On Blogging and Micro.Blogging sproutlight.com

@sproutlight That’s a nice, thoughtful look at some of the “rough edges” of the platform, and I think many longtime Micro.blog members will probably agree with you on many/most of them.

Note that (at least on iOS) you don’t have to invoke the pop-up to view the Conversation; you can simply swipe from right to left to enter a Conversation (and left to right to exit/go back).

I do agree that it would be nice to somehow reduce the “clutter” of the replies in the Timeline; adding a third setting of “Posts only” is one way, but I’d also like already-viewed replies in a Conversation to “fade out” of the Timeline as I scroll backwards in time, so I get the benefit of discovering and seeing updates to Conversations via replies, but not the burden of seeing them multiple times as I work backwards in time to catch up. Hard to implement, certainly, but that’s an idea that’s been stewing in my brain.

Regarding the titleless posts, I tend to think that the WordPress Admin really should do a better job of displaying/distinguishing them (especially since WordPress/Automattic use WP for microblogging internally), i.e., it’s a WordPress bug that the display in the Admin is awful, not a Micro.blog bug that short posts should be titleless.

That said, there are a few strategies that we WP-using Micro.bloggers have developed to cope:

• On the Posts page of the WP admin, you can switch from List view to Excerpt view; at the expense of a more compact view, you can get a better idea of the “(no title)” posts’ content.
• Give all posts titles date-like titles, which Micro.blog will ignore (for some definition of “date-like”); I modified @colinwalker’s original code to do this so that it also gets the correct blog timezone and handles DST (available here). OR
• Give all posts titles and and then strip the titles of status-type posts out in the RSS feed. @johnjohnston has some code to use the first few words as the post title (especially helpful if you’re posting from an app like Micro.blog that doesn’t let you set a title) and then code to strip the title out (available here, items 1 and 2 for setting the title and 6 for stripping it out—John, is that right; I’m not positive about item 1…)

(And while we’re mentioning WordPress code, I wrote this to auto-link @-names in posts in order to create Mentions when the post shows up on Micro.blog (bullet 4).)

If you have any questions about the WordPress-specific Micro.blog stuff, don’t hesitate to ask and the rest of us will help get you sorted out :-)

@smokey “Posts only” is sorely needed.

@smokey @sproutlight in the functions I use 1. set the title in the WP post editor if I don't have one. 2. adds titles for posts coming from xml-rpc (micro.blog for example) if there are less than 280 characters in the post. There is the possibility of endless tinkering with this.

@smokey Thank you for the very thoughtful reply. I clearly failed at navigate app—I think my issue is that when I try to swipe, I often hit at an angle which pops up the menu. After that happened, I must have assumed it was my only option. Also, I will take a closer you look at your suggestions when I have a little nore time.

@sproutlight That pop-up is the bane of many a thing…ceasing scrolling, following links…and apparently swiping, too :-P

@40Tech I’ve seen it mentioned to Manton several times now, so hopefully it’s on his radar.

@smokey Is it wrong that I’m glad it’s not entirely me? :)