This short post is rather self-referential as it's about how to make itself! Online text editors are not conventionally seen as apropriate technology, but they can certainly help run collaborative websites. The technology Prose.io is completely open source and cuts out the crap of clunky content management systems (CMS). See below how.
To understand Prose.io you must first have a grasp of GitHub. Prose is a free plug-in to your GitHub account. Grant it permissions and it will be able to see all your projects and files and enable editing. Yes, you CAN edit the Markdown files used on this site using GitHub's own editor. But it is not intuitive or visually appeally. Enter Prose.io.
As you can see here,
the GitHub editor is functional and neat. But it wasn't designed to build
websites using .md files. Therefore, you have to type all the various
markup symbols (e.g. [link name](http://link.url) for links) manually
and this can be a pain, especially if you are new to Markdown.
The alternative is to do your text editing offline and then push the files to GitHub. This works great and the majority of this post was actually writting offline. But there are three reasons why Prose is more suitable for collaborative website editing:
Below is a short tutorial I made to showcase what Prose.io is and how to use it to add to this website in particular.
And here's the Atomic Zombie video I mentioned in the talk!