Sidebar for navigation within a longer post

Feedback Feature requests
1

I have a software blog I host myself using WriteFreely, and found that currently it’s a little hard to navigate between sections inside a long post with multiple headings. One could manually write down links to each section in Markdown (which I have been doing), but a sticky hamburger menu (or sidebar nav) with a table of contents would be nice to have, as in Docsify.js.

Headings are already given unique IDs currently, allowing navigation to a section with blog.example.com/some_post_slug#section_heading_id. Gathering the headers inside a post and displaying a list of links to each heading should work.

Rendering links along with headers, e.g. {...}</h1><a href="#heading_id">⛓️</a> would also be nice, as it would allow readers to share a link to a section of interest. Read The Docs has this, with the link only visible on hover.

Having a sticky sidebar/hamburger menu would also allow for adding site-wide functionalities that are much easier to access without having to scroll to the top or the bottom of the page. A “share this page” button (using navigator.share()) comes up to my mind at the moment.

If this feature doesn’t go against WriteFreely’s aims, I might as well take a look at implementation. But implementing a new, site-wide nav element is not a trivial change (not of difficulty, but of impacting multiple files that others have also been working on) so I’m a bit cautious.

2

I know this is an old post, but I’d like to revive it as a suggestion. I just published a post about reasons users should avoid using Amazon. I do this every year ahead of Prime Day, and I try to list reasons that could appeal to any political belief. It would be AWESOME if my post could have a list of subheaders so that - for example - a conservative who sees my blog currently might see the first point (which harps on Amazon’s harms to race and equality) and go “oh, liberal trash, I’m out” whereas if there was a section at the start listing every subheader, they’d see there’s another point later on that says “Amazon is an enemy of small business” which might speak to them more. Even for other less-political posts, I’d love for my readers to be able to more easily get a snapshot of my blog posts and navigate accordingly. (It would also help remind/incentivize me to structure my blog posts with more intentionality, which is always a good thing.)

3

I second this. An optional navigation bar, or at least an auto-generated table of contents, would be super helpful.