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)

Before we come to this week’s new features, let me mention a few bug fixes.

• Working with newly inserted lines was problematic in 2 ways. First, it was necessary to reload the discussion to reorder new lines. This is not necessary any more. Second, if you created new lines at the bottom of your discussion, those lines were only seen after having reloaded the discussion. This is also fixed.
• Changing the colors of lines was not possible with Firefox. This now works properly. … Wait. Changing colors? What the heck is she talking about? Yes, I failed to mention this feature in our last week’s “new feature”-post. Sorry for that. So how does it work? When you hove over a line and the comment/edit bubble appears, you will see a little pink box next to the edit-link. Clicking on this box will change the background color of that line to pink. Click again and you will have a yellow line and so on. There are 3 colors to choose from: pink, yellow and a somewhat pastel turquoise.
• A subtle but important change for all you coders out there. For making doingtext easier to use for code reviews, from now on the indentation of all lines is shown correctly.

Now this week is offering some important new features for doingtext. You can now format your texts with textile and you can view your discussion as a presentation.

Presentation

The presentation feature offers you the possibility to show the latest version of your discussion. You find the link right next to the “Download PDF”-link. How can you handle the presentation tool? Here is a list of its skills:

• At first, there will only be 1 slide containing the whole of your text. To create new slides, simply insert 2 blank lines.
• If you have more than 1 slide you can switch between them by either clicking the pagination or the next/previous-link in top right corner or hit the space/backspace keys on your keyboard.
• You may use the presentation link as your personal preview as well. As it opens in a new tab, you can parallely work on your text and then switch to the presentation, reload the page and - voilà - here are your changes.

Text formatting

The second new feature is probably that one you were waiting for mostly: formatting the text. Doingtext is using the textile markup language for this. If you’re used to working in a wiki, you almost have everything you need to know.
Almost, because to make textile work in your discussion, first thing, you have to rename your discussion. Simply add .textile to the title of the discussion, e.g. “new discussion.textile” (without the quotation marks, of course). Second, reload the page. Third, start formatting your text.
For those of you not used to wikis, textile is providing simple tags for the basic needs of formatting. For example, if you want to have a bold phrase, you have to type it this way: *a bold phrase*. If you want to format a phrase as a headline, add h1. to h6. (with a space character) before the phrase, e.g. “h4. Creating tables with textile” will become

Creating tables with textile

.

Within the next days there will be an FAQ containing all of the markup tags. Until then you may have a look at the textile site or at the wikipedia article .