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 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

@sod @warner Oh yeah, that seems like something we can improve. Thanks!