PADD: Some new features!

I've been working on PADD publicly for about a week now. Before that I was hacking on the individual parts (indieauth, micropub, etc.) but I was finally able to put them together in a fun UI and reading from a Microsub server. It was something I threw together while waiting for the results of medical tests on my partner. Something I did to take my mind off the stress. It's quickly become one of my favorite projects!

New Features

Post Drafting

You will now see a "New post" button in the side bar (or floating near the bottom of the screen on mobile). This will take you to the page I'm using to write this post! It includes a markdown editor, photo upload, tag input, optional title, and even the ability to add your current location (for check-in style posts).

While you can draft full articles in PADD the main intent of this screen is that you use it to quickly post to your blog. It should hopefully reduce the friction for many in just doing the dang thing of posting.

User Settings

I added two new users settings:

1. Mark as read: this setting allows you to control the "Mark as read" behavior. It can be set to "Explicit" (the old way), "Interaction" (meaning posts are marked as read if you interact with them), and "Scroll past" (just marks them as read if you scroll past them).
2. Expand content by default: when enabled this will automatically expand content when you're viewing it. This means long posts won't be collapsed by default.

Additionally I made the user settings now persist to the database. This means that your settings won't be lost if you log out or your session expires.

Bug Fixes

Marking as read

Now when posts get marked as read we update the sidebar. This means that unread counts in the sidebar get updated as you read them! No more having to reload the page to get rid of the unread indicator.

Future development

I'm not totally sure what new features I'm going to be adding to PADD. However, what features I do add will be designed to scratch mostly my own itches. If there's something you'd like to see added to PADD please send me a webmention here (or reach out any other way)!

PS, I'm also sharing this on IndieNews!