I'm really looking forward to using this as my regular editor for posting to my site. I'm wrapping up a big refactor of the app's interface, focused on the asset management and site settings areas. Link cards and images in particular have been a big focus area—I want to make it really ergonomic to incorporate them into posts. I'm planning to add some keyboard shortcuts to make navigating the main areas of the app by keyboard. In particular, I want to make it super easy to get back to the most recent post being worked on, from anywhere in the app.

There are lots of small items I need to get working, but it feels like I'm getting pretty close to being able to dogfood this soon—a milestone I'm thinking of as "1.0 Alpha". My goal is to get my main site on Herringbone by the end of the weekend, and to get the Waterdog Stewards site live in prod before the Squarespace renewal on March 4th. 🤞💪

To-do before 1.0 Alpha

Logo

I need a logo! The logo will have to be among the Herringbone dev stories. But in the meantime, I need to settle on a color pallete, generate the pattern background, and decide on a treatment for an "H" or something to sit in front of it.

Deployment

A big epic—and honestly, the biggest potential hurdle to 1.0 alpha—is deployment. In addition to plain site generation, I want to ideally host this site at Cloudflare. And I want a seamless way to not only deploy the site (the minimum for alpha), but to incrementally deploy changes. There's a lot to do here.

Metadata

I've really cleaned up the metadata for the site that's in production now, and I don't want that to regress meaninfully when I go to prod with this app. So, I need the app to generate meta tags for canonical URL, OpenGraph/Twitter Card/etc., and other metadata that Google and other sites read.

Important, but not a blocker for 1.0 Alpha

Performance

I will soon have to look into performance; some areas of the app are feeling sluggish. For instance, typing in the title field of a post feels a little slow. And I'm not sure I need the near real-time page preview while typing in the editor, although I admit it's nice. It's not a dealbreaker for the alpha, but I need to learn how to use Instruments and get into the details.

Series

Among the last features I need to finish before considering going live with this is Series. That is, a series of related posts that will have their own index and navigation within the set of posts in the series. This is probably not strictly necessary, but it's a feature on the current site, and I'd like to use it to write up techniques and stories from developing Herringbone.

Annual Index Page

I have a pretty nice index page that breaks up posts by publication year, and I want to be able to bring that over prior to go live.