For webmasters who do not have the luxury of using a WYSIWYG text editor to publish posts, Texty as mentioned on Techcrunch comes in real handy providing a way for anyone to use a rich text editor to create dynamic content.

Synopses:

One of the best features found within most dynamic content management systems is the text editor used to write articles. These text editors give users an abundant amount of options while providing an ease of use factor, allowing virtually anyone to style, format and configure articles without having to know HTML. With that being said, there are still a ton of static websites that are being used today which require users to edit the page within a text editor of their choice such as Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup, require HTML knowledge to create, and last but not least, an FTP connection for uploading those pages to your site. Texty aims to eliminate most of these mundane processes.

The Signup Process:

This is one of the more simpler account creation routines, or at least thats what I initially thought. Type in an email address, along with your preferred password. Once you do that, the Texty editor appears on the left allowing you to create your first Texty.

One of the annoying things that I discovered while trying to create an account is when I pressed the SIGN IN button after I typed in my email address and preferred password, which continuously loaded the TEXTY home page, telling me I have entered an invalid email address and or password. I then proceeded to try and create a Texty thinking that this was the correct way of creating an account, but the page would just reload with an empty text editor after I would press on the CREATE TEXTY button. After trying a few different options to create my account, I finally noticed that I was seeing two different home pages.

One of these pages contained an EMAIL ADDRESS form along with a PASSWORD FORM at the bottom of the page. This was actually the signup area, unlike the login box on the right which I guess is for members who are already registered. After I put my email address with my password into the these two boxes and created my first Texty, my account was finally created.

I wonder if I am the first person to have difficulties creating an account on Texty.com It’s not painfully obvious to a new comer on how to create an account. On the bottom of the Login Box, you’ll see this line of text Setup A New Account By Creating Your First Texty On The Left. I continuously tried to create an account by creating a Texty while leaving the Email Address and Password fields in the login box filled as I didn’t know the exact process of creating an account. I think the folks at Texty.com could benefit from reworking their account creation process as I am positive that, I am not the only one to of had this experience.

Using Texty:

After managing to create my account, using Texty was actually straightforward. The idea behind Texty is simple enough. Write as well as format your articles as you would want them to appear on your site, copy and paste the created Texty into your website where you want the article to appear and then use Texty.com to edit that Texty at any time.

Texty utilizes the TinyMCE Javascript text editor which you’ll normally find within content management systems such as Joomla or WordPress. The text editor contains your basic set of tools such as bolding, italicizing, underlining, linking, images and few more nifty formatting options. One thing I noticed within this specific editor is the menu that appears when you right click. The menu contains options such as Cut, Copy, Paste and Insert A New Table.

Texty contains two options which you would normally only see which a dynamic content management system, these are, Enabling anonymous, administrative comments on your Texties, and Enabling RSS for the specified Texty, allowing people to subscribe to your Texty feed.

While creating my first Texty, I decided to enable both of these features. Each time I did, I was greeted with a big fat however, after creating my Texty, I was able to go into my Texty options and configure the RSS feed along with the ability to comment and place those two features into my Texty. I can’t be too hard on them because after all, it’s BETA!

After creating my first Texty, I was given two options. Editing the Texty, or copying the Texty. Copying the Texty produces a line of Javascript code which you are supposed to copy and then publish into the specific web page where you want the article to be displayed. Once the Texty as added to your web page, you can use Texty.com to edit that file without having to re upload anything to your site.

Final Thoughts:

There are quite a few things worth considering before you even think about using this service. First of all, what happens if this site or service disappears? All of the content that is saved onto Texty.com would most likely disappear as well. Secondly, and I may be wrong about this, but I don’t think the text will be crawlable by search engine spiders. Instead of seeing text, the spiders will see a line of javascript code which makes up the Texty hurting the search value of your site.

Aside from these caveats, Texty should appeal to those who want to add a bit of dynamic content to their site without moving to a full blown CMS. I can also see Texty being used as sort of a poor mans blog. If you are going to use Texty, make sure that the content you place on their site is not important and that you can deal with losing it in case Texty disappears.

An Example Of An Embedded Texty With The Commenting And RSS Options Turned On: Please do not leave a comment using this form, this is for display purposes only.

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