Choosing the right platform for our articles

I worked at a school paper and our way of keeping articles has been my main concern every single time. We lose this, we lose that, the handwriting sucks, too small to read, you know the struggle so its really really sucks. Although some of them are written in Microsoft Office, like, not all of them but can we just keep those stuff in a Word format instead right? Heck yeah but the docx gathering thing is also a mess. Proofread articles may be stored in someones computer and worse of all, I can’t get the article because of poor or lack of internet connection from the computers owner. Having to store content on the web is my dream as it is allow us to access it easily. 

I decided to build the app on my own. It’s a Rails app called “NeoPluma” and it has the features that is very essential when it comes to article management such as text diffs, taga, and etc. The app is really functioning until New Years Eve when I deployed the app to Heroku and it made a mess on my app like the 5xx error resulting to fixing some weird bugs until I surrendered the project because of short free time to fix and also it just can’t fucking run the app smoothly. Most of my colleagues whom I informed about this were left disappointed. So I was wasting 3 months for this but at the same time I earned a lot of new things and got finished my first Rails app thats not half-baked at all. Yey. 

Few weeks after, while I was browsing in hacker news, I found a thread that Dropbox is releasing its modern collab tool Paper out of beta. So I visited their page and I was really surprised that all of the features I wanted are there and the best part it’s free. I signed up, invited a few people, wrote few docs in there, and done. (Straight to the point, boom.) The first time I got in, the interface is so clean and its barely readable at all. The one thing I’m expecting to see is the improved mobile support both for mobile web and the native app. The issue on the mobile web is that the layout is a mess and in the native app I can’t view the docs at all. 

Sooner this month all of my colleagues are gonna start working again for the year-end issue and they’ll experience the best way to store those important news rather than keeping it and getting lost. 

Overall, Dropbox Paper is really a good collab tool that would beat Google and Evernote in the ass.