PSA: Qua registration by invite only for next two weeks
For the next two weeks, new user registration on https://qua.name will be by invitation only.
Info and notices on the Qua instance, only relevant for users.
For the next two weeks, new user registration on https://qua.name will be by invitation only.
The registration for new users has been reopened again.
For the next two weeks, new user registration on https://qua.name will be by invitation only.
The registration for new users has been reopened again
For the next two weeks, new user registration on https://qua.name will be by invitation only.
I've updated the instance to revision 2b5d48 which is release 0.12 of writefreely.
The upstream announcement has all the details on the changes.
As we have been following the develop branch, many of the changes were already active on qua.name before this release. We typically merge in changes from upstream as soon as possible after testing.
The 0.12 release has many interesting new features, I won't list them all here, the upstream announcement does an excellent job of describing them in more detail, but I'll highlight some of the relevant changes for qua.name
Activitypub mentions
When you mention an activitypub handle in a writefreely posting (for example, my handle is: @mrb@mastodon.nl ) the corresponding user/object on the activitypub enabled social site gets a mention when the writefreely entry gets published. This usually means that this particular user is notified that she was mentioned on a site; Qua in this example.
The mention is just on publication. If the posting gets modified after publication, no more mentions go out on that event. Also, when publishing a posting as a draft, the mention won't be activated yet either.
This helps writefreely and activitypub enabled systems interact a little better. This can be use to signal relevant users which are mentioned in the content of the posting or have a notification go out to otherwise interested parties. When you realize that an activitypub handle does not necessarily mean it is one user, but it can also be a group of users or even a gateway into a whole other social network, this new feature can help a lot to expose writings to a larger audience.
Plain text imports
When I prepare a posting, especially longer ones, I tend to start writing in my text editor for a while without knowing where the text will end up being published, if at all. I find I'm a lot more focussed and efficient at writing in my usual editting environment than on the writefreely site itself.
There's now an option in writefreely to import plain text or markdown formatted texts into your blogs directly. The only work needed in the editor of writefreely is the formatting check and possibly the final publication into the proper blog.
Another scenario where this feature will be useful is if the writer and the publisher are not the same person; if one person can prepare the post in plain text, handling the content between people, possibly using a revision control system is a lot easier than pointing to a published html page.
I've updated the instance to revision 7926eb2 which is release 0.11.1 of writefreely.
The upstream announcement has all the details on the changes.
As we have been following the develop branch, many of the changes were already active on qua.name before this release. We typically merge in changes from upstream as soon as possible after testing.
The 0.11 release has many interesting new features, I won't list them all here, the upstream announcement does an excellent job of describing them.
There is a new experimental admin option available to silence users. So far, I haven't needed that feature.
There are however quite a few users which register on the site and never use it afterwards as well as a couple of obvious articles that just exist to have links to other sites for gambling etcetera. At some point I will publish a policy where it will be made clear how inactive accounts and commercial postings are handled. The silencing makes the users posts invisible for others but does not affect the user otherwise, i.e. log in is still possible.
Last night my mastodon account at https://todon.nl got silenced and removed within a timespan of 12 hours (most of which I was asleep), so I also do not have an export of my data, which is why I'm writing here to reach Qua.name users.
I'm not even sure what I did exactly to offend the administrator, but fact is that I have to change accounts.
As the todon.nl account has been deleted, followers won't see the usual 'mrb has moved to..' signal in the profile, so I am going over the places which used the account as a contact point.
The new account is @mrb@mastodon.nl
You may want to update your subscriptions.
I've updated the instance to revision c829d68 which is release 0.10.0 of writefreely.
The upstream announcement has all the details on the changes.
As we have been following the develop branch, many of the changes were already active on qua.name before this release. We typically merge in changes from upstream as soon as possible after testing.
I will elaborate only on some of the changes relevant for qua.name.
[NEW] The landing page, the page which (anonymous) visitors of the site see first, can now be customized.
For qua.name this is still the default for now, but this is likely to be updated to make the site a bit more distinguishable from other writefreely instances out there.
[FIXED] The RTL (right-to-left) language setting can now again be correctly managed in the web user interface;
[FIXED] Federation with pubgate (https://github.com/autogestion/pubgate)
This means that where previously following a user from qua.name through pubgate was not working, this will now be possible. The activitypub protocol implementation in writefreely has been adjusted. If you were already following from pubgate, it might be necessary to redo the follow. This change has already been active on qua.name for a while.
For all the other changes, please read the upstream announcement
I've updated the instance to revision fb5340 which is release 0.9.1 of writefreely.
The upstream announcement has all the details.
There are no relevant user visible changes in this release, only for site managers. See the upstream announcement for details.
However, as I neglected to log the 0.9 release separately, that one has a few user visible changes which warrant a few lines: (see also the 0.9 changelog )
draft to post status, instead of on their scheduled date