I’m sure I had figured this out at some point, but: thinking out loud on #Drafts workflow for working on a manuscript or writing project (a list of considerations and ingredients to assemble):
- A manuscript/project workspace
- An “index” or outline draft; this would serve both as a table of contents AND as a basis for compiling a complete document; this would also allow for resequencing. You can decide how “atomic” you want your sections to be.
- An action to list all drafts in a workspace (to make it easy to produce/update the index/outline)
- A transclude action (plenty of these in the action directory) to compile all the appropriate drafts into a single draft in the order determined by the index/outline
- Could this also work in reverse? Create a series of empty (titled) drafts from an outline?
- Consider some scripting to format the index/outline appropriately for the compiled draft (remove double square brackets)…
That should cover the basics, right? My personal needs are pretty slight: the projects I’m working on don’t typically demand images or equations… any gotchas or nice-to-haves that I’m failing to consider?
On Return
Back in the day, I used to dance. Not professionally or anything; I was involved in a “scene”. I co-produced a club night in a venue off Oxford Street (London), and religiously attended a few other nights that catered to similar tastes, pitched somewhere between broken beat and jazz-dance music. It was a relatively small, tight-knit scene and on more than one occasion I went out for the night on my own (or “on my Jack Jones”), knowing that I was there for the music, and that there’d always be a few people I’d recognise in the venue— the DJs, people on the door, random people in the crowd I knew simply because we’d shared the same space so often that there was some sense of connection— to the extent that I never felt alone.
Returning to Micro.blog this week has felt something like I’d imagine (or hope?) it might feel like if I returned to that same music scene after a few years away. I thought I’d fire up my old account, slip in quietly, figure some things out, make a few awkward missteps on the road to establishing some sense of how things work now. Within a few hours of logging in and posting a tentative first message, I had a smattering of “welcome back” messages. Those welcomes have warmed me— some from people I interact with elsewhere on the internet, some from people I started to connect with when I first dabbled with Micro.blog back in 2018, and others just welcoming me back to the neighbourhood.
It’s early days yet, but with so much cynical and exploitative activity going on elsewhere in the world of social media, Micro.blog already feels like a good place to be.
A few quick Micro.blog thoughts (after having spent a lot of time on Mastodon over the past few months):
- It’d be nice to be able to add (or subscribe to) saved searches in my timeline. Is there anything that might come close to this with the existing functionality?
- I miss tags for discoverability. In other people’s posts primarily, but also for making it easy to rediscover my own.
- With tags in mind, I need to grok how categories work here.
- Wouldn’t it be cool to see some visualisation of threading in conversations?. Or maybe something like the visual indication of per-message responses we get in most modern messaging apps? I’m a little confused by the way conversations are flat, with replies that include specific people’s handles… and how you when reply to a response that should be targeted at more than one person, you only get one person’s handle in that message by default… am I supposed to add the handles of the other people I want to point that response at? If I don’t include other people’s handles, do they just not see the response? Have Twitter, messaging and Mastodon broken my brain and rewired my expectations for threaded conversations?
Note: this is all after about half a day’s worth of usage of Micro.blog. Entirely likely that I need to adjust my thinking to fit…
Okay. I’m now set for posting to micro.blog from Drafts, with micro.blog cross-posting to my Mastodon account. It’s a little Rube Goldbergian, but it works, and sets me up for future experiments with BlueSky and Nostr.
Testing a micro.blog post from Drafts…
Coming back to Micro.blog. Looks like five years since I last checked in… and last time, I was trying things out from a Wordpress blog. This time, it’s all micro.blog. Let’s see if I stick with it this time…