Admin Post: Discussion Post: What are you yearning to Pillowpost?

[prettyarbitrary]

First a bit of comm business:
The What do you want from this community poll is still open. I'll let it run for another day or so. We have over 25 members (already!) and less than half have voted, so if you've got opinions, feel free to make them known!

But so far, there's strong consensus in favor of:

• "Connect with other Pillowforters"


• "Updates/conversation about Pillowfort"


• "Members can post things into the community"


• "Conversation starter posts from the mod"

So let's get started with those discussion posts! Our first topic: What do you wish you could post on Pillowfort?

What's the most recent thing that had you thinking, "I should make a post about that?" Or the thing that's overpoweringly making your fingers twitch because you keep thinking about it and have nowhere to put it?

Tell us in the comments here--or heck, make your own community post about it!

(Fun fact: on DW, you can track comments for a post or comment thread! If there's a convo you'd like to follow, look along the bottom of the post or comment for the 'Track this' icon--it might look like a little bell--and click it to turn tracking on or off. If you add tracking for a comment, then you'll get notified of any comments made in the thread from that comment on down. You can find all your notification settings in Account Settings>Notifications, where you can turn them off at any time.)

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I happen to have posted about this recently! I am really really missing the image posting function. I very rarely embed videos and I can still do that here with no more difficulty than at PF. And while I sometimes link embed there I can easily link out from here as well. But images? My only workarounds are time consuming, and I got very used to the ability to not only create photo posts but also easily reblog them to communities.

I can still do that here -- for example, I just shared something today on common_nature that I posted on my own account the day before. But the original image host is a clunky process that means I am in no way going to post many photos the way I did there.

[osteophage]

Yeah, similarly... I was just thinking earlier, if I had to fully move over to DW, I would be bummed out about how inconvenient it would be to post as much desert photography as I have on PF.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh definitely. I mean, just yesterday I mentioned how all my early blog photos, from about 2015 and earlier, are now gone from here because I'd used an external host for years and they suddenly restricted use down to under 100 pics. I use Google Photos now (which, fortunately, maintained all the links from Picassa which was the next host) but they don't offer an embed code. I have to use a third party site to do those one at a time. DW began offering image hosting after I was using Picassa and there is a storage limit, plus it's still not all that quick since you can't upload directly into the post.

As a result I stopped sharing many photos at all in the last 4 years. So I already have a ton of stuff at PF that I never posted here at all and never will either.

[prettyarbitrary]

Does the < img src= blah blah > work for images in Google photo galleries? I ask because I haven't actually tried it. But for photos that are hosted on external sites, I often find that good old-fashioned HTML is the fastest way.

[prettyarbitrary]

Actually let me just give this a try.

[yourlibrarian]

No, it doesn't work because the image address can't be used for the embed without a workaround.

[prettyarbitrary]

It's actually easier to post images that are hosted somewhere that isn't DW than it is to post images you have in your DW image gallery. :(

[prettyarbitrary]

I miss easy image posting so much!

The DW folks have said they're working on it, but they need to do a lot of cleanup on the underlying code to get it ready for that, and with such a small group of mostly-volunteers, that'll take a while.

Although I have been enjoying all the various quality of life improvements they've been making along the way.

[yourlibrarian]

I have as well. But I wouldn't expect anything to change for some time. As I recall the ability to host images at all took some 6 years after it was announced.

[always_sundae]

I remember the days of posting pics on forums, I guess it’s pretty similar to here (haven’t tried posting pics to DW yet). You just need to find a good image host you feel comfy with, preferably one that automatically gives you the copy-paste code for html/markdown/bbc code when you upload the image and it’s pretty smooth sailing after that. Pretzelspaceship (Bea) recommended this one when I talked to her about it on Discord: https://imgbox.com/

Also, having w3schools or the markdown code tips page in browser bookmarks for easy access can help a lot too. If you use DW on mobile, you can even set up your keyboard to do a shortcut for html coding. For an example, when I type &shrug on my keyboard I set it up to give me this kaomoji —> ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I just set it up for myself “&img” turns to src=“IMAGE URL” alt=“ALT TEXT”> and “&links” turns to =“url” target=“_blank”>title< /a> Cool huh! (Removed some elements of the html so it doesn’t auto-format, the whole version in in my keyboard is complete)

[yourlibrarian]

Oh the coding is the simple part. I ended up with Picassa post-Imageshack because I didn't want to have a repeat of all the photo losses. I figured Google is not likely to completely delete photo storage. They did actually phase out Picassa but transitioned it to Photos, and if they phase that out I suspect it will likely be to a more general cloud storage option with a size limit.

Of course, should PF go down entirely that will be a different sort of loss, but at least it won't be one that can be seen now on DW where there are a lot of posts with broken links or watermarked images after hosts changed their Terms.

[recently_folded]

This, absolutely missing. That was one of the attractive things about tumblr (remember when there were attractive things about tumblr?), that oh-so-easy image posting. And Pf was smart to hold onto that as a must-have. I've been meeting online for over 20 years now with a group of friends, and although we have a custom text-based website we built for this and years of expressive conventions, we've somehow mostly migrated to slack because of that ease of posting images and links that auto-snippet.

Yesterday I did upload a couple photos here to post, and while it wasn't much more complicated than posting to my wordpress blog, there were all of those steps which are not just straight-forward html but involve DW code. Plus, just now, opening my html editor because I didn't want to mess up the link to my post with a typo and break the page, simply to make this reply.

I think that not only are those of us who can do the html nonetheless happy with the convenience of not, it definitely opens up use by those who can't and don't care to take that time and fiddly effort. And that ultimately makes the conversations richer, I feel.

[yourlibrarian]

Easy image posting was Tumblr's killer app, it was what made the site. And you're right about how one comes to expect that. I found I couldn't do it on Discord and was surprised (there was an option for gifs and emoticons, but not images from my desktop).

Ooh kitty pics! Always worth seeing 😺

I know that another thing that got me using PF was the fact that while it didn't use HTML, I didn't have to recode a post to share it there either. If every site has its own markup options (or doesn't have any) this is a headache which means one will reduce cross posting. However I quickly discovered that I could simply copy the finished post from here and paste it there and it would be an exact duplicate with markup and links intact. The fact that you can't do that in reverse at DW however has surely got to be a major roadblock for someone whose main accounts are somewhere else. While I often found this irritating at PF (all the people image posting their Tumblr or Twitter posts even though you could just do link embed, or you could just copy the text itself), the fact that people want to do this means DW is going to be used less.