Pandacap: Part 3 - Creating Posts

From a public-facing perspective, Pandacap is essentially just a single person's art gallery (and blog, microblog, and profile, I suppose). One of Pandacap's philosophies is that fundamentally different kinds of content are separated, so there are three types of public posts:

Artwork - a single image, with a title and description.
Journal entry - essentially a blog post, with a title and text.
Status update - text, with an optional attached image.

These are, not coincidentally, three of the four DeviantArt post types. The paradigm of Pandacap - the context in which it assumes you're creating and uploading your posts - is heavily based on art sharing platforms like it, some of which predate the rise of general-purpose microblogging.

Uploads

Although there are three post types, there are five options in the "create new" menu. This is due to the Uploads section and the new two-step upload process that was added in Pandacap 5.0. Although Uploads can serve as a simple photo host (only the logged-in user can list them, but the images themselves are public), the real purpose of the Uploads section is as a temporary holding area for uploaded images intended for artwork or status updates. Once an upload is used for an artwork post or a status update, it gets removed from the Uploads section.

Uploaded images can have "default" alt text (this can be changed when the image is attached to a post), which you can type out yourself or send to Microsoft's cloud for a suggestion (this is still a work in progress; it's primarily going to be useful for simple OCR). The initial upload page looks the same whether you want to post to Uploads, post artwork, or post a status update with an image; the only difference is where you get sent to next.

Posts

Pandacap posts can be created directly or from an uploaded file, depending on whether they have an attached image or not. (Currently, only a single image can be attached to a post.) All of the main post types are represented internally as UserPost objects; the post type primarily affects which section of the application they're shown in and what crossposting options are available.

New Pandacap posts are added to the Atom/RSS feeds and (after a few minutes) sent out to any ActivityPub followers. Pandacap never automatically crossposts a newly uploaded post to an attached external account, though. That's something you have to trigger manually.

Artwork

When uploading artwork, after you upload the file, you'll get sent to the "post artwork" page. One special feature of Pandacap's artwork posts is the ability to set the focal point - used by Mastodon for cropping images in the timeline - to the top edge of the image, instead of the center. Mastodon allows the focal point to be anywhere in the image, but for now, Pandacap offers just those two options. Other fields include title, body (all Pandacap post bodies are stored as Markdown), alt text (copied from the initial upload if applicable, but can be changed here), and tags. The uploaded image is shown to the right.

Journals

The journal entry page is very bare-bones, with just the title, body, and tags fields.

Status Updates

Status updates are very similar to the other post types, but lack a title field. Pandacap has two separate menu items for creating a status update - one for uploading an image that you then attach to a status update, and another for creating a status update without an image.

Crossposting

On Pandacap's "view post" page, the title and timestamp are shown first, then the image (in a 640x640 box, as of now), then the description and tags. Additional options are available to the Pandacap user, though; in particular, the ability to crosspost to Bluesky, DeviantArt, and/or Weasyl.

Bluesky

When posting to Bluesky, Pandacap will normally use the description of the post, not the title. However, if the description is 300 characters or longer, Pandacap will replace it with the title, followed by a link to the Pandacap "view post" page.

Alt text is included. Also note that Bluesky doesn't allow editing posts, but (at least right now) Pandacap doesn't either.

DeviantArt

The post's type in Pandacap - artwork, journal entry, or status update - will also be its type on DeviantArt. Text-only posts will simply crosspost immediately. (Crossposting status updates with images to DeviantArt isn't supported.) When crossposting an artwork post, though, you'll see a screen with some additional options: which gallery folders to add the post to, as well as whether it should be flagged as mature content, whether it's AI-generated, and whether to signal to third parties (outside DeviantArt) not to use it for AI. All of these options come from the DeviantArt API; the latter two are mostly included because the API documentation does not make their default values clear (Pandacap defaults to false for both). Some other options aren't currently implemented and are either left blank (for example, the subject of the artwork) or have fixed default values.

Weasyl

Journal entries and status updates in Pandacap both become journal entries in Weasyl (for status updates, an excerpt is generated from the body text and used as the title), while artwork posts in Pandacap become visual art posts in Weasyl. Folders and ratings are not currently supported (all art is rated General). Weasyl supports Markdown in descriptions, so any Markdown formatting you enter should get carried through.

Other options

The logged-in Pandacap user can also detach or delete a post. Detaching a post just causes Pandacap to forget the post on the external site exists, so you can crosspost it again, while deleting the post from Pandacap will issue a Delete activity over ActivityPub. Neither action will remove a post from Bluesky, DeviantArt, or Weasyl. In fact, it can't delete posts from these sites at all right now - you'll have to do it yourself.

Snail#