48 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
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title: Publishing Draft Docs to my Blog
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layout: post
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---
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I like to think that if only I find The Perfect Text Editor I will somehow
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write better and more often. Obviously this is only a tactic I use to delay
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actually writing anything, but I did come across something that might actually
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help. [Draft](https://draftin.com) is a writing app being developed by one guy,
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[Nate Kontny](https://twitter.com/natekontny), that has a ton of nifty
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features, one of its best being a version control system that allows you to
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send a draft to other people and accept or reject any changes they suggest. It
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also has a minamilistic iA Writer type interface, which focuses on the actual
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writing and nothing more.
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One of my most favorite features that I have just discovered, though, is that
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it allows publishing any Draft document to any arbitrary
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[WebHook](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook). Which basically means I can
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click a button in the interface and that will send a POST request to a URL I
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specify with all of the data for my Draft document in JSON format. I can just
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write a bit of code to parse that data and then I instantly have a better
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editor for my blog.
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It was really easy to do too. For this Django website, all it took [was adding
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a view that parsed a JSON object and made a blog entry out of
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it](https://github.com/thallada/personalsite/commit/c4694a6669dbc7b79a5bff3fb818a682ecacffbb).
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You can read the
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[documentation](https://draftin.com/documents/69898?token=5fjKKlZ0-AeBzqj_RAftAGdzRzl9VBfBHj5wpSWm_gU)
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for more info on how to make a WebHook for Draft.
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Nate has also made a lot of other neat features, like a [Chrome extension that
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turns any textarea on the web into a Draft
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document](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/draft/amlbbbgcijmiooecobhkjblcdkjldmdk).
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Read about some of the other features in the [Lifehacker
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article](http://lifehacker.com/5993339/draft-is-a-writing-app-with-serious-version-and-draft-control).
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The app is still in development and new features are being added constantly.
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I think the take-away here is that the Big Guys, with apps like Google Drive or
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Evernote, don't always have the best solutions. I tried hacking Google Drive
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into a more immersive writing experience with templates and so on, but nothing
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came close to the experience of Draft, which was exactly what I wanted to begin
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with. It's a wonder that more people don't know about Draft, but I guess that's
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part of the magic. There's a real person, an innovative and driven hacker,
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behind the product who might actually listen to what I have to say.
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Now excuse me while I go waste more time scouring the web for more obscure but
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brilliant apps.
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