Product Outlook: Write.as and WriteFreely by Matt

https://micro.blog/manton/14045523

@manton When I was looking at Fediverse instances the other day I noticed that one of the biggest platforms within it was Write.as, which are more blog centric. Is there a better/easier way for m.b. to federate/interact or serve as a reader for that part of the ecosystem? Perhaps worth exploring?

See https://discuss.write.as/t/only-30-users-listed-in-users/6317 ("My site has 37 users now, but only 30 users are displayed[...]"; later: "Well. the 2nd page displayed when users got 60").

Discoverability/accessibility issue, as noted in https://discuss.write.as/t/how-do-i-back-up-my-site/3296/5

Dump out a ZIP with a viewer similar to the Google Takeout archive browser.

What does this mean?

There's nothing really here. We should say so.

More than a few people have made this error. Call it "JS".

Where?

Polish the UI on this to eliminate the confusion. Communicate that the JSON option is for people who know what JSON is. If you don't know what JSON is, it's not the option you want.

Something related to this would actually work as a good springboard for the convolutions involved with the New Post Emails Not Being Sent to Email Subscribers problem.

Direct manipulation via manual overrides and explicit feedback, etc.

Looks like it's AGPL, so it would not be possible to use on write.as...

Where?

Let's rev it. Let's port Bob Nystrom's Dart package.

This is an opportunity to delight the user by intercepting their "bad" behavior and steering them in the right direction.

Good user support case study.

Topics:

• premium versus gratis support
• rude, abusive, or demanding users
• Discourse as a medium for handling support requests
• asking bad questions versus how to ask good questions

Don't do that.

Don't support this.

We can/should definitely go further and not even require a NodeJS.

Why does the Edit link point to /contact/edit, but the Unpin link point to /derp/contact/unpin?

What is this referring to? Can't tell without diving into the source.

Also broken. See also https://hypothes.is/a/frWkbqLxEeuwwRsPcM5VcQ

Link to docs on this.

"the write.as guide"?

Inconsistency here between "Dates are shown" and "No dates shown" (and "Latest posts listed first", for that matter).

Change the "mood" (?) here for unselected options so that it's quasi-subjunctive(?) so we'd say e.g. "Only you will be able to read this blog [...]". (Should probably also eliminate ambiguity about "while you're logged in qualifier".)

This links me to /derp, which returns a 404 ("This page is missing. Are you sure it was ever here?")

When dark mode is enabled, both this link and the "now" link appear as blue-on-black, which is too hard to read.

"JavaScript" (or "JS")

"JavaScript" (or "JS")

For "untitled" posts, this should probably be the post date, or maybe something like "April 20, 2021 (qo1uj5qae3)", where the autogenerated ID is de-emphasized (greyscale or something).

gaps between lines is off here.

No close fence?

Since a lot of this is guaranteed to be seen as arcane magic, maybe this is an opportune place for the UI hooks for a conversational/palette-based UI? Maybe >> to set it off?

Need to eliminate the overlap between this page and the Development Setup page.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/CSposKLsEeu7iideSalB8w

Should be U+2014

This should be an em dash (U+2014). Here, it is an en dash (U+2013).

"one"?

bad hygiene; unnecessary

This step prompts me for superuser privileges (it shouldn't; probably installing lessc as a global utility (it shouldn't)) and then still fails.

Need to eliminate the overlap between this page and the Getting Started page.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/DyLhNKLsEeufFONBnjpvDw

These aren't declared as phony targets in the Makefile.

How about a writefreely probe command that performs basic checks for this stuff?

Should be https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely.

@2:00+ Subscribe widget not shown on index pages. Should be replaced with an inline deep link that addresses the widget on the actual post (shown in the video immediately afterward) by a fragment identifier.

Take inspiration from the mailto URI scheme here; ideally, we should be able to re-use almost exactly the same style of URL construction.

I'm very interested in this, but it's a lot of work — at least if you want to get it "right" (and I do). That would involve:

• parallel implementations with perfect feature parity, one each in golang (for the backend) JS (for ProseMirror, which may itself need to be hacked to support our alternate impl? don't know—I haven't dived deep on ProseMirror at all, but I have some reasonable suspicions, based on some familiarity with marijnh's past work)

Having looked into this before for my own reasons, I would probably not use any existing library from the Go or JS ecosystems. I'm pretty sure what I found the PowerShell folks settled on was the best at the time. Written in C#; would need to be ported. I expect this to be at least a couple months work, full time.

(Not a good first bug, or even a good undertaking right now—which is why I hadn't already done it on my own.)

I created an account (related to this) that can/should be deleted: https://write.as/test-t654/

Web Annotations > Webmention

Is this the kind of claim we want to be making at the WriteFreely level? Ideally, this statement is true on all instances, but I fear a cavalcade of hacked together versions powering instances where various promises like this get broken.

This "link" (and the "Make default editor" button) are "broken" (presumably because I don't have a pro account, but there is no clear call-to-action here).

This matrix is confusing. I'm not sure I get it even now. (What's the last line "user + blogs + posts" about?)

For cross-reference: Embed pkg in Go 1.16

Not a real domain name.

This is a good place to prompt people to use Write.as itself as a way for voicing other kinds of feedback.

Or selling reader subscriptions, too, right?

Interesting (generous) definition of non-commercial.

"Write.as Pricing"

"allow"? "enable"?

I'm using this tag fo keep notes about the changes that need to be made now that Writefreely exists in its own organization on GitHub. See https://discuss.write.as/t/moving-the-writefreely-repo-on-github/2568