What are your biggest pain points with Write.as at the moment?

[matt]

Hey everyone, I’m looking to fix any smaller, lingering issues that regularly bug you while using Write.as. This could be a weird part of the software you regularly have to work around, or an issue with navigation that irks you, or just any bugs you’ve noticed.

Please feel free to share your thoughts, and add a comment if you’ve encountered any of the issues people share here. Thanks!

[SaschaFoerster]

• Upload images with the self hosted version.

[PaoloAmoroso]

Here are my annoyances:

Published a new post and no emails were sent?

If you initially published an anonymous post, and then moved it to your blog, no email is sent to newsletter subscribers. A workaround is to set the anonymous post’s date to the current date and time before moving the post to the blog.

Move off the editing area the warning 'This post has been updated elsewhere...'

In the post editor, please move off the text editing area this occasional warning: This post has been updated elsewhere since you last published! Delete draft and reload. The warning is currently displayed at the bottom of the editing area and covers a few lines of text making it nearly impossible to access or change the text, typically the final paragraph or the last few lines of a post. Intead, please move the warning anywhere else it doesn’t cover the text at all, make it dismissable, or…

Add default blog language

I’d really like a default blog language setting, preserving the current option to override the language per-post. Changing the setting manually for every post introduces unnecessary friction and sometimes I end up forgetting. Also, the official Write.as themes should use exclusively the default language for every element on a blog’s website, including post dates and other metadata. I’m Italian but write 100% in English. If a non-native English speaker understands 99% of the text on my blog, it …

[davepolaschek]

I’m with Paolo. The no email / no fedi-post when moving an anonymous post to a blog bites me every single time.

I also strongly dislike the way editing a single page in a book makes that the new last page in the book, and then I have to spend hours messing about with pages to get the order correct again.

[PaoloAmoroso]

I actually do get a fediverse post when moving an anonymous post to my blog.

[matt]

It sounds like a big issue is basically with drafting posts, since Anonymous posts kind of stand in for that without being true drafts that behave as expected. Does that sound about right?

@davepolaschek

I also strongly dislike the way editing a single page in a book makes that the new last page in the book, and then I have to spend hours messing about with pages to get the order correct again.

Are you referring to the ePub books generated from a blog?

[davepolaschek]

@matt

Are you referring to the ePub books generated from a blog

I’m talking about a “novel”, as selected from the display format of the “customize blog” page, and then displayed by going to the root of the domain, such as meadmadeeasy.info

The pages were in the correct order, but every time I go to fix a typo on a page, that page gets shuffled to either the beginning or the end of the book (I don’t remember which), and I have to spend a few hours manually touching timestamps on each page to get the pages of the book back in the correct order.

That’s far and away my biggest pain point, and if I expected to make any money from my book (I sold 1000 copies, but that basically was the entire market), I would have moved away last year, rather than renewing. It’s not even close.

The draft stuff I can live with. That’s more of a pebble in the shoe kind of irritation. It bugs me, but not enough to do much about it.

[davepolaschek]

As for ePub, last I asked, you said it might work, but nobody has asked me for a copy, so I haven’t tried generating one.

[matt]

Okay that’s definitely not the way it should work for Novel-format blogs, so I’ll take a look to see why that’s happening.

[davepolaschek]

Thanks! If you need me to poke at it to get more information, let me know.