I was wondering, what powers your stuff.interfree.ca blog? This looks better than writefreely, what with having replies from fedi straight up displayed on the website itself, and the possibility of actually replying right from any client.
Does it allow for people to subscribe via emails too?
@xogium No. It’s a custom statiq template with lots of JavaScript for comments and betula for the links, updated by rclone and all wrapped up in a powershell script.
@fastfinge Hmmm. It looks like writefreely uses ninja2 for template generation. I believe I could get away with customizing the base.tmpl file, this way.
What would I need as html into the post for example for this to work then?
@xogium I’m not at my desk. But view source on an article from my blog and it should be obvious. You’re looking for the fediverse comments js file in the head section and the div in the body that refers to fed.interfree.ca
It looks like you can only customize css and js if you're a pro subscriber of write.as. Too bad I self-host it and can thus do whatever the hell I want anyway. Hah.
@xogium Oh! You're absolutely correct. I moved that for...reasons...Yeah. So the full bit you would insert would be everything between lines 128 and 136.
@fastfinge Alrighty. I'll check those lines specifically. Is there any other requirement? Like for example is the fediverse post you link to having to be on a server where you store and retrieve comments?
I don't think writefreely even stores or cares about comments this way so if you reply from another fedi client to the post from the blog itself they will just disappear into the void on the writefreely side but be visible in the fedi thread itself, if that makes sense.
@xogium Nope. It can be a post on any server that supports the mastodon api. When a visitor loads the page the JavaScript runs and goes to get the comments. It all happens client side. That’s why you have to have the plain html link to the comments. If someone visits with JavaScript off the comments won’t load.
@fastfinge Oh, okay, got it. So if I have a blog post lets say for example xogium.me/the-space-between-us, I then could refer to this exact same url in the html body to load comments from?
@xogium No, you have to refer to the url of a post on mastodon. So the workflow is: post to the blog, share on mastodon, then update the blog post with the url of your toot.
@fastfinge Oh. I see, yeah.. Hmm. That's not exactly how writefreely works. You basically write a post, and then writefreely itself makes a fedi post that leads users that follow your blog to the new article you've just put up.
@xogium The disadvantage of my approach is if I don’t share a post on this account, it can never have comments. Also people get horrible warnings because error checking is for weaklings, not brilliant men like me.
@fastfinge No, writefreely itself is on fedi via my @xogium handle. That gives the whole timeline of my blog. If you were to follow this user, you'd get notified of every new post I put up, with a short headline, plus direct link to the blog post.
I do like writefreely, but I just wish they actually took accessibility into consideration more... The web ui for writing is a bit, well, erm... Not so great. Usable, but not great.
Having it directly federating on its own is good too, but then that means of course that I have no way of retrieveing comments that were posted. So there are often replies in the fedi posts it created, but they all just silently go nowhere and remain visible only for example if I go and check myself with tweesecake, on this specific user timeline.
I don't know if it supports the mastodon api, although... I mean how could it publish toots otherwise?
@xogium@xogium So the mastodon api is what apps like tweesecake use. It’s not part of the activity pub protocol. I looked at write freely and didn’t use it for accessibility reasons. I write my posts in markdown, save them in a special folder, and run my powershell script to update the blog.
@fastfinge Hah. So I found, you can turn off federation. So in theory I could the do this the manual way. Publish something, get it up on website itself, then write a short toot with my main account mentioning it. This should be making it possible for me to also use your script. Right?
