Greetings,

Alex

Nice post. You make some very good points. I would be very interested to read Simon(from above)’s response to your ideas.

I seems we have different thoughts as to what we “expect” the app to be. (Oh, and the ctrl-c thing was just for comparison sake) Perhaps there should be two versions of the editor, a n00b version and a BS-in-CS version.

I’d like to hear about future-proofing as well. Actually, that came up in a conversation yesterday. I would like to use Jottit for a few projects, but I’m hesitant because I have no idea what will happen if the lights go out.

Cheers,

Matt

we might be just missing each other, but the ctrl-c and ctrl-v stuff works in a WYSIWYG just like it does in this simple textarea – so, no time lost there.

i’m all about getting stuff done quickly, too, but i’m also about the democratizing of technology – making it so you don’t have to have a BS in CS just to create a wiki/website. maybe Jottit is geared towards folks who already know wiki markup (i.e. experts), but i didn’t suspect that based on it being one of those ‘create a wiki in 3 secs’-type websites, the type of site i would associate with beginner technologists (i.e. n00bs).

there’s hope for it, but i just looked at it and thought “kinda like pbwiki, but no wysiwyg”, and “google page creator might crush everyone anyways”. curious what jotspot looks like when it’s re-released, too.

if i was imaginary jottit product mgr for a day, i’d suggest:
1) a wysiwyg – make it optional if u must, but make it default
2) do away with the ‘claim’ feature – semantically confusing; find another way
3) use a workflow approach to wiki/website creation – that is, try to use page creator to build a quick website and write down every difficulty you have, then fix it with jottit. for instance, currently, there’s no obvious way to build navigation into your google page creator website – that’d be a big one. basically, i’m suggesting a wizard-like approach where new pages are added to the navigation structure automatically. users can then veto/delete that link if they like. ah – i see the page list down the right-hand side acts as a nav bar of sorts – that’s very, very good. +1.
4) build a few nice css templates so that people are really wowed when they see what they’ve created in 20 seconds. right now, stuff looks real clean, etc., but it’s also sterile. start with one target market – the edumacation market – convince some css/graphic design guru that you’re gonna pimp their skills forever more if they’ll just hook you up with a super-fly design. I mention the edu market (I’m thinking grade school to high school) b/c it seems they really are starting to use this kind of stuff, it’s a large market, it could actually be useful to them, there is a humanist twist to helping educate kids and educators, etc. the template should have a fly/cutesy navigation bar/menu. and it’d probably help if you actually talked to a grade school teacher and asked them a few questions about what they wish they could do with a website. have a ‘homework’ page, a ‘field trip’ page, a ‘parental consent form’ page, a ‘pictures’ page, an ‘about/class description’ page, a ‘teacher’ page, etc. For template design, i’m thinking somewhere between the current designs/colors and a cuteoverload.com.
5) clean, search engine-friendly URLs are important, too, of course. looks like that’s handled. +1.
6) find a way to give some assurance that websites won’t go down the black hole if jottit decides to up and die or up and get bought the way jotspot did. FAQ question addressing this would work.

i tried using *this* and I thought it’d go bold, but it went italics as did _this_.

p.s. page creator needs a screencast.

I’m one of the founders of Jottit and I just wanted to thank you for the nice words and the awesome screencast!

Thanks,
Simon

I respectfully disagree. One of the most powerful elements of a wiki is the ability to format on the fly using markup. Jottit is a tool designed to build websites very quickly. Using markup is just like using keyboard shortcuts. Once you get used to using ctrl-c and ctrl-v to copy and paste, there’s no reason to click ‘edit’, point to the word ‘copy’ and then do the same thing to paste it someplace else. It takes too much time! Just like having to select something and click something else to format a document takes too much time once you’ve taken a few minutes to learn the markup.

Cheers,

Matt