Provide a way to save a post without redirection

Feedback Feature requests
1

When I’m iterating on a blog post (particularly if I’m trying to get some formatting syntax correct), I often want to make a small change and see its effect, repeating that in a tight loop.

The ideal for this particular use case is what Discourse is doing for me right now, a side-by-side preview. However, I don’t think that’s a good fit with the UX of WriteFreely (90% of the time, I’m writing not formatting, so it should be optimised for that case). A workaround I’ve used with other blogging software is to load up the rendered page in another window alongside the edit window. My tight loop is then: make change, save change, refresh rendered page, repeat. Not too bad!

Currently, though, I don’t think this is possible with WriteFreely, because there isn’t a way to just save. When I click “Publish”, I am redirected to the rendered blog page. Clicking “Edit” or using the back button will take me back to the editing screen, but both reset my cursor to the start of the post. (Middle-clicking the Publish button, which I thought might be a workaround to not lose my place, opens the edit screen in a new tab and does not save the post.)

Am I missing a way I could already do this today? What do you think of the suggestion?

2

Hi @OddBloke,

I like your suggestion, especially pointing out that WriteFreely is optimized for writing, not formatting.

With that challenge in mind, I’ve seen people use Markdown editors like Typora to format their posts and then publish them via copy & paste or a command line tool. @Aris can speak to the process since he has mentioned it before as something he does for his own blog.

3

I think an external program is the best way. I currently use QOwnNotes, which lets you write in Markdown (same as in the write.as editor). It includes a preview pane which you can put next to, above, or below the editing pane, and which is updated live. You can also style the preview, so you could make it look consistent with your write.as blog.

I’m currently working on an add-on for QOwnNotes that would let you post to write.as directly from it, and I’ll post to the forum when it’s done.

Typora can be good, but I don’t like that it’s closed-source. If you want an open source program that behaves similarly, I’ve had good luck with Marktext.

4

Hey folks, I appreciate that external editors are working for you, and I think that’s great! I would still like some way of doing this just within my blogging software, though.