PADD Gets a Big Upgrade

I've been busy! There's a big batch of improvements landing in PADD today. It touches pretty much every part of the app so I'm writing this post to walk y'all through it.

First though, I want to give a disclaimer: I'm building this stuff primarily for myself (not you, sorry). I want a good way to quickly post to my own site and read the blogs I care about. PADD is my attempt at that. If it turns out to be useful to other people, that's great. If not? Well, then at least I have a reader I like.

And of course, some acknowledgements before I go on:

None of any of this would be possible without some serious foundational work from the IndieWeb community. The Micropub spec was edited by Aaron Parecki, with contributions from many others. The Microsub spec grew out of the broader IndieWeb community (also spearheaded by Aaron). PADD is built on top of both. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I would be remiss not to mention them here.

The New Fetures

Save Your Work: Persistent Post Drafts

You can now save post drafts and come back to them later. Your title, content, tags, photos, and location all get saved. There's a drafts sidebar right next to the composer that shows your saved drafts sorted by most recently updated. Click one to pick up where you left off, or delete it when you're done. It's the kind of thing I probably should have built sooner.

Built-In Photo Editor

You can now edit your photos right in PADD! There are nine one-tap filters (Vivid, Warm, Cool, B&W, Fade, Noir, Dusk, Matte, Chrome) with live previews, a manual adjustments panel for Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Warmth, a crop tool with preset aspect ratios (1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 9:16, or freeform), and rotation controls including a fine Straighten slider for when a photo came out just slightly crooked. Nothing too fancy, but it covers the basics without making you leave the app. Editing happens before upload to your media endpoint.

Smarter Photo Uploads

PADD will now automatically convert non-web-friendly formats like HEIC or RAW to something web-safe before uploading. If you're shooting on an iPhone or a dedicated camera, you shouldn't have to think about this anymore. It just works.

Discover Feeds

There's a new (experimental) "Discover" page linked in the dropdown under your profile picture. This page surfaces content being interacted with by other PADD users. I'm simply surfacing counts of likes, reposts, and replies. I'm hoping with a bit more use I can evolve this page into something that helps PADD users discover new blogs to follow.

Import/Export via OPML

PADD now has OPML import/export from the settings page. If you're coming from another reader you can bring your whole subscription list over at once. Or you can export your subscriptions as OPML. Your data is yours!

Export Account Data

Just like OPML export, we also have full account data export support. This export includes all likes, reposts, replies, drafts, and account data saved to PADD. I say again: Your data is yours.

More Control Over Your Feed: Mute, Unmute, and Block

Beyond follow and unfollow, you can now mute an author (either globally or in a specific channel), unmute them later if you change your mind, or block them. Marking an entire channel as read has also been made more reliable across different server setups.

Settings and UI Refresh

The settings page has new options, and the overall UI got some updated styles and assets. Nothing dramatic, just cleaner.

Account delete

The one feature I hope you never use: Account deletion. This feature wasn't something I considered adding to PADD from the outset because in all honesty I never imagined that anyone would actually sign up for PADD. But then people actually did sign up! So now you can delete your account should you ever decide you want to.

I'm not done yet.

While I've been working on PADD, I've also been quietly building something else: darkfiber.space.

The basic idea is that there's a lot of great writing on personal blogs and it's genuinely hard to find. darkfiber.space will let users who've signed up publish posts (via webmention) to topic based "spaces". Each space will then be a feed so you can subscribe to topic based feeds populated by any number of authors.

More to share on that soon.

How to help

If you're using PADD (or any of my projects) you can support me by:

• Giving your honest feedback on my work! You can send a webmention to this post or leave a comment below even!
• Contribute code! I'm always happy to review PRs.
• Consider a one-time or monthly payment on Ko-Fi. Every little bit helps!

PS, I'm also sharing this on IndieNews!