Some QoL ideas

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Good evening,

This is all a bit selfish, but there was an offer some time ago to discuss the Write.as experience, which I unfortunately couldn’t take up as it was around my honeymoon. I did have some thoughts so I thought I’d put them here instead, but I am very conscious that Matt is already very busy.

I’ve been using write.as for somewhat over a year now and really enjoy it. I love the minimalism of the editor and the site itself, I find that it helps me focus on the writing. I also enjoy the randomness of read.as, although I don’t check it out as often as I should. Overall I’ve found it a very enjoyable experience and I really support the ethos of the site and its deliberate lack of focus of SEOing your entire writing experience.

That said, there were some features that would give me joy, but completely understand if they’re not a priority. The three main ones are:

  1. Stats: I’m very nosy about what is being read and what isn’t. The stats for the last 30 and top 25 posts are useful, but sometimes I’d like to be able to look across a different time period or larger part of my posts. I also very often get ‘[Keyword] keyword not defined’ as a referrer, and I’m not sure what that means. I understand that some of the tracking features may not be available by design because write.as doesn’t track readers like other blogs do, but for example one of my blogs has recently had lots of reads and I cannot work out why, but I doubt it is because Google has certainly taken a liking to me :slight_smile:
  2. Review mode: This was actually my partner’s idea because she tends to review my posts before I publish. Of course I could have her log in as me, but she wondered if a specific preview link that allows her to point out mistakes or typos would be a thing that is possible. (We’re probably both too much used to MS Word to appreciate how tricky this likely is).
  3. Comments. I think these have been asked for before. I know you can get Discussion through discuss.as, but I imagine the majority of readers aren’t signed up to that. Though I keep going back and forth on that. I love the idea of a conversation as a result of my writing. I don’t love the idea of deleting thousands of spam comments every week.

Anyway, just thought I’d share in case it is of use :slight_smile:

Cheerio,

The Casual Critic

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A workaround for the second feature is to publish the post to be reviewed as an anonymous post, share the link with your partner, and move to your public blog the final post.

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Hi Paolo,

Yes, I use that workaround with anonymous publications to let my partner review. But it means she has to keep a list of all edits/suggestions rather than being able to make those herself. Anyway, I know this is a very specific use case. :slight_smile:

Cheerio,

Frank