draft

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A draft in the context of the indieweb refers to a draft post, a post that an author has partially written, or otherwise does not consider finished.

Why

Drafts are useful for private or semi-public sharing with others for review and feedback before official publication and POSSEing.

Being able to save drafts has more than once saved me from posting something "in the heat of the moment" that I'd have later regretted. They can be a useful saucer for cooling off. Kylewm.com

IndieWeb Examples

Some IndieWeb community members are using scheduling to publish drafts at otherwise public URLs, but not have them show up on their homepage (e.g. in their composite stream) or legacy feed file.

Tantek Çelik I've been doing this for a few years. scheduling#Tantek
MobilePub allows saving of posts locally, even when offline, then posting later when connected
Aaron Parecki supports draft posts on his site and with Quill since 2017-01-04
Anthony Ciccarello supports draft posts and has had a /drafts page since 2023-01-26
...

Open Source Examples

WordPress

WordPress has a draft feature that allows you to save a draft and share a URL to a draft post which does not show up on your home page or any feeds. It has a status field in the API that can be draft or publish

ProcessWire

ProcessWire has a published/unpublished flag that effectively allows writing a draft post that does not show up on your home page or any feeds. An unpublished page is visible only to logged in administrators at its permalink.

Known

Known has a public/private/members only access setting per post, so Private can be used as a Draft mode.

Silo Examples

Kickstarter

Kickstarter supports sharing drafts of a campaign and includes a prompt at the top asking the viewer to submit feedback to the author.

Blogger

Blogger has a draft mode for posts, which the API exposes with an isDraft parameter

Twiitter

Twitter has a draft mode in its clients, but this is not reflected in the API

Medium

Medium has a publishStatus for posts that can be public, draft or unlisted whihc is accessible from the API

Brainstorming

UI for many drafts

Tantek Çelik use-case: I really need a better UI for keeping a big list of draft posts organized.

current workaround: right now I just braindump them all into a text file, which makes it hard to find a specific post when you want to iterate on it, and hard to find a set of related posts when you want to split / merge one or more posts into one or more related posts.

Design thoughts:

Three pane view:

+----+
|____|
| |  |
| |  |
+----+

Top horizontal pane search box with a list of hashtags underneath in descending order of frequency (most to least frequent in existing drafts), and clicking them adds them to the search filter without losing keyboard focus, so you can keep typing. They act as whole "characters" inline so you can delete them as just by backspacing and they get added back to the frequency list.

+-----------------------------+
|Search: [___________________]|
|(#indieweb) (#running (#css) |
+-----------------------------+

+-----------------------------+
|Search: [(#indieweb)________]|
|(#running) (#css)            |
+-----------------------------+

The hashtag buttons are key for lower-effort cluster discovery. Because of them I can just write a new note / post draft any time, put in hashtags, then come back later and quickly see which topics have the most drafts, and split/merge them accordingly into one or more posts.

Panes 2 & 3 side-by-side select list of drafts and editable content view. This is a classic list of drafts vs content editable view of a draft (or multiple if you select a range on the list side)

Prior similar work: Notational Velocity, e.g. see screenshot. Appears to lack: hashtag cluster discovery, inline editing in pane 3.

Public Drafts

While drafts are usually private, there are some reasons you might want to make drafts publicly accessible.

Give reviewers a chance to review the content before posting in a feed
Share incomplete thoughts while tempering reader expectations

Design Considerations

Help readers understand when a post is a draft using a warning at the top of the page
If the final post URL could change (e.g. when the date changes), ensure redirects are in place or discourage direct linking to the page
Public drafts are typically unlisted, and configured to avoid indexing by search engines but could be listed somewhere site visitors can find them

Anthony Ciccarello Added /drafts page as a list of WIP posts on 2023-01-21. It's similar to a digital garden but with the intention of posting the content later. Draft URLs are also explicitly expected to break. This list of links is manually created to only show drafts I'm okay okay with working on publicly but it's a pain to add each link.

Why