Working on a long Steemit post? Save the draft as a Github gist file.
I just saw this Steemit idea post by @bacchist requesting a save draft feature. I think it's a great idea, and I'm curious if it would be implemented in the steemit client code only (off blockchain) using local browser storage or if something more permanent would be needed server side. Or maybe there could be a direct integration with a certain code repository...
Either way, I thought it'd be helpful to reply with what I did for my rather long introduceyourself post. Just use a Github gist file!
Github supports Markdown (interesting historical side note, Aaron Swartz collaborated on the creation of Markdown) so you can simply create a private gist and give it a .md file extension like so:
To create a gist file (after you create your Github account), just click on the gist link in the header:
As you can see, I went through 13 revisions before posting:
What's also nice about using a Github gist file is you can send the link it to your "editor" (my wife, in my case) so they can prevent the world from knowing how bad at spelling and grammar you really are. :) Even if it's a private gist, with the link they will be able to view it without needing a Github account themselves.
Happy Steeming!
Huh, a 2 year old post and it's still a gem. Thanks for the suggestion! Going to do this on my GitHub.
Your post appeared on the top of Google's SERP and I didn't bother looking into other suggestions. Has there been any apps since this post that saves and auto-posts our drafts on schedule?
Maybe I should build one.
I think there are plenty of tools out there. You can check https://steemprojects.com/ as well.
Busy.org and ESteem (mobile app) both support drafts built into the interface.
Ah yes drafts, but only ones currently being typed. If I'm typing multiple posts that are not yet ready to be published, I would still like to save those as well.
Thanks for replying.
Nice idea .. but requiring a github login is a non-starter .. however .. if you were able to link your steem account with a github account on steemit .. that would open up many possibilities for those thaz want them
Great idea!
Thanks @xerox. When you say a non-starter, do you mean from a privacy perspective or just from an ease-of-use-for-non-technical-people perspective? I figured many of the early adopters would be tech focused and might already have a Github account, but yeah, creating an account on some third party system just for a place to create drafts is probably too cumbersome for the average user.
Tahkns for tihs atrilce. My kdis tie up my cmoptuer, so olnie storgae is graet! Triygn it out nwo.
Hahah! Nice!
Hey @lukestokes, good to have you here. Nice tip.
Thanks @billbutler! How cool is this to see decentralization and blockchain technology being used like this?!?
Miss that you're not here in Nashville anymore, but maybe someday we'll get down to visit you all and get out on the water.
Please do! We have an extra bedroom now. Make sure you follow @xeroc and @donkeypong. They are old school bitshares guys. Also @xeroc has build the Piston API for posting from a command line here.
You know what's awesome about this whole thing? Having been here only a couple days, I was already following @xerox and already liked and enjoyed @donkeypong's content. Incentivized curation works! That Piston API looks interesting for sure.
I like the idea a lot!
What I actually ended up doing this morning is finding a text editor that supports markdown. It's called ReText and it's in the ubuntu repositories. Provides a nice preview as well.
I think I like your solution better, though. Not being tied to any particular device is an advantage. And being able to roll back to previous versions is another plus.
Very cool! Glad it was helpful. Yeah, I've toyed around with getting a good markdown editor, but I also want to learn the raw syntax myself. To me, the big benefit is being able to send your post to someone for review, prior to going live with it on steemit.
Thank you!
You're welcome, @stealthtrader!
I'll be lazy and comment instead of reading the whitepapers, but as somebody who loses internet connectivity near constantly, the Steemit site should adopt Github's or Trello's approach to ensure local edits don't get blown away on reload. I've always assumed Github used localstorage in the browser, but never dug in. Depending on how long the content is, hitting submit only to find our your connection died and your content is gone… not a fun thing :)
(A quick test shows it doesn't fail so spectacularly, thankfully. Since the submit is ajaxy, the page doesn't reload. Hooray for that, at least. Accidentally closing the browser tab though would still be a bad time. Restoring the tab doesn't restore the content.)
Oooh… Interesting. Looks like unsubmitted comments persist on page reloads. Posts don't though, as far as I can tell.
I've also noticed if you hit "Reply" but don't reply, it remembers you were going to reply and the box will still be open later. So there is some saving going on. As for the white paper, it doesn't discussion user interface details. ;)
Just an advice:write the article in Microsoft Word where you can edit it and also save it and when you are finished you can export it to Steemit.
What do you mean by export it to Steemit? Do you mean save as HTML and then use that HTML or does Word have an option to export as Markdown? Historically, Microsoft automated HTML creation is... quite poor.
Has anything changed in this space? I saw https://stackedit.io/editor is a pretty cool tool that works like a markdown WYSIWYG but wondered if people out there had an idea of which markdown WYSIWYG is the best? I'm new here, Hi, thanks for this post.
Hello. I mostly just use Sublime, myself.