Ask HN: Pinterest for Text?
I haven't found anything good enough for this. Ideally it should be like Pinterest (or maybe Instagram) for text, an unlimited canvas of text previews (masonry.js style or stacked design). A search function would also be useful.
I was thinking that this description is close to a blog but I'd like it to be optimized for displaying a lot of different snippets (as in Pinterest and giving the choice to the user to "peruse" through the entries quickly) but clicking on an entry should result in expanding into full content (again like Pinterest).
A Hugo blog offers a clean view of the titles (one after the other) but no preview of the actual content. Wordpress is optimized for only a posts per page. On the other end something like Bret Victor's quote page is too simple and doesn't offer the "read more" feature: http://worrydream.com/quotes/
Anyone has seen anything out there that matches my needs? I don't mind paid services.
I could implement a text preview feature if you want. Currently you can have long titles and descriptions with Markdown support
Here’s an example with articles I have saved: https://bmarks.net/felipecortez/tag/articles/?expand=all
You can make your posts public and they'll be shown on your usage page, for example: http://pinboard.in/u:incredimike/
Evernote does something like this (web clipper). In the left pane it shows the first lines of the saved fragment, in the right pane it show the full saved fragment and it also includes a link to the original work
Evernote works well for saving, but not for presentation. and its search is sluggish with a bad UX.
I like search on HN (by Algolia), it feels snappy and I can find what I'm looking for relatively fast.
In other words, I want to curate my Evernote notes list in a web app where design is a first class citizen. That doesn't mean pompous or flashy stuff, for example I find HN's design serves its content well and pg's site does the same for essays.
Sometimes I think about taking a Wordpress theme with masonry and stripping it down so that it has no visual distractions other than the content (and then adding the extra functionality needed). I'm not sure if that's better than building something from the ground up.
Evernote does the capturing well enough. Both Evernote and OneNote allow capturing parts of a web page with their web clipper but OneNote's workflow is cumbersome.
I think about this like in writing (pg's model of writing essays), where you write a lot of ideas down in no particular order, dumping random thoughts as they come and then on subsequent "passes" you try to bring the scattered thoughts in order, arrange them in paragraphs etc.
Another tangential idea is Jupyter notebooks for research ("research" as in studying a topic). For example if you're researching a topic, you can use Evernote web clipper to do all the capturing from various webpages and then you would have curate/organize this information in a "jupyter notebook for text"/blog post. Maybe offer the functionality to add comments/marginalia (like distill.pub's implementation, e.g. https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable-parameterizations/).
Drawing snippets from multiple web pages and books also brings Ted Nelson's transclusion concept to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion
This is not hardcoded behavior. You can change this in a theme pretty easily.
Edit: I don't want to watch the whole game I just want highlights.
I have tried almost everything: Evernote, OneNote, Google Kepp, lastly Wenote (Android), Dokuwiki, etc.
Currently I'm jumping between Notion and Telegram (saved messages).
I'd be more than interested if something 'better' emerges. Or, when I know code, I'll probably start my own as a side-project.
Notion feels like the opposite of the Unix tenet, "do one thing and do it well".
I was somewhat excited when they released their web clipper recently but I found out it doesn't allow to save snippets from a page (only allows to save the url), which makes it useless for me.
Also the emojis are very offputting. Maybe it works well if the user wants to organize a trip with friends but I want to use it as a research tool.
I think a webapp for this would be simply awesome. (Sharing quotes and text snippets through collections).
I'd love to know if someone has another suggestion
Memo tried to carve out a niche ("Facebook is for photos. Twitter for discussing sports and Donald Trump. Memo is for learning.") (https://web.archive.org/web/20161021001811/http://memoapp.co...) but they ultimately threw in the towel. (http://memoapp.co/)
I doubt there's going to be a successful new product for this because Pinterest and Twitter cover the use cases pretty well and are hotter media (à la McLuhan). Images are mostly a superset of text use cases. You can always put great text into an image, and doing so gives is more context and emotional color.
Also funny, if you search Hacker News for "pinterest text" you get this Ask HN and a Show HN from six years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558714 So it looks like QuoteRed also tried and gave up.
Maybe an open source app would work because it wouldn't need much of a sustainability model, just a few passionate dogfooding developers.
HN attracts the kind of people it attracts because of its simplistic design, no images and focus on content.
Here's the link if you'd like to give it a try: https://frackxn.com
Anyone remember what it was called?
I've been thinking about it for a long time and have several ideas and opinions.