Final Thoughts

We've now tested the very basics of mochott. This includes experiments with:

• Creating a minisite (Test Site)

• Creating a series (The Basics)

• Using the writing interface

• Formatting available from the main formatting interface

• Formatting and features available in the additional “+” interface

• Reviewing our published articles

First thought, I absolutely love the way series work. It's fun to read through my articles as parts of a bigger article. I can see this being useful for a ton of publishing options - writing a book is top of mind!

Second thought, I need to create an additional minisite to full explore how this feature works and the potentials for use. Curious how others are using minisites, if they are.

Third thought, mochott takes a couple more seconds than I'd like to load between pages. It's a minor issue but clicking between articles or publishing a post takes a couple more seconds longer than I keep expecting. I'm constantly worrying it's not loading or not saving things. 21st century problems, I know…

Now, let's get into the posts and the functionality of things.

Testing The Basics

In our first post, just writing some text, mochott does amazing! It was simple, it was intuitive and it made wanting to publish more very enticing. It also looks clean and beautiful and the cover photo we chose fit exactly as we expected it to. Curious if there are any guidelines on cover photo sizing - I'll have to look around for that.

Format Test

First thing I love is how adding Headings 2 and 3 automatically add a Table of Contents. H4 does not appear in the ToC, which is fine with me. I also love that I don't need to add a cover photo to my posts.

For the most part, the formatting options worked and looked how I expected them to. However, the alignment options seem to have done nothing, even though in my writing interface they show the correct alignment, even when I go back to edit the post.

I really like the way the table looks and images look great at 100% size. Using quote marks (“) in my image captions changes them to code, which is a minor detail but a detail nonetheless.

Additional Format Test

Our final test in The Basics series focused on the additional formatting options available in the “+” menu in the writing interface.

I attempted 2 BlueSky embeds - 1 in the main text and 1 in a collapsible section - both did not work. We will play more with embeds in future tests.

I love the callout options, although do wish you could select your own icon. You may be able to do this with custom blocks, which we will experiment with soon. I also love that you can format text within a callout.

The collapsible sections (Toggle) was a bit weird. It appears as though you can embed within them but that didn't show up ( ) and it allows you to add toggles within toggles but those don't show up either. It just shows as text. Not complaining really, as I said in the post, I don't know why you'd do that.

The URL preview to another ATproto blog looked great on publish. I was a little worried, based on what I saw in my editor, that it wasn't gonna work out. However, it looks very inviting in the published article.

Like the image caption issue in the Format Test, the footnote that appears naturally at the bottom of my article changes my quote marks to code.

In Conclusion

The posting interface, the formatting and writing on mochott is mostly enjoyable with only minor pet peeves encountered. I very much enjoy the concept of minisites and series and can see this being hugely beneficial to all sorts of writing projects. I plan to further experiment with both.

I'm hoping that in future tests, we'll sort out the embed issue we're running into and we'll find out more about custom blocks, which we've mentioned in every single post, so far!

Overall, after exploring the basics of mochott, I'm excited to keep experimenting and see where our journey here will take us!