I spent some time over the last couple of weeks surveying the amazing collection of Medium-like editors written in JavaScript. All open source, some very good. It's just amazing to see the collective energy and ambition of the JavaScript community. I've been programming a long time, on a lot of platforms, and have never seen anything like this.

I thought about integrating one of these toolkits with MyWord Editor, currently in development. I put together testbeds for the most promising ones, ZenPen and its derivatives, Dante and medium.js. They're all on the right track, each has advantages, but imho what they all were missing was a way to enable a motivated user to run a Medium-like blogging service with their editor as the centerpiece. A next-gen blogging system, built with JavaScript, with elegance and beauty at the center. Key point: this is achievable, within easy striking distance, in the spring of 2015.

I decided that rather than pick one beautiful simple editor, I'd sprint to the finish line with the standard pre-HTML5 <textarea> editor, release the whole thing as open source, and let the community decide what to do. There appear to be some front-runners, projects that are active and ambitious, going somewhere. I want to make it easy for people to work with me, rather than be in the position to choose a "winner" at this time, based on incomplete info.

With all the incredible open energy in the JavaScript world, I don't doubt we can move the leading edge forward, if we have the will to work together. I'm putting out my best invitation. I have a great back-end, perfectly suited to host a blogging environment (I have some experience with this), and a rudimentary editor. Let's see where we can go from here.

I expect to ship my editor next week.