Feedback wanted: WriteFreely Writer's Guide

Development Documentation
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As we approach v1.0, we’re looking to create a comprehensive, up-to-date guide to writing on WriteFreely, and put it all in one place – namely, the currently-empty Writer’s guide page on writefreely.org. So we need your help:

  • What’s the most important information we should include in this guide?
  • What confused you when you started using the platform?
  • What information was hard to find?
  • What order should we present everything in?

Right now you can find our original writing guide here, and my quick attempt to distill everything down to the most important information on this blog. I think we can draw on some of that, but I’d like to know what everyone finds easiest to understand, and how we can organize it in a way that makes sense. I’m too immersed in the platform to be able to do this well :slight_smile:

Also, if anyone is interested in helping write this documentation, that would be a huge help! Otherwise, any feedback at all is much appreciated.

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I can’t help you for writing in English :star_struck: but I support your idea. Maybe I can help you (after refactoring) to translate Write Freely documentation in French :sunglasses:

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A post was split to a new topic: Creating new posts

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That would be awesome! I’ll make sure it’s set up to support multiple languages :+1:

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What confused me the most was actually just the setup of a free account. It’s great that the site gets you in and writing right away, but it was confusing to me how much of an account actually existed at any given point until I’d entered an email and gotten a few posts in.

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Cross posting the info I wrote on Mastodon.

  • point out the post ‘Title’ format and how it works
  • a basic intro to Markdown, then link to a resource or two for further info…
  • a basic intro to customisation through CSS (ensure to include Aris’s ‘larger image’ option :smile:
  • Use of the ‘menu’ bar for setting Publish Date etc
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In the documentation, I think the following is worth mentioning, regarding how to use subscripts and superscripts in write.as/writefreely.

Some markdown implementations support superscripts, e.g., for a footnote reference or for use in equations, etc. You prefix a caret ^ before a single letter, e.g., ^1 or if there are multiple characters in a superscript you use brackets or sometimes parentheses to isolate them, e.g., e^{ix} or e^(ix).

Though this syntax is not supported in the markdown that wa/wf uses, you can still get superscripts and subscripts using the html tags <sub></sub> and <sup></sup>.

So here’s a footnote1 and here’s the one with grouped superscripts: eix

As far as I know, subscripts are typically not supported in markdown versions. But you can get them with the html <sub></sub> tags, e.g.,

H2O

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I have varying amounts of time on any given day, but I am certainly happy to help out with writing/editing/revising some of this documentation. Qualifications: I write technical documentation for an ed tech company as my day job.

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