Great points in this conversation about how Micro.blog handles longer blog posts with titles. Maybe the time has come for a change here. I’ve never wanted Micro.blog’s timeline to be a bunch of summaries and “read more” links, but right now we should be encouraging longer posts, not relegating them.

@manton I’ve wondered if I should use titles more. I usually don’t because I have the feeling that people won’t click on contextless titles–but on reflection I wonder if that’s just because of my experience with sites that incentivize the endless scroll. I’ll be looking forward to whatever you decide to do.

@jabel my vote is for titles. A compelling title is identical to a compelling first sentence or topic sentence. I find the folks who like to do long posts without titles (sorry you’re one but I still follow!) a bit exhausting as part of the scroll. I don’t actually often know if I’m interested enough to read, whereas the title tells me if I am. Also, I find it not at all annoying to click a link to read something, but very annoying to click a read more link and get like 5 more words or one more sentence.

@manton I could imagine an “include summary” boolean that lets you preview the summary kind of like alt text. That could auto populate with anything before the Hugo read more thing, fall back to truncated text, and be editable to fill in the summary front matter/property of the post with a strict character limit.

@jsonbecker @manton I know there are folks who complain when the interfaces aren’t identical, but this kind of stuff really points out where “mobile first” fails. It seems way easier to imagine a good web and MacOS or even iPad experience and way harder to see how to do this on iPhone without being really fiddly feeling.

@pratik I gave up on pleading with you to put in titles, even if my own analytics show people click and read 😊

@jsonbecker Yeah, we don’t want “too fiddly” if it overwhelms people. I think the way Hugo does summaries / “read more” is fine but it’s also more work than most people should deal with.

@jsonbecker @manton Adding my +1 here. 🙂

@manton I was playing around and I think a little button next the the character count that appears when you exceed 300 that says something like “summary?” Could be useful. Similar weight and same “bar” as images pending upload. Only shows up with a title or more than 300 characters. Pops a fresh view like alt text view to fill in. Maybe when you click it, defaults to filling in with the first 300 characters (assuming URL itself is an embed/entity and not counted)

@manton It’s one of the few remaining friction points that keeps me on Blot for my long posts. I have the luxury of frontmatter metadata there, like a summary or “quip” as I call it, that I can include in the RSS feed that feeds into the Micro.blog timeline. Sometimes I use the quip field, sometimes I don’t. But I appreciate the flexibility.

@manton At one point I played with putting a sandboxed iframe on Lillihub and styling it like a screenshot for posts with a title (no pointer events, fade effect). I actually liked it though some people block their sites from rendering in an iframe, and others didn’t have a mobile view (which made it look odd as a skinny column). Ultimately I scrapped it because I didn’t want to be rude by pulling in sites that way without permission. But it was an effective way of calling attention to posts with title links in the timeline (in my opinion)

@jsonbecker @pratik Those are good points! I hadn’t thought about it from the other direction–clicking and finding you weren’t interested. Titles have always been difficult for me. In the blogging circles I was part of back in its heyday, they valued funny titles that weren’t necessarily informative. And a title patterned after a topic sentence is something I hadn’t considered. Maybe my problem goes away if I just think about titles differently…

@jabel one thing I’ve often said is titles for long form posts are basically “what is the short form version of this post?” That’s not always the pattern I use, but it helps me to write some of my titles.

@manton My biggest request for a while is a way to have a way to filter the feed and see just the long form posts. I like seeing short form posts but I’d love to filter and see longer ones. It’s what I set up on my hosted site a while back so why not in the feed.

@manton how about adding an achievement pin for publishing a number of long posts in 30 days? If you add that, I commit to unlocking it.

@kevrodg I love that.

@manton I would appreciate more flexinility. I sometimes adapt my posting style to the MB timeline’s output, which is ass-backward.

@manton I’m a fan of titles. I title most posts, not via Micro.blog’s “Title” field, but just with CSS formatting, which isn’t ideal in my opnion.

@manton I see the appeal in an AI generated, optin summary, but I’d much rather see in the timeline an excerpt or subtitle to help give context to longform posts with a title. Just like no “Like” button encourages intentional replies, an optional “excerpt” field would encourage intentional context.

@JimRain Interesting. So using a heading at the top of the post text basically? Good to know.

@manton in my thinking on this I’m not suggesting generating summaries. I think that could be challenging. I think the first thing to try is simply displaying items with links better. Perhaps using a larger, more prominent font. Today a post in the timeline with a title is actually less visible, less interesting, less nearly everything than one that has no title. I’d first start with presentation alone. My $0.02.

@manton I think that would be incredible. My first post was long and I was a little disappointed that it was just the title that was posted. I really like the AI summary idea discussed.

@manton why not just update the timeline to display the opengraph ? Like other apps do? Then we could control on our themes how we want certain things displayed. Just an idea.