My Weblog.LOL Wishlist
My current blogging platform, which is in beta, recently got precisely to the point at which I could put this blog together the way I’d started to see it in my head.
Features get added and refined fairly regularly (balanced with work being done on all the other OMG.LOL suite of services) so the following is not a complaint about the pace of development. Rather, my feature requests tend to be scattered around GitHub, IRC, and Social.LOL, and when I thought about making a central list for myself somewhere I decided why not just make it an actual blog post.
I feel it’s important to note that I drafted this post before the code freeze was announced for February, to work on infrastructural capacity (and, as I surmised, documentation). It shouldn’t be read as a response to that, or as a challenge to its priorities.
Internal backlinks
What I mean here specifically is backlinks within one’s blog, so that any posts linked by a newer post can display a list of posts linking to them, through something like a {%backlinks} function in the relevant template being used to display posts.
This would have to be accompanied by some sort of section in the configuration file to determine the format of the output, similar to how we can customize the output of the {%tags} function.
This is something I suggested late last year, and has come up elsewhere, but I think it’s a bit more complicated than many existing features, so I don’t expect this to be a high priority.
Tag results formatting
Speaking of tags, while we currently can customize the ways tags appear on posts using the {%tags} function, we don’t have a way to customize the way posts are listed on tag pages. This would be similar to how we currently can set a Post list format and Search results format in the configuration file.
This one is important to me mostly from a sort of design OCD standpoint because right now I can’t conform the list of posts of my tag pages to the formatting I use for the {%post-list} function and Search results format setting in configuration.
I’d recently suggested this and today it got added to the queue after also being raised over on Mastodon.
Pinned posts
Here I’m thinking something as simple as a {%pinned} function for use in templates that would display any posts containing Pinned: Yes in their front matter. This, too, should have formatting available in configuration, under something like Pinned posts format.
This is a lower priority for me, but it’s definitely something that I would like to have, especially since the design of this blog’s main page only displays excerpts from the five most-recent posts.
This one I only just suggested this week, just before the code freeze. I don’t expect it to be a priority but I imagine it’s also a relatively simpler feature to implement later on.
Separate CSS editing
Now that we have the ability to have multiple templates, maintaining our blog’s CSS becomes more of a hassle. We need to have a separate area to edit our CSS and then have it included in templates through something like a {%css} function.
In the meantime, the only option is to do something like serving a CSS file from another service like Dropbox.
I’ve made a number of other requests here and there, like a way to put a disclaimer on posts older than a given timeframe, but the above are what I’d consider my biggest asks.