It's taken me countless long nights and forgoing weekend adventures to finally reach this point. It all began when I couldn't find any good answers to medical related questions on Quora. Answer after answer were from doctors touting their own services to be the best when all studies I later combed through proved otherwise. I knew there had to be a better solution. Users shouldn't have to resort to continually scouring through verbose studies for high quality information.
This led to letting all users edit all posts by default, with the plan to allow some tags to restrict who can edit what (like posts with the tag "Blog"), and potentially allowing users to turn off the community edit feature if absolutely necessary. I'm still working that out.
In addition to wanting to provide a collaborative method to edit content, I realized that there is an abundance of hastily created websites dedicated to one component out on the web. A character counting website. An image color picker website. Creating an entire website dedicated to such a small task seems futile. It dawned on me that allowing users to build small components in addition to editing data could really help the user find what they need.
Thanks to ever increasing browser security, and successful roughly similar implementations exclusively for coders (such as jsfiddle), I knew it was possible. Now that I'm finally releasing it for Beta, I'm amazed at how far it's come. There's a long ways to go, and I'm sure everything will go wrong at some point, but it's great to be here.
Launch of Beta will be on July 11th
I'll be writing a blog post about once a week. I'll discuss upcoming changes, posts and components I've made, and more.
Last night I spent a few hours creating a quiz component. It will need updates, and it's shown me that the process of adding a component can be stilted when the component is complicated. I'll be working on that in the coming months.
I swear I don't want this site to be the next buzzfeed.
Here it is in action:
