If one day, we can finally make federation work, I hope all the hashtags we use will link and work just like they're supposed to. But for now, we're writing random musings because it's very easy to get started when doing so. For the moment, the topic is why we like writeFreely.

Easy to Get Started

As I said above, it's quite easy to get started. You open your instance, make sure you're logged in, and start writing. Once you're done, you hit publish and off it goes, though sometimes, for whatever unknown reason, it saves your post to drafts, so you have to go to the drafts area and move it to your blog. Meh, it's only a link.

Headings and other things

With the markdown code that write freely uses, we can separate things with headings. The unfortunate side effect of either this or rantli displaying everything on one page is that our blog post signature is displayed every time a post ends, when on the main page it really only needs to be displayed once. See, told you this would be a ramble.

Distraction free

It is, actually, distraction free to write with this thing. You're presented with a new post box, where you can write everything, including the title, with #markdown code. We forgot to put that tag in there before, so there it is. Maybe the more tags we use the more federated we will become, though for some reason the blog won't accept a follow request from another account, so we may just have to suffice with posting a link in our posts on our main mastodon page every time we write something on here. We do this for ko-fi posts, which we need to post one of soon, so we can do it for these ones. All in all, write freely is ok for what it does, and will probably be where we end up placing and building our main blog. But it does have some cons. What are they?

Posts saved to drafts when published.

Sometimes, when you hit publish on a post, it publishes and makes it look like it was published, but it turns out it was only published to drafts. This is a little annoying, but could be worse.

Signature displays multiple times.

As you can likely see looking at this page, we have a pair of headings, which appears at the end of each block of content. Sorry about that, we don't know how to fix it yet. This block is the contact/support block, and will likely soon grow to contain our twitch link. So ... ya know, look out for the new info whenever we get around to putting it in.

Federation doesn't quite work as expected.

As we mentioned above in the first part of this post, the federation, showing posts on other servers, and being able to follow the blog doesn't quite work. We don't know why. But the page shows just fine in incognito chrome, displaying each of the posts, though for some reason it took a bit to drop our second blog post of the day.

Not recommended for those with low patience.

I do not think it would be wise to recommend this tool to a person with a lack of patience or a hard time focusing. Granted, we have a hard time focusing, but we also have a bit of patience and have been taught to have some problem solving skills when we can. When we're not ridiculously angry.

Overall

All in all, I do think we'll be continuing to update this page more than the ko-fi, though on good days, some posts may end up crossposted for ease of access. Seems we ramble easier on a page we think of as closer to our own. And the way #WriteFreely is set up does certainly allow you to customize your page ... lots and lots of text, links, and other madness you wouldn't even think of with a regular blog ... at least not us blind folks, not easily. We hope you have enjoyed tonights ramblings in the dark, and please note there will probably be more over the next however long it takes us to lose focus this time. If we're restabilizing like we hope, it won't happen like that. If we're not ... then who knows? not us, certainly.

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