A few people have mentioned wanting to preview posts before they publish, so I wanted to see who else would be interested – please feel free to vote or comment on this if you’d like to see this feature.
Right now, you can preview posts by simply publishing a post to see how it looks, then going back to edit it.
But for a dedicated “preview” feature, I’m thinking the best way to do it will be a browser extension. This would make the feature optional, and avoid adding more complexity to the editor. In the future it could also be changed slightly to work with Snap.as, Draft.as, etc. and maybe even non-Write.as editors. What do you think?
I like the optional browser extension idea better than adding complexity to the editor. So I favor your approach. This is not a feature that I personally have a need for.
I would love a preview option and it could be a browser extension. I usually use one of those “paste to markdown” website to check if my formatting was okay before posting.
@valvin On Write.as you publish anonymously first. The post is invisible on your blog timeline, on your RSS feed and not not federated. After you can move it manually to your blog…
1- Yes, publish anonymous post then move it to your blog is confusing… at the begining.
2- My personnal worlflow: I write my post in Typora, after I publish to Write.as…
But I don’t think @matt is on the way to integrate a wysiwyg editor in Write Freely, because this project need to be simple & minimalist… Not a big & bold CMS.
On codementor.io I can press Ctrl+P to show a preview of my blog with all the formatting applied. And the killer thing is that its instantaneous! I think you need good coding and maths support for technical computing people like me! And the custom url is a killer feature!
@matt, to get normies using Write.as, you’ll need to offer a simple writing experience like Medium - full WYSIWYG. Normies aren’t going to want to learn markdown or figure out how to use a separate image host like Snap.as.
Similarly, for the various customization possibilities, you’ll want to be more like Wix - full WYSIWYG with selectable options. Normies don’t have the patience to learn CSS.
Of course, you’ll want to continue letting the purists use markdown and CSS, but normies need a completely code-free experience.
We are currently working on an extension for previewing posts on Write.as & WriteFreely! It is planned to work for Chrome, FireFox, and (hopefully) Safari. Here is an sneak peek of the extension in action:
Thanks as always for your feedback and please continue to leave some along with questions.
Hello @matt & @cjeller1592 , I’ve been using Write.as for barely a month and I am loving it! The idea of an extension is great (personally I would like the feature baked into the platform though). If there is an extension, I don’t see it in Firefox right now. What is the status on such a preview feature as of now?
I would prefer it as part of the website itself. I’ve saved the WriteFreely webpage on my phone’s home screen and I like to use it as an app. So far it is working well for me. A browser extension won’t work with phone.
Agreed. This would be a huge feature. For me the new labs feature of a better editor is a bit whatever, unless you’re going to add being able to include twitter snippets or whatever. But being able to preview your post would give people who are unfamiliar with markdown (and those who are) comfort to play and experiment.
I personally am using this as much for the newsletter feature as anything and the thought of pushing publish and it going out to my readers immediately makes it impossible to run edits after the fact.
Great trick, but doesn’t this miss getting the theming?
Agreed. This will solve the preview of formatting itself, but I think being able to preview it as it will appear on the blog is still needed. Personally, I try to keep browser extensions to a bare minimum, so I wouldn’t use that.
If anyone has written on Ghost, it’s nice that it interprets markdown into WYSIWYG. If you type a # and then a space, it will automatically start an <h1> block without showing you the # anymore.
I have used Ghost’s WYSIWYG editor and in the long run it’s really frustrating. You can’t create nested lists, markdown links are not registered if you don’t input them in one go, keyboard shortcuts (end/home etc) sometimes work erratically… It’s just not a good editor to create a long-form article.
I much more prefer Discourse’s approach - edit on the left, optional preview on the right
I think previewing posts would be nice to have. I use a markdown editor that lets me see the post so it’s not something I have to have. I rarely use the write.as editor to write posts. I do use it to place my draft posts and then publish. A cool thing would be to see how images would look if placed in snap.as and the link copied over. I do write posts and embed the snap.as links but cannot see how they look until I publish the post. Is that possible @matt ?
If anybody’s looking to implement an inline live markdown preview nowadays, I am looking with big eyes at the editor in Silver Bullet https://silverbullet.md/. The project home page is a live, editable example of the editor itself, so you can try it out; you just can’t “save” there, of course.
The preview “inline” approach like that appeals to me much more than the 2-pane (or separate tab) approach which I have tried in QOwnNotes and in Wordpress (with markdown) and which still feels much too clunky to ever make a nice writing experience. Even though the ability to show a “proper” (reader’s view) preview when wanted is a nice additional facility for checking the final result is “perfect”, it’s not a satisfactory substitute for inline preview while writing.
(In fact there’s a lot more to Silver Bullet than its editor, and probably a lot of opportunity to combine other aspects of it with WriteFreely, such as wiki-style page linking, but that’s going off topic for this thread.)
