Matt's Dev Log

I’ve just updated this instance to the wysiwyg branch of WriteFreely, where we have a new what you see is what you get editor to choose from. Work on this editor is in progress on #383.

I’m now writing with that editor. (You can view the raw output here.)

It’s built on ProseMirror, and gives you a more classic writing experience while converting everything to Markdown (as WriteFreely understands) behind the scenes.

It also auto-saves, just like any other standard editor that comes with WF. I’ve refreshed the page a few times (saving everything to the clipboard first) and it’s always sucessfully loaded. This is the most basic requirement for our editors, so that’s great!

Some issues

It does seem to insert magic quotes in the editor (“ instead of “), which is not what we want — that happens automatically on the rendering side, which is good (it seems to do it for em-dashes too).

I’m not sure if our shortcodes will work, like <!—more—> — especially with the auto-em-dash stuff.

Also, the scroll bar is right next to the text instead of outside the text area padding, which is un-ideal, but fine.

Poetry\ probably\ b r e a k s\ (It doesn’t completely! But the spaces before “breaks” gets removed when going back into the editor to update the post.)

Ctrl+K should add a link to the selected text. Also “Target” in that modal is confusing even to me. Hopefully we can fix that.

The editor doesn’t render HTML.

The editor inserts a backslash on the following before the first # symbol, preventing the hashtag from activating.

#WriteFreely #wfdev

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To import posts into WriteFreely from an outside platform, it is ideal to get all articles into a JSON document that looks like the following, where each object in the array is a complete article:

[
  {
    "title": "Optional Post Title",
    "slug": "optional-post-title",
    "body": "Entire post content, in Markdown or HTML, including any images and #hashtags.\n\nNote: newlines should be preserved in this field, even when using HTML.",
    "font": "serif",
    "lang": "en",
    "rtl": false,
    "created": "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z"
  }
]

These field names map directly to the API — you can read details in the API documentation. Otherwise, a few notes:

• The slug should contain only alphanumerics and hypens. Any invalid characters will be automatically converted.

• The body property should include all original markup (HTML) and Markdown, with newlines (WriteFreely respects and requires newline literals). Note: Getting as close to Markdown / plain text as possible here is ideal, as it provides the best editing and data export experience. But WF will render HTML.

• Include any categories or tags as #hashtags, inline in the body. To make it look nice, you might append any to the end of the post, separated from the post body by \n\n.

• Supply a created time, in the RFC3339 format (shown above) and converted to the UTC timezone, to preserve original publish date and time.

In this format, we can trivially loop through the array of objects and POST each one directly to the WriteFreely API — creating either drafts or blog posts.

#WriteFreely #import #dataMigration

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Right now, we have a pause on major features in WriteFreely. I've finally started to work through the backlog of outstanding pull requests, some of which were from mid-2019, and now am getting to more of the polishing side of things. So coming soon, there will be some small new visual changes in WriteFreely / Write.as, particularly that affect user blogs.

• Dates on blog posts. It's been missing for years. They'd show on the blog home page, but not blog posts. Well, this is no longer the case. Soon, posts on blogs that use the Blog display format will consistently show dates both on their home page and individual posts. Other display formats will continue not showing dates, because that's exactly what they're there for: not showing dates.
  • Also, dates are now correct, relative to your device's timezone!
• <table> style. These elements were previously unstyled. Now they'll have some improved, basic styling that you can easily override with custom CSS. See #194.
• Consistent user page headers. User pages (Blogs, Drafts, Account Settings, etc.) were all over the map with their headers. I'd start using a new style on new pages and not update the old ones. Well, now that's fixed in #262. Write.as users will notice this change is already live.
• Slightly more line height. We've added 10% more space between lines of text. It's perhaps too small to really notice, but large enough to make a nice improvement. Changes in #263.

On the admin side, we're redesigning the dashboard to make it much more user friendly, and optionally less technical, in cases where an instance is in a hosted environment and the admin doesn't care about getting into the weeds. See #264. We need this change in Write.as for Teams, but it should also prove helpful for other WriteFreely hosts.

Particularly since these are visible changes that affect users, we want your feedback! Please jump into those pull requests on GitHub, try things out, and let us know what you think. We want to be sure people are happy with these upcoming changes before they get released to everyone.

#wfdev #design #WriteFreely

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Dates on this blog should now be correct to your current timezone. This post is set as published just a bit after midnight UTC, so it should change to the day before (January 28) for anyone in the Americas.

#dates

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Dates on this blog should now be correct to your current timezone. This post is set as published just a bit before midnight UTC, so it should change to the day after (January 29) for anyone in Europe, Africa, Asia, etc.

#dates

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Just merged writefreely#235 (Add dates to blog post pages) to the develop branch, which closes T669.

It's a small change that'll make it over to Write.as soon (before WriteFreely v0.12), but you can see what that looks like on this blog post!

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A recent idea I had: what if WF federated Notes instead of Articles in certain situations? I just tweaked this instance so that if there's no newline in a post, it'll come out as a Note. Otherwise it'll be an Article, like normal. Thoughts? Reply to @matt@writing.exchange.

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