I’ve dusted off one of my old projects and finally put it on the interwebs: minimaltypeweriter.com
Born out of wanting the lovely clickety clackety noises of a mechanical keyboard while not having one (and not disturbing other) and also a transient/ephemeral slate to just write on outside of any subscription service.
I now have a mechanical keyboard and a paid subscription to Microsoft Office and GSuite… but sometimes you don’t want to disturb others, plus it’s fun, cute and slightly stupid all the same.
Initially, I had the first hacked together version all up and running on a subfolder of my website, but then that was all lost when I changed hosting and forgot some folders were not backed up… so after recreating most of it maybe two years ago now, and paying for the domain for even more years, I’ve finally given it and update (and oh my could the base code do with a complete rewrite knowing now what I didn’t know then about coding) an am flinging it into the world as the beta / minimum viable product that it is.
I’ve also gone all-in and learnt how to host it in an S3 bucket distributed through CloudFront, SSL certificates and the mind-melt of DNS records. It should be very resilient on the rare occasion that more the two people access it at once…
Features:
- Makes nice sounds when you type
- Has a word count
- Allows you to save and load your work from a text file
- Has a Pomodoro timer! (part of another project that got lost in the great hosting debacle)
Future plans:
- I’ve toyed with adding in more advanced text formatting features, but it’s meant to be minimal… so that it will stay (unless I get bored and I’ll add them as an option to be enabled).
- The original version had a dropbox widget which would let you save and load files from there. I might look into doing something like that, but I can’t be faffed learning to place nice with multiple different cloud storage solutions who will inevitably change their widgets or api.
