Write.as Development @writeas_dev@abunchtell.com

Today, bouncing between this and a new @matt blog post about ActivityPub identities.

Testing federation while moving posts from draft / anonymous to a blog, or vice versa, or from one blog to another.

Moving between draft and published is good so far, though re-publishing doesn't seem to have an effect on Mastodon's end.

Added an admin option to reset user passwords by running:

writefreely --reset-pass <username>

On the develop branch now, to be released in v0.3.

https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/issues/25

#writefreely

While it won't be required for installation, we will support Docker: https://phabricator.write.as/T531

#writefreely

Moved encryption key generation (for cookies and email addresses) out of a Bash script and into the app. So that's one less file to deal with, and now you should be able to install #writefreely on Windows!

Good amount of fixes and changes going into #writefreely already -- I'll probably release v0.2 early this week.

Fixed some very small stuff with installation, as well as big stuff like federation with #Pleroma.

Yep, works as well as expected on a Raspberry Pi. Requests are slower, but not noticeably so under low load.

Things start slowing down when getting around 10 concurrent requests on blog posts -- a common thing to happen when someone publishes a new federated post. But this can be mitigated in the future with some caching.

A really nice thing about #WriteFreely is how light it is. It uses very little resources -- so little that it should have no problem running on a Raspberry Pi or NAS.

Well, I just dusted off my Pi to put that theory to the test.

In this vein, to keep everything consistent and echo Write.as/WriteFreely, I'll probably rename the @read_as project to ReadFreely, and then Read.as will be our flagship instance.

An idea that came to me the other night: maybe adding some way to closely integrate Read.as with WriteFreely, for anyone who wants to host an instance with more than just the writing experience.

Probably need to implement oauth so users can have one identity across e.g. writefreelyinstance.com and read.writefreelyinstance.com. Or maybe they just share data somehow; Read.as boosts get posted to WriteFreely blogs, etc. Could be really interesting combining them in new ways.

Now that WriteFreely is out there, it's officially the name of the fediverse software underneath the Write.as blogging service / instance. That'll get updated on sites like the https://the-federation.info soon.

Imagining some interesting uses for the https://writefreely.org site, especially around helping people start up new instances.

Good morning!

Let's see if I can finish up the #writefreely v0.1 release today.

Figured out the UI for single-user instances last night, and I think it'll work pretty well.

Now the setup process for a single-user blog includes admin user creation.

The backend UI is gonna take some work, though. A lot of things need to move around and get streamlined to work for instances hosting only one blog. Might save that for a future release.

Now to fill in all the cracks that open up when you run it in production, and make sure single-user mode is solid.

Just tested federation and it's working 👍

Morning!

Stayed up too late trying to get #writefreely running on a test instance, couldn't figure out why basic routes weren't working.

Today immediately found what was causing the problem. (That's why you don't stay up when you're stuck on something)

Phew. Intense day of getting the basic #writefreely app to a runnable state and pushed up to GitHub. Right now everything looks good in multi-user, federated mode. All the uncertain areas are around different configuration combinations -- and single-user mode.

Once single-user mode is solid, I'll call it v0.1 and make the big announcement

https://github.com/writeas/writefreely

I also updated the landing page a bit for new users, and put the Write.as logo back in the corner of the editor when you're logged in.

The "view blogs" icon that was up there before was fine, but too generic. The official logo there is just sexy.

Moving around some sites tonight.

Decided I'll host a demo instance of #writefreely on my writefree.ly domain -- currently occupied by a little marketing site I put up a while ago. It doesn't get a ton of traffic, so that'll just move to an unaffiliated subdomain (https://howto.writefree.ly)