Feature requests from a newbie

[jrus]

Hi @triptych, welcome.

@triptych

1. Collections:
   a) I wish that I could add a notebook not created by myself to a collection. I’ve ended up just forking the notebook to have a copy and a reference,

Have you considered just linking to the notebooks you like from one of your own notebooks, as a workaround?

For example @Fil put a list of interesting notebooks here Cool Observable Notebooks / Fil | Observable

Alternately if you don’t need categories, you can see notebooks that you have liked at Data visualization platform | Observable

b) I wish I could “subscribe” to another’s collection.

If you use an RSS feed reader, every collection has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to.

2. Members
   a) As I come across a cool person on Observable, I would like to keep track of the notebooks they post, as they are interesting and relevant to me.

Every author also has an RSS feed, if that helps.

3. Profile

Yep, I agree: feature idea: give each observable user a designated 'profile' notebook

4. Shortcuts

If you click the little question mark icon at the bottom right corner, you can see a list of keyboard shortcuts.

If you want to keep all cell editors open, let me recommend using “safe” mode: Append /safe to the notebook URL to see only the cell editor views, but not the rendered cells. When working on a notebook, if you have a large enough display, it is often nice to open the notebook in two separate windows, one in safe mode and one in ordinary mode with all of the cells unpinned. The two will be kept in sync so that when you make changes in the safe-mode editors, the “preview” notebook will update.

Autocomplete glitch: when I type something like md and then do a bunch of stuff, then get to the end and type “” I get 2 “``” instead of one

I guess you already saw backticks don’t make auto-close pair when typing a template literal

5. Back end / microservices
   I see I can do a bunch of stuff to get a backend working. I wish there was a simple way to set up a simple key/value store without all the login / config stuff.

Can you get away with just keeping state in the reader’s browser? If you need per-user state stored on a server, there are many existing services for this on the web, with various feature sets and business models. Maybe someone who does this kind of thing can recommend their favorites.

Cheers!