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Show HN: Txtpen – web highlights and in-text comments (txtpen.com)
65 points by grandjury 3365 days ago
9 comments

How do you handle the problem of versioning or changing content with annotations of that content? For example if someone has annotated a piece of text that is changed in the site what is the procedure for dealing with that scenario?
Good question. txtpen uses fuzzy string matching among other anchoring mechanisms. Assuming the change is below a certain threshold, txtpen displays a diff(addition, deletion) of the underlying text.
Hello,

txtpen is launched today. I started this sideproject because I really like in-text commenting on Medium. It is the best way to add value for readers.

An example blog page that has txtpen enabled:

http://blog.antoniofrighetto.com/ipc

If you have any suggestions or feedback please contact me. ricky@txtpen.com

Ricky,

You are sending email + password in plain text through URL.

https://txtpen.com/login?f=true&username=<username>&password...

Please change this.

I had this idea before medium implemented it - glad to see someone getting off there ass and implementing it in a plugable way.

My original idea went further and was aimed at the media industry, fake news etc. The comment was actually someone who disagreed with the content and wanted to "re-write" the content for a particle point. There comment would then be invlined in the article if u wanted to have that "view".

Then you could trust certain people (upvote) and automatically read future content with these peoples POV inlined where the original content was.

i def feel like a feature where as u scroll, comments are automatically revealed on a side-panel is a good idea. i dont like the fact i need to mouse-over commnets to read them.

Can one only see comments on that blog if they are logged into txtpen?
Of course not. There aren't any or the moderator hasn't approved any.

Personal highlights are visible only if you login

I cannot see any comments, either.

I tried installing the chrome extension.

edit: Ah, I guess you can comment, but there may not be any comments on that page, yet.

How come there are so many posts of this within a short period?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14058502 (2 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074622 (2 days ago)

Why should I switch from Hypothesis to this? Genuine question. I liked the landing page.
Thanks for checking it out.

1. Full publisher control. Publishers can moderate and pin highlights on their sites. However, all annotations can be retrieved via RESTful API as per W3C standards. Hypothes.is doesn't support moderation in their current iteration.

2. txtpen picks the best highlights to value add the reader. Otherwise annotation is nothing more than digital graffiti. Hypothes.is display any and all annotations on page.

Also, we strive to be the best web annotation platform period. The load speed is 150ms compared to 2 seconds of hypothesis. It does not slow your page down.

Oh, wait. Sorry. I was asking from the viewpoint of someone that wants to write comments for himself on any random webpage. Hypothesis has a Chrome Extension that allows me to annotate any webpage and find my annotations later, even if the webpage hasn't added Hypothesis to the site.

I believe that's not in the scope of txtpen, right?

Thanks for the feedback. Highlighting is supported on any page. I will add this use case to the homepage.

Here is the link to the txtpen Chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/txtpen-web-pen/cgm...

Doesn't seem to work when you highlight backwards?
This friction raises the bar of highlighting, forces the user to read the text again and makes sure that highlight is intentional.
This is great.

I don't know if I'm more amazed at the level of nitpicking in the previous comment or that this is intentional and actually a good idea.

This looks great. I'm impressed at the attention to detail in _functionality_ and _experience_ in addition to design.
How is this different from hypothes.is?
Internal error on Google login :(
Python unicode handling. Should be fixed. Thanks!
the installation for 'any other site' is broken... any clues?