When I was designing the publishing tool for this website, Create, I did so with the idea that the tool should specialise in blog post publishing. I was already happy with the text editor I used, and still use: Typora. By extension of specialising in publishing blog posts, I thought about the design and UX affordances I would like in my publishing tool that would be ideal for my workflow.
I write my blog posts in Typora, then I paste them into Create. Typora lets me copy the markdown representation of a post. When I paste a post into Create, two things happen:
- The title from the markdown document is pre-populated into a “Title” field, and;
- Sometimes, the blog post is automatically assigned a category.
Step #2 happens if the title meets one of several rules I have written. These rules comprise the category suggestion feature. The table below shows a few of them.
| If a post title contains… | Then set the category to… |
|---|---|
| coffee | Coffee |
| indieweb | IndieWeb |
| ideas | Ideas |
| joy | Moments of Joy |
| blogging | Writing |
| design | Designs |
There are less than a dozen rules. These rules were informed by categories of posts I commonly write. The rules are case insensitive.
With these rules, some of my posts are auto-categorised. This means I have one less step to complete before publishing a blog post. This may be a small detail, but one that matters to me. It reduces friction in publishing, which can be a tedious process at times.
When a post title meets one of the rules, the Category form field is auto-filled, like this:
There are occasionally mis-classifications. But, I can always change the category if needed.
While there may be a more technical way to implement the suggestion tool, I like the way it is right now: it works, saves a little bit of time, and doesn’t get in my way.
This has me thinking what other design affordances would be useful? One thing toward the top of my TODO list is a way to preview posts before they are published but without posting a draft. It would also be nice if I could paste an mp4 link into the editor and have it auto-complete to a video tag without having to add the HTML manually.
