Ethertoff.js

Ethertoff is a simple collaborative web platform, much resembling a wiki but featuring realtime editing (à la Etherpad). Its output is constructed with equal love for print and web.

Just a question: I thought it was ethertopff and not ethertoff but I don't remember why. What is the actual name?

Well someone misspelled ethertopdf as ethertopf which sounds like römertopf and than somebody else understood ethertoff like chokotoff and chokotoff being Bruxellois I thought it might be the best of all these references

Ethertoff has been initially developed for the OSP 2013 Summerschool ‘Relearn’. The original version is a mash up of two software systems, Django and Etherpad, and is complicated to install. This new version is built upon Derby.js which promises an easier set-up and a smaller technological foot-print.

How to use

This first version of Ethertoff.js provides a bare-bones wiki experience.

A pad is created by typing a link to a non-existing page in the url-bar:

http://localhost:3000/w/name_of_new_pad.html

a read-only version of the pad is then available at:

http://localhost:3000/r/name_of_new_pad.html

One can see the page get updated in real-time.

Road-map

For now the write interfaces is a bare-bones text editor (codemirror, with no additional options or themes). The read interface can interpret the text as markdown, or as raw html.

The idea is that the wiki can handle multiple kinds of resources, and that dependent on the mime-type of the resource the wiki offers a different kind of edit and read view. The easiest way to to recognise a mime-type is using file extension: so a page called documentation.md will be interpreted as markdown, whereas documentation.html will be recognised as plain html.

To take the file-paradigm further, integration might be offered with the file-system or git repositories. An inconvenience to Etherpad-like realtime writing environments is that they force one kind of editing environment. Not only does this limit the way the content can be edited and back-upped, some writers also like to combine such moments of real-time collaboration with more solitary writing experiences.

A possible scenario is to run Ethertoff on one’s own computer, opening up real-time collaboration to the persons on the same wifi-network. The changes will be synched to the file-system, and once this collaboration session is over, the person who brought the Ethertoff can return to a solitary writing experience, choosing the tools of their liking.

License

(c) Eric Schrijver, 2014 for OSP Open Source Publishing

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.