CryptPad VS openlibrary

In my frustration with MS Office, I gave it a chance and searched for MS Office alternatives ... and found https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad ! Looks quite nice. Maybe I should set that up on a server.

https://cryptpad.org/

There's a public instance in France to try it out.

CryptPad provides a full-fledged office suite with all the tools necessary for productive collaboration.

I discovered these 3 amazing projects recently:

Cryptpad, essentially google docs/sheets/forms e2e encrypted. It does include collaboration. https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad

Immich, google photos self hostable, with share options https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Nginxproxymanager manages certificates and proxies to self hosted stuff through nginx https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager

Great self hosting stuff!

I work for XWiki SAS. Two products we develop have it:

- XWiki, a extensible wiki platform, experimentally [1] but soon to be fully supported

- CryptPad [2], an end-to-end encrypted collaborative platform. And actually, CryptPad was accidentally born as a first attempt to have this feature in XWiki.

[1] https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Realti...

[2] https://cryptpad.org/

Hey, very happy to see you so enthusiastic!

I'll be sure to transmit your feedback to the CryptPad team.

I'm not an expert myself so while I might know some stuff, it'd be better to talk to them directly.

Come say hello on the Matrix #cryptpad-general channel [1], don't hesitate to open issues on the bug tracker, and to browse the CryptPad's website [2].

[1] https://matrix.to/#/#cryptpad-general:matrix.xwiki.com

[2] https://cryptpad.org/

https://cryptpad.org https://cryptpad.fr

It's not LibreOffice, but while revisiting CryptPad (which I thought was a multiplayer notepad like etherpad or codimd, except with an encryption key in the url fragment identifier) I was impressed to see that they're expanding to become an entire office suite. You get a WYSIWYG editor (I'd rather wish for markdown but ok), spreadsheet editor, survey forms, and more which I don't remember, all live like google docs but (as I understand it, I didn't audit it) end to end encrypted between the users. It's a bit sluggish because everything has to happen on the client side, so it's a lot of JavaScript, but after the page loads it works smoothly. You can self host it as well, there's a list of instances somewhere on https://cryptpad.org with the official instance being https://cryptpad.fr

LibreOffice has a ton more features and is way harder to port. Case in point: I was at an open source conference where LibreOffice proudly demo'd their new server version, saying it used mapnik. Me, confused, asked huh why'd you use an OpenStreetMap rendering library? Turns out they basically run the ancient C++ UI on the server and make a VNC-like connection and that map tiles is the easiest or fastest way to load the screen. At least, that's what I remember from that presentation, I haven't looked into that madness further, but that's LibreOffice online...

Currently I'm looking at https://cryptpad.org/. But maybe there is an alternative that sucks even less?!

I'd like to make a pitch for Openlibrary.org the free online library from Internet Archive that includes a fulltext search of millions of books.

I've been volunteering with them on and off for several years and it's always a lovely experience. Their backend is python and frontend mostly from python templates and some Vue for librarian stuff.

Every Tuesday they have a call on Zoom that everyone is welcome to join to share what they're working on, ask for help, and generally chat a bit. It's a great time.

Depending on what you're interested in there's a lot to do from helping build import pipelines for more book entries, writing bots to cleanup data, Performance improvements, better documenting public APIs, etc

I'm currently slowly working on a wikidata integration for their authors page. We also could use some help upgrading to Vue 3, mentors for Google summer of code would be helpful, find of ML projects needing help, moving away from old jQuery libraries, etc.

They can be quite responsive to PRs too like I blogged about here: https://blog.rayberger.org/idea-to-merged-in-less-than-30-mi...

For example, here's a small issue that could use some help on the python side: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/8928

OpenLibrary does provide search access to full texts. For example: https://openlibrary.org/search/inside?q=%22institutional+thi...

It is open source and they're always looking for contributors. I think they'd especially welcome help improving search!

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/

Check out https://openlibrary.org. You can search ´library science’, librarian’, etc, and something should come up. Just select the ‘ebooks’ option to search for items within the collection. And you can narrow the search by subject, etc.

Right now I'm in the middle of the chicken and the egg problem where we don't have enough authors cataloging their publications and b/c of that obviously readers are not interested in using the site.

I've gone back and forth with taking Open Libray's [0] catalog as that would at least flesh out our collection of books but then I'd have to deal with verifying authors to accounts so they can access their books. Which sounds like a major headache and also just defeats the concept of building a community.

Since this is really a weekend project, I'm just going to keep building the tools out to perfection and hope people will trickle in over time.

Luckily for me I just want to write, so the tools I'm building are exactly what works for my writing goals and I think overtime others will find the same value.

[0] https://openlibrary.org

Here's one: https://openlibrary.org/

The Internet Archive runs what they call the Open Library, which is a unique concept on the traditional library. You can sign-up with minimal details and digitally check out many scanned books from libraries all over the world. The only caveat is that almost all of the books are older editions - ones that would be impossible to find locally. It's great if you're looking for old routes, a look back in time, details about obscure areas, or just prefer to read a book rather than browse AllTrails. Please do still support local authors whenever you can as guidebooks take hundreds of hours to create and are slowly going extinct.

Repo : https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary