TxtBear Blog

Minor update for the WordPress plugin

Jo Michael — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:59:23 +0000

After quite a while, we throw another look at TxtBear’s WordPress plugin. We found that some interfaces within WordPress have changed since the last update back in 2010. Thus, we published a minor update to get the thumbnails and embedded books working again.

The updated TxtBear plugin is now available from the WordPress plugin repository. You may also just auto-update from your existing WordPress installation.

Download TxtBear for WordPress 1.1.2223.2113

Bringing TxtBear to Your Browser

Jo Michael — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:52:32 +0000

Viewing PDF documents on the web is somewhat difficult: you need the Adobe Reader plugin, and the document takes ages to load before you can actually read it. Additionally, Adobe Reader is known for its vulnerabilities.

We knew about these problems, and we didn’t like them. Thus, we had a look at how to bring the sleekness of TxtBear to your browser. Today, we’re releasing our first result: the TxtBear extension for Google Chrome.

Take the Swiss Army Knife for documents and view PDFs and other documents right in your browser – no plugin, no waiting time, no security holes. TxtBear helps you.

After installing the extension, TxtBear will rewrite any links to PDFs and other documents to make them load in the TxtBear Viewer. Also, when you click a document link launching your browser, TxtBear will notice and display the doc in TxtBear Viewer as well.

Tip: You want to access a specific document the regular way? Right-click its link and make use of TxtBear’s context menu. In the options, you may also specify to ignore links on certain websites from getting rewritten.

You got an idea or feature suggestion? Send us a tweet at http://twitter.com/txtbear, or leave a comment here!

—By the way… We know you might be using Firefox or Internet Explorer instead of Chrome. Stay tuned!

An Update on TxtBear for WordPress

Jo Michael — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:52:14 +0000

Embedding documents into your blog with ease is what TxtBear’s plugin for WordPress offers. Since its introduction in January 2010, people have created many embedded documents.

However, some users have reported that they are unable to upload files with the plugin’s uploader. This is because in their installation of WordPress, the “Browse” button does not work as expected — it is simply dead.

After investigating what might be the cause, we have added compatibility for the WordPress themes those sites are using. Now our plugin code does not collide anymore with the theme Javascript (programming code). At the same time, we have added support for WordPress 3.0 (an amazing release, by the way!).

Thus, if you are running the TxtBear plugin for WordPress in a version lower than 1.1.11, please update immediately.

You still have trouble with our plugin? What can we do better? We’d love to get to know your ideas and suggestions!

Share docs in your blog, including previews

Jo Michael — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 07:30:00 +0000

You are a blogger and want to share documents with your blog posts? Embedding rich content files, such as Adobe PDF, isn’t always as trivial as it could be. Additionally, quite many users either don’t have the browser plugin installed necessary to view these docs. Or they are afraid of the Adobe Acrobat security issues that have recently been discovered (once again).

With the TxtBear plugin for WordPress, embedding and sharing docs with your audience is much easier. Inserting a document is as easy as:

Clicking the Embed document icon,
Browsing your hard disk for a document file — or alternatively enter its Web URL —,
Hitting the Upload button,
Choosing an embed style, and
Pressing Insert. Nothing easier than that.

For your readers, viewing and reading the shared document is as easy: They can click the document thumbnail visible within your post, and the lightweight viewer launches with no delay. Even for documents with 800 pages!

Stay tuned for step-by-step guides about the TxtBear WordPress plugin in the coming weeks.

You can download the TxtBear plugin from the official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Social documentation

Stefan Thomas — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 07:59:02 +0000

The best documentation I’ve ever encountered is that of PHP. Hands down. And that’s curious because it’s not particularly unique. It has consistent navigation, sure. It is very complete, sure. All those are important points, but what really makes it incredibly useful is the community participation it gets. Very often the comments on any given page of PHP documentation address exactly the issue you’re having.

Needless to say this is a role model we wish to emulate. So in true startup mentality, we slapped a set of Disqus Comments on there. Took five minutes and it enables users to interact with our developers directly. Eventually, we’ll put in a comment system that isn’t JavaScript based and hence allows the comments to be indexed by search engines. For now however, this is a very quick and hopefully very useful support feature.

So take a look at our API documentation and please share your experiences with it, so others can benefit!