Jottit is the insta-wiki
This Web page...
Here's a cool tool that's kicked off a bit of a Twitterstorm this evening: Jottit. It's a very simple, Web-based text editor and publishing service. It can create a brand new Web page or wiki in about 10 seconds flat. For an example, you can see a draft of this story, which I composed in Jottit, as a Jottit page.
Jottit is also part wiki. The review page I just linked to is closed to edits, but it's easy to create a page that anyone can tweak. Here's one, for example (if you try it out, please keep the edits clean). You can also lock a site so that visitors need your password to view it.
All pages have a wikilike revision history. Also, wikilike, you can create subpages by just entering wiki codes for new pages.
...was created very quickly, with this simple editor/preview tool.
You can also use HTML as the Jottit formatting language, to create links with HREFs, include images with IMG SRC, and make lists with "<li>" tags. That's a small thing for most people, but if you're a blogger accustomed to hard-coding your posts, it means you don't have to learn yet another formatting scheme for this platform. What I like even more is that there's a live preview window for Jottit's editor: As you type, your text and formatting results appear in real time in a window to the right of the editor. So it's a great playground for experimenting with HTML, as well as being a pretty cool insta-wiki.
For publishing a small site really quickly, I've never seen anything quite like this. I'm not sure Jottit is a programmer's experiment or an actual business, but it's very slick, either way. Check it out.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
