My new Micro.blog plug-in is a minimal, no-frills post editor. But it has one pretty magical feature: live previews!

See it in action below, try it on my blog, or look up 🦄 Magic Preview in the plug-in directory. ⚠️ Read the important notice there before installing. Have fun!

@sod Wow! Another awesome one. Thank you.

@sod ohhhh excited to try this!

@sod nice work sir.

@sod That is pretty nifty!

@sod Awesome! Started using it today after seeing @manton post about it.

I noticed /magic does not show up in side-link "Pages"‡ on micro.blog and kept looking for it there before simply adding /magic to the address bar URL. It works!

‡ will that eventually happen?

@Sylari @sod We've talked about letting plug-ins basically tell Micro.blog about things it should put in Pages. I haven't worked on that yet but it's a good idea.

@Sylari I could force the page into the menu, but I personally don't like that approach. Some people may not want Magic Preview in their blog's menu, and if it's forced in, there's no user-friendly way to get rid of it. (One has to change the plug-ins code or hide the menu item with CSS.)

You can always add a link to the menu yourself. And, as @manton mentioned, this will hopefully be a lot easier in the future.

If I'm reading you correctly, you just figured out the URL on your own by guessing? Impressive! The URL is mentioned in the plug-in's documentation, but it's easy to miss. Maybe the documentation will be more prominent some day.

@sod I didn't guess, I inserted the /magic page on the address bar because of your documentation when I didn't see it appearing in Pages link.

So, it won't conflict if we add a /magic page in micro.blog Pages link? And, you don't need to add a page in the Pages link, just keep using the /magic URL as per documentation?

@manton I didn't mean to ask to change anything, just trying to get a clear understanding of what to expect and what to avoid (re: above about whether to avoid adding /magic in Pages) as it stands now.

Thank you both for that further explanation. Definitely a fun way to see live editing.

@sod this is really useful for writers previewing posts in the context of your site design!
But I'm surprised some people would want this page to be visitor-facing though. To be honest, I'm concerned in opposite direction, I wouldn't want it appearing in search engines. And as yet, we can't do meta tags page-specific (or at all on that Vapor theme!)

@sod … what @warner said!

@warner @JohnPhilpin I will add a robots meta tag with noindex set in the future. Until then, just install your theme, Magic Preview, and the No robots plug-in on your test blog and you will get preview functionality while keeping it hidden from search engines.

@warner @JohnPhilpin The future is here! 🔮 Magic Preview 0.5.0 has noindex set.

@sod 🏎️🏎️🏎️

@sod Impressive turnaround! Will install next week

@sod preview works perfectly.
When I clicked post it opened in the Mac .app and for a second pulled up a draft page which disappeared, and it hasn't posted. Guess my 'open in app' defaults are messing with your web posting design?

@sod oop just seen the draft is lurking as back window. Would you have any way of making it 1-click post. Otherwise I'd probably continue drafting in .app and using just for rich Preview

@warner Thanks for checking out the plug-in! There's no plan to turn Magic Preview into a full-blown text editor or Micro.blog client. It's just a quick way to preview your next blog post and relies on your favorite app for the actual posting.

Regarding the macOS app and the new post window lurking behind the main window, that's something @manton might want to tweak. Maybe the new post window should have focus and appear at the top when a user follows a microblog://post URL?