Summer of Pub Retrospective!

This is the last post for Summer of Pub — with some final thoughts, not only on this (probably too-casual) blog club, but on what would make future collaborative publishing experiences great.

☀️🍃📝🍃☀️

Reflections on Summer of Pub

I know updates here have been infrequent; I've been distracted by Leaflet product improvements and growth and, you know, doing summer things. But I've loved seeing everyone publish and this was a really nice way to see more folks writing in the early days!

My own blogging hasn't been super consistent, and it's been split across my personal blog (Scraps!) and Leaflet's Lab Notes, but overall I feel like this helped me get into the habit of publising more than usual.

To be honest it was probably a little premature to run a blog club, as we started without really any of the social features, like quotes and comments, that we later added. But…so it goes! Still had fun :) And this has sparked a bunch of thoughts on improvements for next time!

☀️🍃📝🍃☀️

Towards Better Blog Clubs

I also heard some great suggestions from some of our participants — thanks! — which are worth keeping in mind for future blog club iterations…whether ones run by us or by others:

better ways to mark (and view) participating posts: it'd be great to more easily indicate which of your posts to include (maybe a whole publication; maybe just certain ones), and view all the posts in one place…maybe via tags, as a feed, or even some kind of community publication others could subscribe to

nicer directory of publications: similar to above, a good way to browse everyone participating — I made this eventually, but a little buried in a post

better examples: starting with me, the host — I definitely could've done a better job of posting consistently, jumping in with comments / questions on others' posts, etc!

more structure: this was a little too loose and rolling and slow, which was partly inevitable b/c we were building as we go, but also could have been nice to have a more clear start and end, some periodic check-ins, etc.

stronger social interactions: a big thing we were missing was clearer ways to interact with each other's writing! I shared more early on, but we didn't have comments then, and later I got busier and let this slide…stronger expectations e.g. for all participants to reply to others could've helped here

better list of topics / formats: it could've been cool to have something early on with suggestions; I did a post later on with a big list of ideas, but maybe too wide a net; more constraints could actually be helpful to get folks more on the same page

poster partnerships: could be fun to collaborate more with folks active on Bluesky, e.g. folks in specific subcommunities, to help lead a club, share posts, or even help vote and pick winners for more of a contest format

Much thanks to Jonas-Merlin, Psychosis Enjoyer, and Bread for suggestions here!

☀️🍃📝🍃☀️

Ideas for Better Collaborative Publishing

I also want to think more broadly about how we could better support groups writing and publishing together!

This could look like…

similar blog clubs but for more niche topics / communities

a daily challenge format

webrings, for groups of friends to post together

communal publishing for broader groups, e.g. Blacksky or fandom communities, perhaps more ongoing and fluid…

A bunch of things that could be interesting, including some drawn from recent Lab Notes posts:

top level pages for a pub: for a blog club, something like "start here" or "participants" might be useful

subpages in posts: I think would just be fun and enable more types of content, e.g. Jonas-Merlin's pattern language could be an evolving artifact within Leaflet

post reactions: little thing, but nice to have lightweight ways to encourage each other (custom reactions could be fun here!)

notifications: a big missing thing for comments, want to add soon…need this for the end to end conversational experience to feel complete; right now hard to know if comments get replies!

tags: a fairly lightweight thing that could be useful for this kind of blog club; we've seen e.g. book clubs on Bluesky have success with custom feeds based on a unique tag…and tags could even help folks find each other before the formal structure of a club or challenge, to help them organize in the first place

collaborative publications: it'd be nice to have a way to collect posts from many contributors — everything from a small group of people publishing in one place, to a larger community / org where people can submit / cross-post…

☀️🍃📝🍃☀️

In Conclusion…

Thanks so much to all who participated, and anyone who's been reading and sharing what people are publishing! It's been very fun to experiment with writing and push Leaflet to its limits.

Wrapping up this club / pub for the time being, but still here if anyone has questions, ideas, things you want to jam on…

I'd love to host some more writing sessions too, maybe more experimental one-off things — we did this early on with Leaflet, before we even added any social publishing features, and it was a lot of fun…even better now!

And if we do something like this again (next summer?!) we'll have lots more great examples, as well as many more folks using Leaflet, so it could be cool to try more focused structured formats. TBD :)

Thanks & happy writing!

Brendan