Experiment: Notes in WriteFreely

I’ve been thinking about how WriteFreely might support publishing both Articles and Notes lately, just out of curiosity. Then I came across this thread, which inspired me to try a small WF modification where posts that don’t contain a newline will be sent out as Notes – otherwise they’ll be Articles, as usual.

In this case, our definition of “Note” is kind of close to the spec:

Represents a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length.

(Though maybe it’d be better to distinguish Notes and Articles by a double-line break, instead of single?)

It’s kind of interesting to play with. If anyone wants to try it out, it’s live on our demo instance now: pencil.writefree.ly.

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I love this idea. Please report back to this thread with any findings!

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After playing around with it, I just switched to double line breaks as the means to send out Articles, instead, so a post like this will be a Note.

Other things of note:

  • Mastodon and Pleroma don’t support titles on Notes – you can test by creating this post on the demo instance:
# My title

The body of the note.
  • Of course, Mastodon doesn’t show much formatting for Notes, but the plain text gets through, which is sort of okay. (Might be worth linking to the original post for Notes because of this. Though potential downsides to that.)

  • Pleroma renders Articles and Notes almost the same, besides the lack of title on Notes.

  • Mentioned you @darius so you could see how WF Notes look in Hometown.

Will continue experimenting!