Creating a text-site where people can comment anywhere?
December 30, 2009 8:48 PM Subscribe
I want to create a site which displays a very long text, and allows people to comment on any part of it and discuss it. What would be a good program to use? (Wordpress? Joomla? phpBB forums?) How would I be able to import hundreds of pages of text? How would I let people comment on any part of the text?
Thank You.
My webhost is bluehost, and they support PHP and MySQL. I only know a little programming, so it shouldn't be too complicated. My email is zabrahamz@gmail.com.
My webhost is bluehost, and they support PHP and MySQL. I only know a little programming, so it shouldn't be too complicated. My email is zabrahamz@gmail.com.
If you have just one linear text, I'd probably also recommend Commentpress.
You could also install a wiki engine such as MediaWiki, and disable edits to the text itself, but allow comments to the corresponding Discussion pages. This might be more appropriate if your text has a less linear structure.
If, however, you want to add more texts, so that you had a library of documents that people could annotate, I might reccomend Ambra, the system that publishes the Public Library of Science journals. This is probably more of a hassle to install and configure.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 4:23 AM on December 31, 2009
You could also install a wiki engine such as MediaWiki, and disable edits to the text itself, but allow comments to the corresponding Discussion pages. This might be more appropriate if your text has a less linear structure.
If, however, you want to add more texts, so that you had a library of documents that people could annotate, I might reccomend Ambra, the system that publishes the Public Library of Science journals. This is probably more of a hassle to install and configure.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 4:23 AM on December 31, 2009
Have you looked at Google Wave? I don't know about importing hundreds of pages of texts, but it is very good at having lots of individual discussion threads at any point in the text. Gimme a shout if you need an invite.
posted by lukeo05 at 7:28 AM on December 31, 2009
posted by lukeo05 at 7:28 AM on December 31, 2009
This might be something worth looking into. I know that system runs on python, but you might see about googling around for php implementations of this idea.
posted by toomuchpete at 8:49 AM on December 31, 2009
posted by toomuchpete at 8:49 AM on December 31, 2009
I did something similar last year for a document. I don't mean to promote something I did, but I thought it might give you an idea of what you can do with a basic weblog tool (TypePad in this case) and tweaked templates. Here, each paragraph is a single weblog entry, so each one can be commented on seperately.
In this case all the text was copied and pasted in by hand, but if you have hundreds of pages of text it would probably be worth writing some code (or getting someone else to write some) that would automatically create all the weblog entries from paragraphs in the text. So choose a weblog tool that has an API of some kind that allows you to automate this kind of process.
posted by fabius at 8:55 AM on December 31, 2009
In this case all the text was copied and pasted in by hand, but if you have hundreds of pages of text it would probably be worth writing some code (or getting someone else to write some) that would automatically create all the weblog entries from paragraphs in the text. So choose a weblog tool that has an API of some kind that allows you to automate this kind of process.
posted by fabius at 8:55 AM on December 31, 2009
Easier than fabius's idea would be to use a system like disqus that will let you add comments to arbitrary things. You could attach comments to each paragraph without creating blog entries for them, which might limit the possibilities for editing.
posted by toomuchpete at 11:03 AM on December 31, 2009
posted by toomuchpete at 11:03 AM on December 31, 2009
Google Docs is free and has excellent collaboration tools.
posted by samengland at 2:18 AM on June 30, 2010
posted by samengland at 2:18 AM on June 30, 2010
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posted by chrisamiller at 9:56 PM on December 30, 2009