With support for locations finished, I was able to add support for checkins in a couple of hours this morning. You can only post a checkin via micropub, but you can edit them like any other post locally.
There's three remaining "tidbits" to be completed before I can mark location/checkin support is complete: use the sent published date time in the micropub request as the posts' published datetime, store/display the syndication urls in the post meta, and confirm microformat my location data. This is what they look like – checkin is from January 2nd :-)
Along with my regular status posts, I'm going to try to make a weekly roundup post for Tanzawa. As this is more of an experiment at this time, I'm putting them in the "Articles", but I may add a weekly stream just for these posts.
Locations
I build and launched the ability to associate a location with an entry. Initially I had planned on limiting locations to check ins and statuses, but decided against building in an artificial limitation.
Location support is baked into the Tanzawa micropub endpoint as well as the RSS feeds. Posts that have a location associated with them will display the location after the author's name in the posts' byline. RSS feeds will append the location name ( or coordinates where there isn't an address) to the end of the post.
While adding the map to the public post views, I also I did some cleanup. I had originally planned on having a 3 column layout for Tanzawa: left navigation, middle content, right meta. But having it split into 3 columns felt unnatural. I removed the meta-data from the third column, though it still exists.
I also cleaned up the footer so it's stuck of the page without extending the view port beyond the natural max. Practically speaking it means that you'd always get a scrollbar even if the content length didn't warrant it. Ironic given that the footer text reads "Made with care". This text is also now styled to reduce emphasis.
Posts that belong to multiple streams will have their streams highlighted on the left. There's also a new "Home" link that takes you to the top of the site.
Misc Issues
The CSS and Javascript required to run Tanzawa is now getting sufficiently complex where I should look into a proper deploy solution. My main server is the smallest droplet available at Digital Ocean, and 1GB of memory just isn't enough to run postcss when I made a lot of template changes without causing the server to swap and basically bring it down until the build completes.
The CSS and Javascript build processes are currently separate commands run with npm. CSS (tailwind) is controlled by postcss, while Javascript is controlled with webpack. I need to integrate the css build into webpack. Doing so would allow me to reduce the number of commands run on each deploy and create unique filenames for each build. Saving each filename as a hash would allow me to never worry about caching old assets.
Working a bit on how to integrate location information into a post. Right now I've got the location name appearing in the byline. Some day, I imagine this will be a link to search page that'll show you all posts within a given radius of that area.
Initially I had planned to have the map display on the right hand side of the post, in the "meta" column. But that felt like it's separate from the post. Moving down into the footer and increasing it's size a bit has helped it feel a bit more "at home".
I've settled in on the final mapping UI for Tanzawa and I'm super pleased with how it's turned out.
I realized that because addresses vary so much by country displaying ta full street address as you'd expect to see them on a letter is a) a huge problem all unto itself and b) far too much information to display.
Instead I opted to show the information that you really care about: city / state (prefecture), and country. It updates whenever your marker moves. The reset button lets your location to the initial value, allowing you to undo miss-clicks. The remove button lets you remove a location from a post entirely.
I also no longer set an initial marker in the map and zoomed out by about half. It's still centered on the Tanzawa mountains by default.
