One of the most desired features is finally here. We have created an API for doingText.

For now the API supports viewing a user’s list of discussions, viewing a single discussion including comments and creating a new discussion. Details can be found on our website.

Have fun integrating doingText into your own projects and we’d love to hear about the way you use the API.

We are preparing to launch publicly. Along with this we are starting subscription plans for the use of doingText. And this is how it’ll look like.

In addition to a free account we will offer five paid plans starting with a monthly fee of $5 for the “Micro Plan” up to $99 for the “Really Large Plan”. The plans are differentiated by the number of private discussions and the number of collaborators you can have. Collaborator refers to the feature of adding collaborators who also have a doingText account.
You can up- or downgrade or cancel your subscription at any time. Payment can be made with credit cards (VISA, Master, AmEx).

Every plan, including the Free plan, will have SSL security for the private discussions. Also, all plans will have all the other features like writing messages to other users, embedding the discussion to your own web site, get the whole range of exporting options and so on. You can always start as many public discussions as you wish to and you can also invite an unlimited number of cowriters by sharing the URL. Your cowriters will not be required to create an account in order to work with you (unless they like doingText and wish to do so, of course). This part of doingText won’t change!

Thank-You Plan for Beta Users
We have a “Thank you” offer for all beta users having helped us on so many levels. The beta account will automatically be upgraded to the Micro plan - for free. And the best is: You can stay on that plan forever. All of your existing discussions will be kept. You only need to upgrade if you need more private discussions.
So if you’re not yet a beta user of doingText, go grab your invite key here.

We plan to roll this out within the next weeks. We are currently looking for a credit card company that fits our idea of a comfortable subscription management. However, being a Berlin-based company ourselves this is not really easy due to German legal regulations. We’ll keep you posted.

Easily sharing your text with others has been raised to a whole new level. As from now you can embed a text to your own website. This is really some nice variation of your data belongs to you.

So how does it work?
Behind the menu item “Share” you find the embed code. Insert it to your latest blog post or create a new page on your site. Done.

At the moment, the embedded text shows the first 40 lines of the discussion and no comments. There’s a link to the discussion, so anyone interested in cowriting can do so with just one click (given the discussion is not password-protected).

In what kind of scenario can embedding be useful?
Some of you use doingText as a preparation tool for later blog posts. Instead of copying the text, you can now simply insert the code.
Another scenario would be planning an event (a workshop or alike) with some folks, you surely want to promote this on your blog by creating a new page there. Your visitors will then always get the latest status of the planning process.
Or, you have a discussion outlining a paper or experiment or alike for university. You could then not only write about the idea on your website and set a link to the discussion, but also bring an illustration of the developing process.

For the future we’re already thinking about offering a scaled embed code. A small version could be used for sidebars and would involve the first 5 lines. At the other end of the scale embedding the whole text would be surely great for publishing writing results on your website.

Have fun exploring.

At first, we want to say sorry for the mishap in the HTML-version of our last newsletter. We hope reading it hasn´t been too uncomfortable for you. Besides this, there are some fine news on new features.

The “home”-page is the central place for you to keep track of your discussions and manage your account settings. Consequently, the “edit profile”-link has moved to the “home”-page. Here, you can change your password and subscribe to or unsubscribe from the newsletter.
Also on the “home”-page there is now the possibility to specify your “News Feed” settings. The most important innovation is the option to get informed by email on certain events. Most likely you won’t have a daily look into your doingText account if there is no recent discussion you’re working on (though it’d be lovely to hear so from you). But you surely check your emails at least once a day. So there is now the option to get informed by email when someone…

As you can see, you actually have the choice how you wish to get informed: only within the “News Feed”, only by email or both.

We have some exciting news this week: Kristina Schneider joined the doingText-team. She’ll take care of design and usability and already has some fine ideas. We’re thrilled and you can be, too. Expect some great changes!
Now for the new features of this week.

Add lines a new way

At the bottom of the discussion field there is now an “Add Line”-button. It adds a new line at the end of the text. We have added this button for usability reasons. People starting their first discussion ever, happened to be startled by the display of text within the lines and thereby not knowing that clicking the line and hitting enter creates a new line.

Growing text area for comments
Just like the line fields of your text grow with the content, now the the text field of the comments grow, too. This way the commenting person always has the whole comment in sight.

Confirming notifications
Inspired by the Growl app für Mac OS X, all confirming notifications now come along in that style. There’s a little rectangle showing up in the upper right corner of the site for a few seconds. It tells you what has been successfully done. It appears after events like changing that status of a discussion, adding collaborators to your discussion, sending an doingText-invite to someone or logging out of your account.

Negative CAPTCHAs
The dark side of being on top of the google search when it comes to “text collaboration” is that we’re becoming interesting for spammers. We have now implemented a negative CAPTCHA to cope with spambots at least for the near future. It’s called negative, because the CAPTCHA works exactly the other way round and you as a user won’t see anything of it. There is no extra field the user has to fill in, but an invisible field for the bots called Honeypot. If something is filled in that hidden field it must be a spambot. Those requests will then be ignored.
More information on negative CAPTCHAs can be found on Ned Batchelder’s site.

No long opening speech today. Let’s get right into this week’s news.

Login notifications

Entering a site and not getting nowhere, ’cause the failwhale’s little brother won’t let you? Now what is wrong? From now on, you’ll get a specific answer to that question. Logging in to doingText, 3 possible mistakes can occurr. Either the account is not yet activated, the login (user name)/ email address is unknown or the password is wrong. So you exactly know what’s going on and what to do in the next step.

RSS feed
Subscribing to the RSS feed is now as easy as easy can be. In the header of a discussion you find the RSS symbol. Put the link to your feed reader and get informed on all the comments and edits to a discussion.

Auto-resize of images
So far, inserting large images led to the phenomenon that the images exceeded the discussion frames. And yes, that looked kinda awkward. Now images are automatically adjusted to fit the size of the discussion.

Textile
At this point on or another might need a little recollection of what Textile is about. The basics are to find in our guides. If you’re already used to wikis, Textile will be very familiar to you. If not, the don’t worry. Textile is really simple.
A few words ahead: Textile is a markup language used here in doingText to structure text passages on a minor level - just insofar as it is needed to talk about a text comfortably. We have already introduced it in our blog some weeks ago and here’s the link to our Guides.
There’s 2 steps: First, add .textile to the discussion title up in the header. For example “Films of the Week.textile”.
Second, use the Textile tags. Here are a few examples:
For bold phrases write *bold phrase*.

For bulleted lists write
• * Point a
• * Point whatever

Images, to come back to this, can be inserted by adding exclamation marks around the URL of the images: !imageurl!.

If you happen to find any tags not working, please don’t give up. Just write me an email to katrin [at] doingtext.com or use the Feedback button on the right to let us know.

Deleting comments


There have been requests for being able to delete single comments. This is now possible for comments you created yourself. Furtheron, the discussion owner can delete all comments. That way you can keep your comments balloon as cleaerly arranged informative as you wish to.

iPhone screenshot
We just love it! So yeah, here’s a picture of the read-only iPhone and iPod touch interface. And, by the way, there’s no extra URL or so needed. The interface loads automatically when entering doingtext.com via iPhone or iPod touch.

(thanks to iPhoney)

The first snow of this winter is past already. Berlin’s a little bitch when it comes to winterwonderlands. And while I grieve for that a few more moments, the new features are coming around.

First, the fixed bugs. Editing protected discussions was not possible in some cases. This is solved. The textile code for interlaced lists didn´t show up correctly. That is straightened as well. But now for the new features of this week.

User-to-user-messages

Working together with other doingText-users? Send them messages with all that’s on your mind. To send a message (aka to start a dialog), go to the profile of the other user. Right beside the user’s name you will find the “Send Message”-link. On the messages site you find all your dialogs. Here you can also directly answer to messages from your cowriters.

Undo function
You changed a passage several times, tried various alternative phrases and finally came to the conclusion that the first version was already the best? “Revert to version x” is your way to go. When you browse through the versions of a line that link will automatically appear.

Icons for the discussion status
Left to the discussion’s title icons show up if and when a discussion is published and/or protected so you can easily spot wether your valuable data is secure or not.

Read-only iPhone interface
Actually, this was not at all a planned feature. Alex wanted to take his shopping list with him without having to rewrite it on a piece of paper. And so the read-only-iPhone-interface was born. It can be used with the iPhone and the iPod touch. After logging in on doingtext.com, you see the list of your discussions and can read them.

Publish your discussions
Yes, non-protected discussions were actually accessible already. And nothing has changed in this matter: Spreading the URL of a discussion lets other cowriters work on the text without having to log in.
The news here is that you can explicitly publish your texts and in this way make them accessible to the site-wide-search.
The published discussions appear on the users profile. So if you’re a cowriter and know the user’s name but can’t remember the title not to mention the URL, you can also go that way.

Search
Imagine a friend told you he published the discussion on doingText for that event. But damn! What’s the link? And where was that email again? Or could it be he twittered it the other day? Hum, nothing found. Maybe, he skyped it…?
To get you out of those time-stealing situations there is now a site-wide search for published discussions. It searches the discussion titles so all you have to do is entering a keyword of the title.

The nice thing about it: You don’t have to be logged in to use the search. The search form appears already on the starting page. This is also good for you registered users. You only want to look up something you don’t quite remember. You hurrily have to download that text for the next meeting. You just want to show a discussion passage to someone while talking about the project and don’t want to bother with logging in first. For all those situations the search will be your helping hand.

However, there is a little constraint here: The search only catches explicitly published texts. With that there still is the control of the “owner” of a discussion to distinguish between making a text available for certain cowriters and make it available for whomever is interested in the topic.

New design of the sharing settings

Along with publish- and the search-option, the sharing settings got a new design. The table gives you more than quick the information on who can read, write, comment and search for your text.

There are also some news for the discussions themselves.

UTF-8
Do you care to write, for example, cyrillic or chinese signs? No problem. DoingText now supports UTF-8 encoding.

Relation of comment balloon and line and opening the comments section
This one falls into the category “little change, great effect”. There is now a little arrow going from the comment balloon to the related line. It makes the comment function easier to relate to the recent version of a line which makes working in doingText easier for you.

Opening the comments section is now combined with the edit mode. That means, whenever you directly enter a line you get the comments section with all the changes automatically shown. Vice versa, opening the comments will open the edit mode.
Here we have a question. When you switch to other lines to see the changes/comments there, the edit mode of the previous chosen line stays open. Does that bother you in some way? Please leave your word down in the comments or in the Feedback Forum on uservoice.

Notes on bug fixes
The deletion of discussions was broken and the News Feed showed a wrong date. That is now solved.
The list of discussions in the header is now case insensitive.

This week is up for a wide range of usability improvements and new features. Now there is a News Feed on the profile, there is a history with all changes, you can subscribe to an rss feed for all changes, you can directly invite other users to your protected discussions, the special character problem with txt-downloads got a solution and the export now also offers XML. Plus, we’d like to hear from you, which additional download formats you want to see.

Download of *.txt and *.xml

The download section now comes up in a fashionable pop-up-window. This gives us the freedom to add whatever format is wished by you without challenging the clarity of the design of doingText.

With the XML download we reacted on the request to also export comments. The XML-data opens in the browser and you can then use the XML for further treatment.
The same goes for *.txt-downloads. These now also open within the browser. This is a solution for the handling of special characters. The direct download into a txt-file didn’t allow to take over special characters like the German umlauts which was indeed rather irritating. The browser view now gives a correct display of the text.

• Which additional formats do you prefer? Leave your ideas in the comments or on the uservoice-topic.

The News Feed.
When you now enter doingtext.com, you will be surprised by the News Feed. When it comes to asynchronic cowriting, the probably first thing you wanna see, when you come back to your texts, is: What has happened in the meantime? On the profile you now see the recent activities from your cowriters at a glance.

RSS feed for changes
When you are rather interested in tracking the changes of a certain text, you might want to subscribe to the newly implemented rss feed for discussions. To get this, switch to the history of your discussion and copy & paste the link from the address bar to your feed reader. (If you’re using the Internet Explorer, it will be kind enough to automatically offer you to save the feed.)

History of edits
This brings us right into the history. Here you find a chronological list of all changes by all cowriters. You might prefer this option in order to get a deeper insight to all the edits of one text while having them on one page.

Undoing edits
When you flip through the versions of a line, you see them in the text frame. To re-insert a previous version (aka undo changes), choose the desired version, click on “edit” and then save that version of the line.

Edit profile
The menu offers the new option “edit profile”. At the moment, here you can subscribe to or unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Directly invite users to protected discussions.
Besides telling your future coworkers the discussion-URI and the password separately, you can also add them directly if they have an account on doingText. Within the sharing settings simply put in the username and already you have your cowriters invited.

Various usability stuff
Aside from a few bug fixes there are also some minor improvements on the usability of doingText.

• The list of discussions in the header list box is now alphabetically sorted by title.
• Editing a line brings new clearness since it grows with the length of the text. You now see the whole text of a line. Of course, the line will shrink when you delete passages of the text.
• Newly inserted lines create a comment telling who has inserted that line. This way you really know who has made what.

So long for now. We hope you have fun exploring all the newbies.

This week is not so much about the tool itself, but rather about the people using doingtext. Alex and I sat together and thought about who you might be. What your work environments are. What you like and don’t like about doingtext. Whether there is a feature you’d love to have, but we haven’t thought about that yet. That kind of stuff. And since we know that you people hate click galleries and since we’re no online news paper, we made it simple: 1 page, 11 questions.

• To the survey.

The second thing is we inform people via newsletter now. This morning the 1st edition went out. Yay! The next is to come in 2 weeks and then so on. There will always be a handy overview about all new features. And the rest of the email is to be filled with specialties as for example the survey in this fortnight’s email.

But there is also a change to doingtext. When you next go to your profile, you’ll find the discussions listed in a new arrangement. There is now 1 list with all discussions and those are sorted by recency, i.e. those with the most recent changes are on top of the list.