins.
This is really slick! It's the first realtime, WYSIWYG tool I've used that still feels like a Wiki.
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Pricing?
How is it different from EtherPad and hundreds of its clones/instances?
Designer of EtherPad here. I'm a big fan of HackPad and I encourage people to give it a shot. I get a lot of questions about the best version of EtherPad out there, and HackPad is the one I recommend.
It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.
It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.
Would be interesting to know which features?
Some of hackpad's features are: task-lists, inline linking and page creation, simple image embedding, search, deep email integration, dropbox integration, mobile (iphone,android) support, an osx launcher/search app. The way hackpad handles basic editing and authorship annotation has also received a lot of attention and iteration. Play with it and let us know what you think!
Inline linking and page creation, image embedding, and search are plugins that are part of the etherpad source and just need to be enabled.
When you say it supports iPhone, does that mean you somehow made the contentEditable issue go away and can edit on iPhone, or is it just read-only support?
When you say it supports iPhone, does that mean you somehow made the contentEditable issue go away and can edit on iPhone, or is it just read-only support?
iPhone support is currently in beta. Basic editing works but it's fairly easy to break.
I think a hackers pad should really have a <code>-button (monospaced font). Otherwise, great tool.
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Fix that, then I'd be interested in giving it a try.
Edit: I missed the ability to sign in without Google/Facebook. It was a bit too small to notice. That being said... I signed up and gave it a try anyway, despite my misgivings. It's a neat product.