WordLand 0.5.4 -- the Timeline

[scripting]

In this release there's a new feature, the Timeline, and an adjustment to the Bookmarks menu.

https://wordland.social/

The Timeline

You can see the timeline by choosing Timeline from the main menu. It's the second item.

It opens a modal dialog containing a list of all the posts you've written in WordLand in reverse-chronologic order.

This hopefully is the beginning of something that will reach into the outside world, but for now it's just for viewing your posts and providing a convenient way to edit them.

Timeline gestures

1. Up and down arrow keys work, they move you through the timeline.
2. Click on a draft to select it.
3. Click again to toggle, so that the text is fully visible. Click again toggle it back to default height.
4. Press Enter to edit the draft, with confirmation.When you do this the Timeline closes and the item you were viewing in the Timeline is in the editor. All the normal WordLand clicks and keystrokes work.
5. Click on the Edit icon to do the same thing.
6. Next time you open the Timeline, the window is scrolled vertically to the same spot and the same item will be selected. This information is saved on the server so it will work on any machine you use WordLand on.
7. Any changes you've made will be reflected in the timeline, new posts, and changes to existing posts.

Information displayed in each box

1. The avatar is the WordPress avatar for the user.
2. When you hover over the avatar you'll see the username. (This feature is not in yet.)
3. On the top line: the name of the author, the publication date of the post, and on the right edge, the Edit box.
4. Below the top line, the title, if the draft has a title.
5. Below the title, the body of the draft.
6. The cursor box is highlighted in light blue.
7. As the mouse moves over the list, the item it hovers over has a darker drop shadow.

Where the Timeline is going

I'll write more about the features of the timeline in subsequent posts here.

Think about twitter-like products -- Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc. They have two modes -- writing and reading. We already have the writing functionality in WordLand. The Timeline is for reading.

I can imagine there will be a Timeline for news about WordLand, or a Timeline that contains Scripting News posts. A Timeline for all the people you work with, the people you play chess with. Basically it will be possible to have Timelines that correspond to anything that can be represented in RSS. It's possible to imagine a product where the Timeline is the main display and the editor is the one that pops up.

But first we need to have the basic Timeline functionality delivered, in the product, and usable, so we can shake out the bugs.

I also have some remaining work to do -- for example the tooltips aren't in yet, and I want to play around with the spacing in the display.

Also it's never had to deal with avatars other than my own (the scripting account on WordPress). It's possible it may not work for others! So please be patient, and write good bug reports!

The idea here is to build up a social network out of the pieces we already have working, good text editing, textcasting features, WordPress (which is an incredible underappreciated product and platform), the open web, and to the extent that twitter-like products support the open web, I want to include their content. This explains, hopefully why I've been beating the drum lately on inbound and outbound RSS.

Really there's no excuse for the products that say they want to federate not to accept the invitation to be part of the RSS network. And imho if they don't get into the loop, that tells you something about their intentions re being replaceable. All the components in the system we're working on here are replaceable.

The Bookmarks menu

Because the timeline feature basically duplicates the functionality of the Bookmarks menu, I've made the menu optional, defaulting off.

If you like the Bookmarks menu as-is, you can turn it back on, in Settings. Choose the command from the System menu, at the right edge of the menubar. The last checkbox on the first panel lets you turn it back on.

Caveat -- there's a bug that mysteriously resets the menu. You can rebuild it with the command in the Tools menu, so it remains functional. When and if it comes back I will have to figure out what the problem is and fix it, but to do that I have to completely review the code, so that may never happen. I think the problem is that it encounters an error, which cause it to fail, and the menu is left in its initial, empty, state. I haven't been able to get reproducible steps for this. So be forewarned if you depend on the feature, you may lose your work at some point. It really sucks when that happens, but it's also a great feature, I use it extensively in Drummer, to organize all my writing.

[scripting]

A quick video demo.

https://youtube.com/shorts/pAPW9wrk1No?feature=share