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)

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.