collabedit updates

Purge History

Several people have requested the ability to purge document revision history. There's a new "Purge History" button on the history page.

Accounts, Favorites

You can now have the option of creating an account. Accounts help you keep track of your documents in a few different ways.

Take a look at this screenshot.

1. Favorites

You can click the stars on the left to toggle your favorite documents. Favorites will appear at the top of your dashboard.

2. Other Recent Documents

This section will show the last 10 documents that you've visited (excluding your favorites). Your most recent documents will appear on the top. Once you exceed 10 documents, they will fall off the bottom of the list.

The Preview column is auto created from the first line of text in the document.

Document History

You'll notice a new History button on the top menu bar. This will allow you to see all previous versions of your documents, and restore an older version if you want.

Prior to this feature, if you accidentally wiped out your document text it was gone for good. This is no longer a problem.

Older documents won't have any history yet, because it hasn't been tracked until now.

Chat

Collabedit now has sidebar chat! There are still has a few minor quirks with it. I ran into some trouble with EditArea (the javascript text editor I'm using) because it requires browser focus in order to update the text. I've got my eye on Codemirror and some other alternatives though.

I've switched to using Tornado as the underlying web server. Tornado will enable me to use comet (aka "long polling", "server-push", "http-streaming", "bosh") technology. I haven't taken full advantage of that yet, but I will. Tornado also has a built in templating system, authentication, database helpers and a few other nice features.