stelian

I got the idea for this web app after I saw one of Marc Andreessen's famous tweetstorms http://cl.ly/image/2k193q333y1M. At first, I thought he was using some sort of app, but to my surprise, he wasn't. So I decided to make one. Where you can write your tweets in the form of an article, each paragraph being a tweet. And each tweet being a reply to the previous one.

The technical bits(this is Hacker News, after all):

Currently, it's runs on Google App Engine. After being a full time designer for the past 9 years, Python is the only server side language I can digest. Also, Twython is a great Twitter API wrapper(https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/twython).

Static files are all stored on Amazon S3 and served through CloudFront. The biggest challenges here were CORS and enabling gzip on S3.

Front-end wise this was hell. My brother convinced me that contentEditable is this magical thing that makes rich text editing in the browser a breeze to implement. In theory, that’s true. In practice, I only recommend it to people that are mentally very stable. I also use LocalStorage to keep the written text when the browser tab is closed. This means that, later, you can continue where you left off.

Even with all the front-end challenges, it was a fun project to build.

TweetEssay: http://www.tweetessay.co/