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.