rich-markdown-editor VS Plausible Analytics

Great article and fantastic choice!

This is a topic I have been very interested lately. I had been lucky to start using since Slate 0.61.x, but I cannot say anything good about it. It has a major problem with managing large documents [0]. I tried to introduce multiple improvements of performance, but it is very ungrateful project – change in one place affects many things at the same time. I am shocked, how many projects are still using it. For example, open-sourced Notabase [1]. My 4+ weeks with Slate.js completely killed motivation, and I was only thinking to put a whole project to litter.

In the result of being unhappy, I switched to Draft.js. It was 2020, and I was eager to try it out, so I did. Sadly, in 2020 there was also the last release [2]. Initially, I didn't like how it works. I preferred the Slate data model. Also, the draft.js project felt not maintained at that time (by looking at commits activity, issues and pull-requests). It is written in the Flow which I detest. I spent few weeks to try "merge" the draft.js and sentry with doing a "rewrite" to TypeScript. Obviously, quickly I realized myself it is stupid idea.

Then, I took a look at ReMirror. Yet another problem that was struggling with maintenance and active contributors. It is based on ProseMirror, so I thought it is better choice than previous. ReMirror is overly complex for simple things. It was hard to find any help - neither by googling examples nor via ReMirror's Discord (it was dead silence there).

After that, I have found information about the TipTap. Back then, there was only provided support for Vue.js. Fortunately, it was that time, when they have promised the v2 with React support. I skipped it to wait for the new version.

Maybe, a raw ProseMirror with React? Yep, tried it, but I wasn't very happy of the result. I knew the TipTap v2 will be released and there were already existing projects that were using ProseMirror behind the scene, for example: Outline's rich-markdown-editor[3]. It has tons of built-in components that I had with Slate. I was extremely happy about it, because "everything what I needed" was there – typical bold, italic, code, code block, quote, multi-level list and even table editing. Really awesome piece of code! However, authors decided they are opting for TipTap and they have archived repository on GitHub, which means officially the project is dead.

I had no time to test Quill.js. It looked interesting, but it has noticeable poor development pace, and it looks a dead project with many bugs.

Currently, I am using the TipTap v2 and I can't say how happy I am now. I guess I will stick with it for longer. However, I know the journey to find the best Rich Text Editor has not ended. There are more alternatives, for example Stylo [4] that I've found in this week.

[0] Try to copy the contents of https://www.slatejs.org/examples/huge-document and paste it back. In a result, my Firefox on Macbook M1 hangs.

[1]: https://notabase.io/

[2]: https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/releases/tag/v0.11.7

[3]: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

[4]: https://stylojs.com/

Thanks! We forked this version of ProseMirror built by the Outline team which was the closest to what we wanted for our product

https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

Outline's rich-markdown-editor (https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor) package is pretty nice. I have used it to make some custom MD editor/CMS experiment.

Good eye! This is indeed based on ProseMirror. I didn't create it myself though, I'm using this: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

Ah yes, I found the library I was using for the editor (rich-markdown-editor) to insert a lot of \ newlines when they weren't needed. I'll take a look at this sometime!

The outline editor is open source https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

It runs a mult-tenant SaaS app with very low memory/cpu requirements (https://getoutline.com/)

I could do the same exercise with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, but luckily I don't need to, since Plausible already did. A piece of advice, rip out Google Analytics and use Plausible instead. It first of all doesn't destroy your website, and secondly it doesn't violate the GDPR - So you can embed it on your site without having to warn your visitors about that they're being spied on by Google.

Also, currently we are using https://plausible.io/ for analytics. No other bugs.

I just swapped out Google Analytics with Plausible for AINIRO.IO. It’s only been a week, but so far I am super jazzed about it. First of all, Plausible doesn’t use cookies, so I can completely drop all cookie disclaimers and popups I had because of GDPR. Second of all, the site scores significantly better on load time. This results in a 10x better user experience for my website visitors, while making sure the website is still 100% conforming to GDPR laws.

No clue what you mean, browser cache might even clear itself without you doing anything manually. This thing makes no sense.

Nowhere ever did it say Tech Demo anywhere, not in the HN headline, not on the page itself. No, thanks. And even as a tech demo, there is nothing impressive going in. It is stores shit to local storage, I guess. Lol, I just looked this up, and it was in Firefox on 2009 already? WHAT? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/loca... I never used it myself directly, but I remember reading about some API that kind of is the new version of cookies that can store more and better and I think that is it. 2009, I would swear what I think about was newer, maybe I am mixing something up, maybe not.

It has unnecessarily tracking from the comment above, not sure if it even sends all your notes to https://plausible.io, and I do not care. For me, this fails as a tech demo or whatever the fuck It's supposed to be. Sorry to not get all excited about everything posted here. In 2009 it for sure would ;)

If you already use Posthog, Web Analytics has been in Public Beta for quite some time.[1]

If I remember correctly, CloudFlare Analytics does not need you to register your domain with them. I personally feel keeping domain registration coupled with your DNS provider is not a good idea.

Plausible[2] has an Open Source self-hostable version but is not so updated in sync with their SaaS version.

Umami[3] is another simple, clean one. And, of course, as many have suggested, Matomo is the other well-established one. If you want to avoid maintaining a hosting routine, a lot do the hosting out of the box these days. PikaPods[4] was good when I tried and played around for a while.

1. https://posthog.com/docs/web-analytics

2. https://github.com/plausible/analytics

3. https://umami.is

4. https://www.pikapods.com

Plausible - Open Source Alternative to Google Analytics

There are many good, lightweight, and open-source alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Plausible, Matomo, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and so on. Many of these options are open-source, and can be self-hosted.

You log the IP address, referrer, user agent and the requested page URL but you don't set a unique cookie to identify the user.

This still gets you plenty of actionable analytics information: where geographically people are located (via GeoIP), what pages are most popular, what platforms (including desktop vs mobile) people are using.

I've been using https://plausible.io for analytics on a bunch of my sites for a couple of years now and I honestly don't miss the extra level of detail I got from cookie-based analytics I've used in the past.

The analytics provider I've gone with is Plausible. Sadly it's not free - about $9 a month - but it's easy to use, lightweight (the script is less than 1kb), and respects privacy, so it's worth a look IMO.