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Description

I have lists of ideas. Despite their dubious quality, I would like to be able to present them to the public in an filterable, searchable and readable manner.

An idea is essentially a super-simple blog post with only simple formatted text [1] and image content. I would like to be able to tag them and provide an interface for sorting them, so others can easily browse them.

The requirements would be:

  • Creation of simple posts with formatting
  • Allow creating of post templates with pre-defined fields
  • Post browsing view allow for sorting by tags, which can both be numerical (range from 1 to 5) or categorical.
  • Post reading view separate from post browsing view
  • Ability to link to individual posts

Similar Products

I currently use Google Docs (example) and GitHub issues (example) for this purpose. However, GitHub issues does not allow for numerical tags nor sorting of numerical tags. It's also a bit confusing to link someone to.

Google Fusion Tables was really close to this. However, it's viewing mode and the ease of editing text inside that interface (it requires raw HTML to be input) is less than ideal. Additionally, it is not possible to link people to individual entries. Regardless, Google Fusion Tables has been discontinued.

Airtable is also really close, but doesn't have anything close to a mark-down formatted cell.

Wikity is an admirable effort at taking this idea to it's logical extreme and building a rational, investigative social network around it. However, the project is dead and the interface is so messy I don't know how to navigate it.

[1] By "simple", I mean what the StackExchange markdown editor for this site already supported by this website.

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  • Maybe not quite simple enough to set up but very simple to use, any of the static site generators could do this. GitHub pages uses Jekyll, but Hugo is one of many others
    – Unrelated
    Feb 1, 2021 at 5:48
  • tiddlywiki.com might also be helpful Jun 1, 2021 at 4:03

1 Answer 1

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(FYI: Found your question via HN!)

If your ideas consist of "super-simple blog post[s] with only simple formatted text and image content", why not just use blogging software like Wordpress? It has all of your requirements:

People can comment on your posts too if you enable it.

You can get a free hosted instance of Wordpress at Wordpress.com (note that this is different than Wordpress.org -- the com is a business that builds and supports the org), or you can search around for your own provider. If you're associated with a university, they may offer some form of Wordpress instance (though you may want to check who owns the content and what will happen if you disassociate).


If you're okay with more proprietary solutions, Microsoft's OneNote Software is also a possibility:

There's the online version that lets you share your notebooks with others, though I'm not sure about costs/versions.


Alternatively, you could check out something like Jupyter notebooks (basing this off your profile description). I'm less familiar with what these offer (in relation to your requirements), but there may be enough customizability for your needs.

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  • Thank you for taking the time to consider my bizarre use case. Does Wordpress have numerical tags? Also, Wordpress forces you to have dates, but I don't want dates, I just want a series of undated posts. I suppose they could be sorted by "last updated"?
    – Seanny123
    Dec 12, 2018 at 1:51
  • @Seanny123 You could define numerical tags yourself (just tag the post "1", "2", "3", etc.). As for the dates, I'm not sure if there's an option for undated posts -- blogs are by default temporally linear in nature, I suppose. The main blog page is sorted by last updated (not sure if there's a way to change it).
    – tonysdg
    Dec 12, 2018 at 2:03
  • @Seanny123: I also just added MS OneNote as an idea.
    – tonysdg
    Dec 12, 2018 at 2:09

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