One cool thing about our platform today is that I’m finally getting to benefit from code and component reuse. In just a couple hours, I can create an entirely new service backed by Write.as, with user authentication, billing, data sharing, and a standard API design.
As I add Remark.as, Draft.as, and today’s new (yet to be announced) service, I only have to follow a set of patterns and interfaces I’ve already built to hook into user authentication and create the web UI — altogether it only takes about 15 minutes to do. Then I’m on to building the actual functionality of the new service.
There’s something about the strange loop of “building tools that help you build tools” that is very, very satisfying.
Thoughts? Discuss...
Just rolled out the largest update to Write.as I’ve pushed in a while. Most regular users shouldn’t notice anything different, but Team users will see it: a way to switch the entire interface / navigation from your personal Write.as account to your Team (as I’ve written about before).
These changes stretch across to the management side of the app, but it was all mainly for one reason: knowing what information to present in the editor. The “action context” (as I’ve called it internally) dictates what integrations the editor presents, tells photos where to go when uploaded from the editor, and determines what authors you can publish an article under (this feature is coming next). Since I was working in the editor anyway, I also made those other small updates announced today.
I probably could’ve designed this in a different way, especially to fit my fluid usage (tens of personal blogs, plus three teams, each with many blogs). But from an actual customer perspective — the people I’m building this for — I think the firm line between “individual writer” and “team member” is the right way to go. Plenty of people will only be writing for their team, for example. Hopefully this design fits them well (besides my own dogfooding, we’ll find out soon with early testers).
Next, as I mentioned, we’ll launch those author features. I’ll announce that more widely on the official blog.
#dev #teams
Thoughts? Discuss...
My thinking lately has started drifting to businesses outside of my own.
This “main street” idea is particularly interesting to me, because I think it’s the start of a path that can actually lead to meaningful resistance against the tech-giant-dominated web we live on.
I still dream of the early web days, with less rampant commercialism and more free-flowing humanity and knowledge. That side of the web is still alive and well, and will always be around. But it feels pushed to the fringes, and left out of all the mainstream conversations on today’s privacy violations, “misinformation,” and social ailments caused by the “big web.” I think it’s all pretty ironic when this old, human web holds solutions to all these problems. The answer is right in front of our faces, yet we blindly look past it.
I’m not sure what this all looks like in practice. Somewhere in it, maybe, there are organizations providing funding for small businesses that need it. Perhaps there’s a curated, social marketplace only for small businesses, where everyone in it can get to know each other. Or a federated network of these independent bazaars, naturally powered by communal, open source software. Just thoughts for now.
#web #business #mainStreet
Thoughts? Discuss...
Implemented the Write.as context switching system! It shares a bit of plumbing and UX with the Snap.as system, but diverges otherwise, since we have a /me/ base path for all “personal account” screens and an /org/ base path for all team-related screens. That means we don’t need as much state-tracking here, unlike on Snap.as.
Overall, the team-based navigation feels a lot cleaner to me (though I still need to get used to it). Here’s what it looked like before, where you’re always acting as the user and really just “visiting” teams you’re a part of (note the top navigation bar that mixes personal sections with your team):
Here is the new layout, with a pared-down context menu that allows you to switch back to working in a personal capacity:
Some notes:
- All those extra pages (Profile, Integrations, Billing) have been moved under the Settings section (though I guess moving them to the context menu dropdown would keep things consistent.)
- I haven’t settled on the “Dashboard” terminology, though it might be helpful to show helpful things from across the suite here — new submissions, new comments, etc.
- When we support shared drafts for teams, I imagine adding a Posts section to the top navigation
Thoughts? Discuss...
Starting on user / org context switching today, so I can finish up our support for outside #contributors on #teams. Excited to get this big new feature out the door!
Thoughts? Discuss...
Realized that we need a clearer line, UX-wise, between the personal writing experience and Team writing experience.
- Teams basically act as Users, with their own set of integrations, Snap.as uploads, drafts (eventually), and a pool of #authors that they can add to blog posts
- We want to severely reduce the chance of accidental posting to the wrong blog (don’t want a personal post ending up on the company blog!)
- We can optimize the editor and backend management flow if we know you’re in “team mode” instead of “individual writer mode” — like working at the office vs. writing at home
Concretely, we’ll have a way for users to switch between their personal account and any team they’re a member of, like they already can on Snap.as.
This also furthers my assumption that collaborative work on our platform is different from writing as an individual — something I don’t think many publishing platforms assume. With time, we’ll see how that assumption holds up, or if the improved Team UX / navigation bleeds back into the individual experience.
#teams #dev
Thoughts? Discuss...
Yesterday I made a ton of progress on new Team features. The biggest one is the ability to add outside contributors, so you can show authorship information on posts without actually creating accounts for each author.
Besides that, I updated the Snap.as API to support Team uploads, and updated the Classic editor to do the same — so if you have a Team blog selected in the editor, your photos will automatically upload to your Team’s collective photo storage, instead of your personal account’s storage space.
These features should go live today or tomorrow!
#dev #teams #authors #contributors
Thoughts? Discuss...
I’ve had a lot of trouble modeling the Team Member / Author roles I recently came up with to support everything we need to on collaborative blogs. Unlike Users, Posts, and Collections (blogs) that I can understand from one perspective, these new concepts need several perspectives to fully understand (and model correctly). At this point, I think I’ve finally worked it all out:
From a data perspective, these are distinct objects with a one-to-one relationship. A Member is (aside: always backed by one User, and) always associated with one Author — but an Author can exist without an associated Member (if the Member was removed from the team, the User was deleted, or it’s an outside collaborator).
From a user management perspective, team admins will always interact with either a Member-Author or just an Author object. But the complexity will be hidden and they’ll look the same to the end user — just in different states, really.
From a user (writer) perspective, a team writer will always interact with an Author object. They’ll only be concerned with who is authoring a post.
#dev #teams #authors
Thoughts? Discuss...
Author functionality is coming along! Now it’ll optionally display at the top of a post, if it has one or more authors set.
#dev #teams #authors
Thoughts? Discuss...
After last week’s interview, I’m starting to play around with Racket as a new publishing outlet. Here’s a new short clip about building a better web by first giving people a choice — inspired by Team Human, a book I’m about half-way through right now:
Building a better web: first, giving people a choice
#audio #reading #web
Thoughts? Discuss...