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...
An idea occurred to me last month. All along, I’ve been pursuing this idea of “separate but connected apps.” But as I’ve started implementing them, and later with the release of WriteFreely, I’ve had to change my view on what that “connected” part meant. It turns out that they need to be not just connected, but highly integrated in some important ways, if I want to give people the best experience.
An easy example is the photo upload feature in our Classic editor. Previously you had to switch apps to upload a photo, then switch back to insert it into your blog post. Now it’s a part of the Write.as interface, and seamlessly powered by Snap.as behind the scenes. You don’t even have to know Snap.as exists to use it — but if you do, you can do things like manage your photos through this separate tool. Maybe that’s where the separation actually makes sense.
So this idea I had was: some sort of unifying interface. Open it and decide whether you’re writing (Write.as) or uploading photos (Snap.as) or reading (Read Write.as) or checking your inbox (Remark.as). Each action points you to the correct product, and each product contains elements of the others, where it makes sense. For anyone fully utilizing our ecosystem, this could fit them best, while not disturbing those who just need one tool or the other. Importantly, the model could also fit WriteFreely, so it’s no longer just a blogging platform, but actually a multi-application tool (kind of like Phabricator).
#suite #studio #WriteFreely #snapas #remarkas
Thoughts? Discuss...
This morning I chatted with Matthew Guay on Racket (a cool short-form audio service) about WriteFreely and what kinds of things I’m hoping to solve with it. You can listen to the 9-minute talk here:
“The WriteFreely story.”
#WriteFreely #audio #origins
Thoughts? Discuss...
At the end of the day yesterday, I added another layer of spam prevention to user registrations, powered by Akismet. Over the last 15 hours, it’s blocked 18 bot signups that slipped through our own filters (which blocked 587 bots over the same time period).
To implement this, I forked a Go library for the Akismet API, and updated it with Go module support, unmerged PRs, docs improvements, and tagged releases. Soon, I’ll also add this spam prevention to WriteFreely — I think many open instances will appreciate it.
#dev #spam
Thoughts? Discuss...
Continuing yesterday’s work on “outside contributors,” some new perspectives:
Now, there are three “person” concepts in Write.as: User, Team Member, and Author. The first two, User and Member, are private structures that primarily hold permission data and contextual settings (User: password + email for the platform; Member: role + email for the team).
An Author, however, is a public structure meant to hold publicly-known information, like a bio and post authorship. Most blogging platforms don’t make the distinction between an Author and a User like this. But this allows us to minimize data collection and eliminate unnecessary work for writers (a single-user blog doesn’t really need an author bio, because the blog is the bio).
I often think of our UX like various gentle slopes of increasing friction and weight — from simplicity to complexity, or zero to full data collection. With this new user structure, we can maintain a gentle slope from writing alone to writing with others. The experience for a single blog author doesn’t change at all — the added work only shows up at the precise moment someone decides they want to write with others, and specifically, that they want some kind of public authorship known to readers (that is, we’ll still enable you to have a multi-author blog that conceals the identity of individual writers).
#dev #teams #ux
Thoughts? Discuss...
Working on an “outside contributor” role for Write.as Teams that’ll support the new concept of an Author.
With multi-user blogs, the past idea of a [Write.as User] or [Team Member] as Post Author doesn’t fit quite right. We want to attribute posts to certain authors, but be able to revoke their publishing privileges if they leave the team. We also want to support Post Authors that aren’t necessarily regular contributors, and don’t need an entire Write.as account. So we need a new abstraction — and this lays the groundwork for that.
The only trouble so far, technically, is squaring our previous concept of one Post to one User with this new level and relationship: one Post to one-plus Authors (each the parent of zero-or-one User).
Thoughts? Discuss...