Qua info

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.