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.

[Loweel]

Hello.

actually I like wrtiefreely, but I needed some change to make it really satisfying for my blog, so I forked it and I improved it for my use.

What I did was:

1. close most of the technical debt
2. add a wysiwyg markdown editor, and the images are stored and served under /go/images with a new route. No need of remote hosting.
3. changed the theme. you can see it here: “https://keinpfusch.net”.
4. added a blocklist for remote instance, to prevent some people to follow
5. added a job, each 8 hours, to check remote signatures and existence of remote followers
6. added a menu where people can change the icon avatar of their blog
7. changed the licence from AGPL to EUPL which is equivalent, but has legal base in EU.
8. export function today produce a zip full of markdownn with heading (hugo format)
9. inport function takes same zip to import. if you zip hugo posts, it will normally work.

you can find my port here:

blogfrei

So this were my wishilist for witefreely. Hope this helps you to understand what people is missing.

Uriel Fanelli

[Loweel]

I forgot. About the future, I plan to add IPFS support for images and media, so people will have a CDN, instead ot using S3 or other evil tech.

I plan to use boxo libraries for IPFS, but this will be kinda heavy change, it will take time.

Uriel Fanelli

[PaoloAmoroso]

I’d really appreciate a fix to this as the workaround is tedious and error prone.

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.

[PaoloAmoroso]

Any chances of fixing this?

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.

[PaoloAmoroso]

@matt It would really help to know if you plan to fix this in the short to medium term.

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.

[unattributed]

Notably there is no bot-blocking on write.as – I had a post get botted last week: ~4500 views, and I found they were bots by looking at the stats in my Fathom analytics. (I mentioned this in my issue report: no robots.txt file is an issue.)

Something else I’d like to see: a more intuitive way of setting scheduled date for posts. Having to save it, then edit, change the date, then clear the bogus “shadow” post…it’s just a bit annoying. Falls into that 100 paper cuts territory.

Having the ability to insert / inject an HTML snippet into the element would be useful. (I’ve been looking at ways to block AI bots, and one suggestion is to use Canary GUID’s—these should be inserted as elements in the head of all pages on the site.)

Oh yeah - what about implementing the extended markdown standard? Especially things like [Reference Links](Basic Syntax | Markdown Guide)

There’s more, but I’ll stop here for now…

George