Doing a small experiment with alternative blog views this afternoon, as a study for a future upgrade to #WriteFreely’s theming abilities.
Originally inspired by “text-only” versions of news sites, plus a bit of Midnight.pub and Bear Blog, this one maintains consistent navigation between the index and post pages, and shows only the post title + dates on the index:
The design here is inspired by Riley’s theme. Titles are inferred from the post body when none is given, or changed to (Untitled) when none can be inferred. And of course it respects the chosen Blog Format, so you can hide dates or change the order of posts.
Besides helping me figure out what common backend elements we might need across themes, this is giving me a chance to see how we might simplify the base blog CSS and possibly restructure the HTML to improve accessibility.
I could also see this being useful for people who want to give their readers a lightweight way to read their blog (without a ton of CSS or custom fonts). So I might add it to Write.as Labs as an alternative way to access Write.as blogs once it’s looking solid.
Thoughts? Discuss...
Reading a forum thread about professional themes on Write.as, I’m mentally at an interesting fork in the road: cater to the people who make things for the love of it, or to those who do it as the means to some professional end?
I think there’s a middle road to take, somewhere in there.
So far, I really built Write.as for the casual writers and people who make things for no reason other than they love to. It’s pure, it’s simple; it’s the reason I personally write — and I think raw, human writing comes from people who do it for the same reasons.
The same goes for digital aesthetics — there’s a place for beautiful design, and there’s a place for raw creative output. One isn’t necessarily “better” or more “right” than the other in all cases, for all people. They’re just different, like the country vs. the city.
This platform’s growth (in all meanings of the word) depends, in part, on catering to some kind of “professional” user class. But instead of swinging us over to stodgy, uptight professionalism, I intend to keep the product in that gray area between hobby and profession, amateur and expert, as much as possible. The line between these categories is truly blurry, when you look at it. So why should our creative tools be drawing it for us?
Thoughts? Discuss...
Went back to the gym today, for the first time in over a year and a half. I’ve been slacking on my health throughout the pandemic, letting up on my cleaner diet, giving into the social pressures to drink and eat whatever is around. I suppose it gave me several months of carefree socialization; time with people I wouldn’t otherwise see. But it hasn’t improved much for me personally, besides serving as another reminder that I need to take these “breaks” from disciplined habits very rarely, and spend much more time taking care of my breath, my weakening wrists, my slowly ballooning midsection. For now, I’m satisfyingly exhausted — and ready for more.
Thoughts? Discuss...
Taking a vacation from work for the first time in a long while — a week in the North Carolina mountains with family. I’m taking care of the crucial things, but otherwise giving myself the space to unwind for a bit. It’s probably been 3 years since I took a week off of work.
Thoughts? Discuss...
Trying something new today, where I schedule a section of time to do the less fun, but very necessary, tasks of the day. Email is this for me, so I’ve blocked off an “email hour” every day of the week.
Part of the struggle for me there is my overpowering perfectionism, how I read and re-read even the simplest of emails before I can send them. I’ve tried to get better at that, subverting my natural meticulousness for the greater good of letting someone know I got their message. Gone are the days I can drop everything else and quickly fix a bug or add a feature when someone mentions it; now I need to remember, triage, give an update, eventually address their issue, and remember to follow up. The process is more complex and often overwhelming for me, but the communication doesn’t have to be. Hopefully a little more structure will help.
Thoughts? Discuss...
We’ve had a lingering issue with the orientation of photos uploaded to Snap.as that I’ve finally fixed today. When I looked at it a while back, I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. After another go at it today, it turns out the issue was with the Dropzone.js library we’re using to resize images on the client side.
After playing around with Dropzone, and adding a Javascript library to decode EXIF data and fix the image orientation before resizing on the client side, I’ve landed on a server-side fix. Now, we’ll just upload the full-size image, and fix the orientation and resize the image on the backend. This will mean more bandwidth use and processing work on the server, but it permanently fixes the orientation issue as well as another issue with optimized images.
#snapas #bugfix
Thoughts? Discuss...
Just pushed some final changes for #WriteFreely v0.13, specifically the exclusive content feature powered by Web Monetization. I wasn’t going to include this in WF yet, since it previously required setting up an additional receipt verifier server. But now that there’s a publicly available receipt verifier, WF admins and users can enable this feature without any extra setup. Once I do a little more testing, I’ll merge that and then release v0.13!
Thoughts? Discuss...
In case you missed it, last week we welcomed Coil Blogs users to Write.as! As mentioned, this is the project we’ve been focused on for the majority of the last year. Now that most of the work there is done, I’m turning my focus to our other major projects: another large migration, our Team / Publisher product, and Snap.as.
For Snap.as, a solid plan is coming into focus. I’ve been wanting it to turn into a friendly, consumer-oriented product for the nearly-five years it’s existed, but I think it makes much more sense in the short-term for it to become more of a developer-oriented backend platform. Essentially, it’ll quietly power photo uploads in our Classic editor or mobile apps; it’ll be a self-contained component of WriteFreely; and it can serve as the solid backend for any visual publishing product we build — whether made for pros or everyday consumers. I’d like to continue evolving its long-promised photo management features, but really focus on this “backend” future.
The other two items are very involved, and mean rethinking almost everything about the platform. I’ve gotten pretty far designing this basically new product over the last several months. But only a handful of customers are driving the design there, and I think we need a wider range of people interested in using “multiplayer” Write.as so I can feel like we have it right when it rolls out to everyone. If you’re interested in publishing with a team and working closely with us to evolve these features, please get in touch! You can reply to this email if you’re subscribed, or respond in the fediverse: @matt@writing.exchange.
Thoughts? Discuss...
After about 10 months of work, it looks like tomorrow we’ll finally wrap up and announce the major project we’ve been working on this whole time. I won’t spoil the announcement, but I’m excited both for what it means for the platform and because it’ll be a large, successful project largely off our plate — I can turn my attention to our other major project at the moment and all the product development I’ve been waiting to focus on.
Thoughts? Discuss...
Two big, foundational ideas for Remark.as have come to me lately. One is that blog comments should catch up to social media, and you should be able to have control over who can respond to you. There’s a ton of interesting ways we could do this on the open web, and they don’t have to involve some preexisting social graph (though they might).
The second is that all interaction should happen within a social “space,” rather than around a single person. The idea is to introduce wider context and hopefully serendipity, instead of optimizing for addictive loneliness (at best) and narcissism (at worst), as “me”-focused platforms tend to do. Everything is a living room — not Everything is about me.
Thoughts? Discuss...