Yesterday I ran into a thread of Bloggers who were explaining how they used Evernote for blogging and, after seeing a few entries, I was shocked by how much work people needed to do just to make the tool work for them. A number of people seem to write rough ideas into Evernote while out and about, then refine it in the desktop version of the application, and finally copy/paste the text into WordPress, Blogger, or done other blogging platform. How annoying. There must be a better way. Oh, right ... there is!1!
Working On the Basics
Yesterday I dipped my toes into the water on the forums to ask if people would be interested in blogging directly from their Evernote notebooks. The response has been pretty positive, as this is clearly something that many people would like to do. That said, I don't feel that Noteworthy is ready for anybody and everybody to easily use. There are still a lot of things that need to be done.
Here is a short excerpt from my ToDo List2:
- web-based API configuration3
- better support for custom themes
- better handling of embedded files4
- update API to use Evernote's recently changed OAuth requirements5
- delete posts if a note is moved or deleted from a notebook
Okay ... so the list isn't too long. These are still areas that I would want to attack before making the project available to the general public where all sorts of scary things could begin to happen. Bug reports describing edge cases terrify me! I've also been a little lazy when it comes to asking some friends that work in the software security field to test my code. When I think about the content that I store in Evernote, I am very careful about what is put where. The last thing I would want is someone's website to be compromised and hackers gaining full access to a person's Evernote account. This is something that I will not stand for.
This sort of security is a tough problem to solve.
I do still aim to have a version ready for people to install on their own servers in the coming months, but there is just no way I can get things massaged and ready before July 2nd to take part in this year's Evernote Dev Cup. Perhaps next year, after I've had time to put some polish on the system, it will be ready for deployment.
