Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 1:58 PM

Something fun I whipped up

I have a new writing tool I'm working on and wanted it to be easy to create beautiful essay pages from it, like Medium. But Medium doesn't have an API. So I made an essay-viewer that has one.

http://myword.io/

Now, I'm not a great CSS hacker. That's obvious. But all that's needed is a framework to get started. That's the idea.

I'm going to keep iterating over it. I really like the way it feels. And if you have any ideas on how to improve it, please feel free to fork.

How to make an essay of your own

  1. It's not pretty.

  2. You have to type in a technical language called JSON. It makes sense and it's pretty simple, but it's also exacting. If you misplace a quote or a comma it will fail. If you've been thinking you want to learn to code, this would be a very easy way to start. (Another way of saying that programming isn't easy.)

  3. You must have a way of storing a file in a public place with an http:// address. I like to use the Public folder in Dropbox.

  4. Start with one of the example JSON files, for example this one.

  5. Edit it, and upload it. Suppose the new address is this: http://someaddress.com/my.json

  6. You can get myword.io to display it with this URL:
    http://myword.io/url=?http://someaddress.com/my.json

That's really all there is to it!

An example that works

http://myword.io/?url=http://liveblog.co/misc/demo.json


Last built: Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:07 AM

By Dave Winer, Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 1:58 PM. Don't slam the door on the way out.