Today I woke up with something on my mind. I wanted to build an action for Drafts.

TL;DR Get the action here: omg.lol weblog.

Why?

weblog.lol is a part of the ever-growing group of sites/features/perks of the awesome omg.lol service Adam decided to launch, and continuously improve.

It’s a very cool weblog service, still in beta, but in full working condition already. I would love to use mine.

At the moment, my blog is happily hosted at Micro.blog, but I’ll find a use for that part of omg.lol’s offer. I thought about a linklog, but…

If I’m ever to do that, I would need Drafts to work with it. This is the app that sits on my dock, closest to my thumb. I spend a lot of time there. Actually, here, as this is the place where this post is also being written.

How?

There was not an action on the directory that would allow me to post straight to weblog.lol, so I tried to repurpose an older action I’d made, and see if I could get it to work.

Mind you, I know close to zero about JavaScript, so anything I come up with involves a lot of searching on the Drafts forum, the documentation, and the wider web. Even so, I was unable to get it to work.

Colin to the rescue!
(And Adam. And Greg.)

I posted a cry for help on social.lol (another very cool service Adam added to the package), and Colin Devroe was the one that immediately tried to help. Back and forth, try this, try that, we were not getting any closer to solving the issue. Adam was involved, and, after a while, Colin thought about summoning the developer of Drafts. 10 minutes later the reply came, and it seemed it would be impossible to get it working, unless Adam changed something on the API endpoint. And, guess what? He did! Quickly, as he usually does these things!

The solution was now very close, and the action started working. Team effort, if I ever saw one: a user with the will, but not enough know-how; another user with no motive except the willingness to help, and a lot of knowledge; the creator of the whole omg.lol thing; the developer of the app in question. All got together on Mastodon to make something come alive. Isn’t the internet grand?

Now What?

The original idea was to build an action that would prepend the frontmatter to whatever I’d written, with the correct date, a couple of tags, and push all that to weblog.lol. I had that working, but then found out weblog.lol works pretty well without frontmatter on the posts. So that part was scrapped from the action.

I would still love to code something that would present a tag list, I’d then pick the ones I’d like, and the action would add those to the frontmatter. It’s on my to-do list.

But working with templates is also cool (and a great Drafts feature), and I now have a template that, at the press of a button, will populate a new draft with the current date/time, and add a couple of tags, ready to edit. It works great.

Anyway, there is now an action on the official Drafts directory that does the thing I needed. Maybe you’ll find it useful as well.