It’s hard to remember the number of times I’ve went to update this site and just drawn a blank. Writers block is a horrible state that happens to just about everyone. Skribit is a way to get around that. It allows your readers to suggest ideas and then vote on them. It is about the best idea for a widget I’ve seen in a long while. However it is still in public beta and has its flaws.
The first problem is the most concerning to me; when you sign up it emails you the account information, password and all. That’s right; it sends you the password in clear text. How a startup in 2008 is able to get away with this is beyond me. A password should never be able to be decrypted and much less sent via an insecure method such as email.
The widget also needs quite a bit more customization options. The biggest option I would like to see is the ability to separate the footer into two lines instead of having the width of the sidebar break the line in an odd place. A checkbox in the customization panel to change this would be a great addition.
Another issue I personally had was how do you suggest a topic? You click the text on the top of the widget, but it took me over 5 minutes to figure this out. I was searching around on the skribit site and finally found the answer by randomly clicking around finally hitting the top text. I think that a little hover option over the top text would solve that issue. If when you put the mouse over that section it says something like “Click here to suggest a topic” it would have been that much easier.
There is also not an easy way that I am aware of to add a suggestion to your own site without using the widget. I would have liked to be able to add a few topics to start out in the back end panel so that it wasn’t just an empty box.
The final issue is really just for those of us who are security paranoid and block javascript by default. If you do not allow javascript from skribit then you get a wonderful little message that says “The page you were looking for doesn’t exist. You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved.” The best part is that if you do a soft page refresh with javascript enabled it doesn’t go away. You have to do a hard refresh to get the widget working. Not pretty.
As much as this sounds like I hate this widget I don’t. It is really one of the best tools I’ve seen for online writers. The reason for writing this post is in hopes that someone will find it and be able to make it even better for everyone.
Thanks for the feedback Zac. Skribit is a true beta product and we are always looking for feedback from users. Some of the items that you mentioned are front and center on our roadmap to improvements. I couple of items are new and we will add them to the list and get them worked in. Thanks for giving Skribit a whirl and letting us know what you think.
Skribit is a basically good idea. I hope it’ll leave beta stadium soon to use it in a professional enviroment.