Forum / Better HTML Editing?

• 
  Stephen Stark

  Feb 18, 05:08am

  It would be a great thing to have a better (possibly WYSIWYG) means of editing the story. Since it is an electronic posting place, it would be nice, especially if it gave the author a the capability to do some fun things with javascript, e.g., pop-up bubbles that might act like footnotes, or text notes. Or encourage a more electronic fiction/poetry feel.

  Another cool thing would be to enable (and I'm guessing none of this would be cheap) commenters to inject comments—for the author's viewing only, perhaps—directly into lines or words, sort of the way that Word or Pages or Acrobat does.

  Or how about a mashup space/place where people could collaborate? Certainly the technology exists out there for all of this.

  And what about the ability to delete a story that maybe so embarrasses you now that you cringe every time you think of it?

• 
  Jürgen Fauth

  Feb 18, 12:56pm

  Thanks, Stephen. The text editor has given us a lot of grief, and people still occasionally encounter problems trying to post a story. So, we're wary of adding too many bells & whistles before we're happy with the basic functionality. Carson is planning a thorough overhaul of the way stories are posted, which would bring back the story pictures, and we're planning to add a way to simply upload a Word file without cutting and pasting.

  The editor we're currently using is WYSIWYG, it's just limited to basic stylings like bold, italics, etc. I'm not sure how I feel about javascript -- pop-up bubbles could be fun, but in the meantime, there are old-fashioned ways of adding notes that work.

  A function to annotate a story or poem line-by-line sounds like a great idea, but there are two reasons why it's fairly low on our list of priorities: you're right that it would require a healthy amount of programming, and in the meantime, there's a fairly simple work-around -- people have been copying-and-pasting lines they'd like to talk about into the comment box, which isn't quite as elegant, but again, it works for now.

  Collaboration was a big part of my initial plans for Fictionaut and then became increasingly sidelined while we tried to get it right for one writer at a time first. We're hoping to roll out some interesting ways for people to collaborate eventually.

  As for the deletions: this is a question that gets asked a lot, so we probably have to make it more visible, but there is, in fact, a way to delete stories. You can find it on the "manage stories" page under the top menu with your name, or directly at http://fictionaut.com/my/stories.

• 
  Stephen Stark

  Mar 12, 05:27am

  Very interesting. Seems so much is possible with AJAX and javascript these days, but it does cost money.

  Love what you're doing here. The collaboration part would be very exciting.

  Steve

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