Welcome! Start here 😁

Write Freely is a minimalist blog space that connects to the fediverse, so others can follow your account, @someAwesomePerson@blog.keyboardvagabond.com, on sites like Mastodon, where they (or you) can boost, share, and comment.

To get started, check out the Writer's Guide, but to give you the gist, Write Freely uses Markdown, though it also works with HTML.

Signing Up

Signup uses the SSO system since blogs are a common source of spam and bad actors. To gain access you can contact the admin at sysadmin@mail.keyboardvagabond.com or message @sysadmin@blog.keyboardvagabond.com for the invite link.

Get Writing

Drafts – Your posts start out as Draft and you Publish them to go live.
Tags – Use hashtags anywhere, or at the bottom or top of your blog to help your content be found. Use tags like #blog, #writing, #travelblog, etc to help your content be found. Sometimes changes to hashtags don't federate properly after a post has been published, so be careful. Consider writing your blog in another application copy-pasting the final version so you don't get prematurely submit-happy.
Pinning Posts – You can pin a post so that it appears at the top of your blog. You can use it to make a directory of posts. See an example at blog.michaeldileo.org.
Images – You can use Pixelfed or Picsur to host images and link them in the blog using markdown.

Using images in your blog

Picsur

A self-hosted alternative for Imgur
Upload your photo to picsur and you can copy the link in markdown directly OR you hover over the icon in the bottom right to add edits to your query, such as resizing (you don't always want the largest image) or rotations. You can also choose the format dynamically by changing the filetype at the end. Picsur does compress your images, so if you want full quality, another source.


Pixelfed

The fediverse alternative to Instagram
Upload to Pixelfed, either with Keyboard Vagabond or with an instance that doesn't compress images. From there you add the URL, but there aren't transformations that you can apply like with Picsur.


Federation

You can enable or disable federation for your blog. If you want to guarantee privacy you can leave your blogs in Draft.

Monetization

Monetization is enabled with Web Monetization, but if you're looking to start a business or earn income writing, Ghost is fantastic and also federates while taking less than other sites.

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