I am migrating a wordpress blog to mataroa and really appreciate everything you have done. I have a few feature requests. I am sure you have thought about some of these already:
- limit the number of posts on the homepage. I have a lot of posts and having them in one long list becomes somewhat cluttered and I think against the ethos of simplicity.
- ability to search. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, but being able to search through posts and their content could be useful. This is my least desired request; I understand I can just export and search that way if really needed.
- tags/filters. Again, I understand and am on board with the desire to keep things simple. I think this can be implemented in a way that retains that ideal. Similar to your inspiration at bearblog.
- are comments functional? I don't care about these that much but I am not sure they are working.
Hey David,
Thanks for sending these! Appreciate it as well :D
On Fri, 3 Jun 2022, at 23:38, David Levine wrote:
> - limit the number of posts on the homepage.
Changing this means that there will be a pagination system. This,
then, raises questions such as how many posts will be per page or
whether this can be configurable, or whether one will be able to
access all pages from the index or if there will only be links to
"older" and "newer".
Alternatively, keeping everything in one page gives us the advantage
of being able to Ctrl+F on index and search all blog post titles. Also,
since we use no JS, the browser can handle even thousands of
blog posts without any issue.
> - ability to search.
This might be something we build in the future. The only thing that
worries me here is the extra load on the database.
> - tags/filters.
It’s unlikely we will support these. I think they would open a large
set of necessary functionality that we would need to implement,
that is creating/deleting/listing tags, assign/deassigning posts to
tags, editing these as well as bulk editing/moving/removing. I
agree that we can probably do them in an elegant enough way but I
think it’s a bit too much on the non-minimalism side. Not sure how
bearblog does it, I'll check it out.
> - are comments functional?
They are functional, yes. I’m currently piloting a moderation system
which is proving to be quite unpopular, mostly because of how
slow it is. In any case, I’m changing this. The new way of comment
moderation will be actionable by the blog author. This change will
roll out in the next few days.
Let me know what you think of these!
Best,
Theodore
Pagination and search may go hand in hand, in that case. I have almost 1000 posts, which I think becomes unruly for a single page. Accessing links to pages in the footer also becomes somewhat untenable. Setting an arbitrary number for pagination seems reasonable (50? 100? I would do it based on how long it takes to scroll to the bottom). I don't think users need to be able to customize it. In the interest of simplicity, having just older and newer seems appropriate.
I haven't created a bearblog account but I did notice they have tags. Not sure how annoying they are to manage from the blog author standpoint. I would definitely consider pagination and search more important than tags.
Having blog authors moderate comments is entirely reasonable. I did notice that the first comment to come through today was spam, which is weird because my site is < 1 week old and I am confident no one visits it. Not sure how you intend on managing spam comments.
----- Original message -----
From: Theodore Keloglou <zf@sirodoht.com>
To: ~sirodoht/mataroa-community@lists.sr.ht
Subject: Re: few feature requests
Date: Saturday, June 04, 2022 7:24 AM
Hey David,
Thanks for sending these! Appreciate it as well :D
On Fri, 3 Jun 2022, at 23:38, David Levine wrote:
> - limit the number of posts on the homepage.
Changing this means that there will be a pagination system. This,
then, raises questions such as how many posts will be per page or
whether this can be configurable, or whether one will be able to
access all pages from the index or if there will only be links to
"older" and "newer".
Alternatively, keeping everything in one page gives us the advantage
of being able to Ctrl+F on index and search all blog post titles. Also,
since we use no JS, the browser can handle even thousands of
blog posts without any issue.
> - ability to search.
This might be something we build in the future. The only thing that
worries me here is the extra load on the database.
> - tags/filters.
It’s unlikely we will support these. I think they would open a large
set of necessary functionality that we would need to implement,
that is creating/deleting/listing tags, assign/deassigning posts to
tags, editing these as well as bulk editing/moving/removing. I
agree that we can probably do them in an elegant enough way but I
think it’s a bit too much on the non-minimalism side. Not sure how
bearblog does it, I'll check it out.
> - are comments functional?
They are functional, yes. I’m currently piloting a moderation system
which is proving to be quite unpopular, mostly because of how
slow it is. In any case, I’m changing this. The new way of comment
moderation will be actionable by the blog author. This change will
roll out in the next few days.
Let me know what you think of these!
Best,
Theodore
On Sun, 5 Jun 2022, at 01:37, David Levine wrote:
> Having blog authors moderate comments is entirely reasonable. I did > notice that the first comment to come through today was spam, which is > weird because my site is < 1 week old and I am confident no one visits > it. Not sure how you intend on managing spam comments.
So, the new system for comments is now live.
This means that for all new comments blog authors will get an email
letting them know that there is a new comment and that they can act
on it (approve or delete).
I imagine this might become tiring for popular blogs, as authors might
get lots of emails per day. I will probably add an option to turn email
notifications off. What do you think?
There are no other plans for spam comments. The best solution might
have been to integrate with something like Akismet [1] or a CAPTCHA
service but I don't want to integrate with a third-party for this.
[1]: https://akismet.com/
About the popularity of your <1 week old website, I'd imagine maybe
you're using a custom domain and this domain was already
SEO-famous (?)
— Theodore