Canonical links, alt tags, published date picker and so much more

Today I pushed out a long list of tweaks for you all. Before I get there though, just know that I am eternally grateful for all your feedback to date. Let's go.

Canonical links:

Robert suggested I add canonical links to the post/article page, for example this one. You see, that page also is available in Markdown (which is experimental right now). Just add a .md at the end of the url — here.

That could potentially cause SEO issues so now both pages have a canonical going to the main post page. If you have custom domain, it'll use that for you. For the markdown version Scribbles will send a nice canonical header in the response.

Alt tags for images:

When you upload images it allows you to add a "caption" underneath by clicking on the meta data (the meta data only shows in the editor):

Of course it would render this correctly and I think a caption is a very good way to surface this description. As an extra though, which was important for me for the Markdown version is to use this caption and apply the "alt" tag with the same text. It works a treat and hope you'll make use of it as it's easy to get to. Of course, it's optional — so the decision is up to you. Generally I didn't do it because it was a little cumbersome at most time.

Date picker & Publish date:

Ah yes, the elusive date picker. I've added preliminary support for allowing you to set a published date for a post if you so want to. The nice thing is that it uses the native OS controls that ship with any computer on an "evergreen" browser (evergreen = self updating & Safari I guess).

The only problem was setting a time, which I figured out, and at the same time added support for timezones (because the globe is round and it likes to spin). So now you can easily set your own publish date, or just let it do it automatically.

I'm still a little undecided if I should show the actual input on the "new" post screen — I prefer it minimal, so I might hide it under a button click or something. There is also a bit more work to be done when saving your post as a draft, because I don't think it should set a publish date.

In addition to that all posts and RSS feeds will now sort by the published date.

The published date can only be adjusted to the past for now. I'll probably add the functionality to allow articles to be in the future (so basically mark them as upcoming in the admin area, and surface them only when it's time).

Open Graph (Rich Text Previews) tweaks:

When you share a post on a social network of your choosing, I've now improved the way the data is set for previewing.

First off, when your post includes any images it will take the top most attachment and make that the featured image in the preview. If none is set, it'll fall back to using your blog avatar if it exists.

In addition I made tweaks to titles and descriptions so that they come through correctly as intended.

Thanks again to Robert to pointing that out!

And much more:

I don't sit still haha, so there are many little tweaks here and there, for example spacing on the blog page and some date formatting tweak I made.

Many changes and additions are still needed before I can call anything done. I've started adding a new styles settings screen. That's still very much a work in progress, but it's taking shape. Not bad for a sleepless night!

Paid plans will allow to have multiple blogs, and because I wanted this for myself to... erm... write this post, I started adding the groundwork for that. Creating a new blog doesn't yet work — I cheated and did it manually in the database.

You'll find the familiar blog settings screen when you click through to a blog in the list:

There is still a lot do on that screen, for example setting up a domain name, adding an additional logo for dark mode, setting custom accent colours, exporting your content and much much more. As an extra I also sprinkled some UI tweaks across the app, so hopefully things make a little bit more sense and are easier to follow — like adding a link to the "Your post was created.... Here is a link" message. Little life improvements is my game.

As I said before, all this would not be possible without all the enthusiasm from you all.

I hope that I can deliver something simple with a tasteful opinionated editor experience and blog layout. More to come here of course, like integrating Tinylytics and displaying kudos — plus a mechanism to... oh, look at that, I am out of time.

Enjoy, and if you have questions send me an email: [email protected].

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