Help

Contents

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Creating a post

Posts are the core of any blog. Grouse.site makes it easy to quickly get your words out there for all to see.

Post Metadata

Here you can set a slug for your post (the part of the URL that identifies the post). Grouse.site will generate a slug for you based on your post's title (if you have one), but you can always set your own.

Tags can also be set in this section, a comma seperated string of tags is all you need (e.g. my cool topic, long read). If a tag exists already, Grouse.site will automatically re-use that tag, otherwise it will create a new tag for you.

Lastly, setting a publish date is also possible in this section. Useful for back-dating posts or setting a post to be published in the future.

Be sure to set your timezone on your settings page before trying to publish a post with a future date. Grouse.site will use your timezone to make sure the post is published and syndicated in your local time.

Adding photos

There are two ways to add photos to your post.

The first is as a "attachment" in the "photo attachments" section above the editor.

This will treat the photos on your post as a gallery, and will list your post as a "photo post" on your photos page.

The second way is to add images in the post's body, directly in the editor.

If you have the image URL, you can paste it in to the editor and it will be converted in to an embedded image.

Otherwise, you can attache a file by pressing the paperclip in the editor toolbar. Images uploaded this way will appear in the "media" section of your blog's admin area.

Writing

Grouse.site's editor should be relatively straight forward, though it's basic functionality is as follows:

If you are not yet ready to publish your post, you can save it as a draft and preview it to make sure it looks just like you want before sharing it with the world.

Sharing a post

Once your post is written and if you have setup integrations with Bluesky or Mastodon, you can have Grouse.site share a link to your post on your behalf.

In the case of posts without a title, Grouse.site will publish the body of the post as a traditional status update. There are content length limitations for both platforms and Grouse.site will warn you if you go over them for each platform. If you do exceed the limit, the post will fail to send.

In the case of a post with a title, the title will be the body of the post, followed by a link back to your site.

Grouse.site will also show a link to Bluesky and/or Mastodon on a post's page.

Saving bookmarks

Found an interesting link that you want to share or remind your self of later? Save it as a bookmark.

When entering a URL on the bookmark page, Grouse.site will attempt to fetch the name of the page you're bookmarking and generate a slug for you.

If you wish, you may make the bookmark public which will list the bookmark on your bookmarks page.

If you are a subscriber, you can also cache the content of the page you're bookmarking. Grouse.site will attempt to pull the readable content from the page and store a local copy that you or visitors to your blog can read when viewing the bookmark.

If a YouTube video is bookmarked, you can also optionally have Grouse.site embed the video when viewing the bookmark.

Uploading images

You can upload images over in the "media" section of your admin area, or directly as an attachment to a post.

Your images will be organised by year and date uploaded, showing the most recent images first.

From the media page, you can copy the URL to your image, or a markdown formatted image embed, if you're authoring a markdown post.

Pages

There are two kinds of pages on Grouse.site.

Pre-built pages, these are created for you when your blog is created and can be used to navigate to pre-defined listing pages.

The pre-built pages are:

Pre-built pages can't be deleted, but they can be un-published in the case you don't wish to make certain content accessible.

The other type of page is a custom page which can be used to display any content you can author in the page editor.

All page types can be added to your site's navigation and re-ordered.

Integrations

You can integrate your site with a number of third-party services.

At the moment, the following integration are available.

Bluesky

You can add multiple Bluesky accounts to your blog, and you'll get the option to share your post to any or all integrations at the time of authoring your post.

Make sure to set up a new app password for Grouse.site in your Bluesky account.

The tokens that Grouse.site saves to connect to Bluesky only last a few hours before needing to be refreshed.

Grouse.site will attempt to refresh these tokens a few times an hour to make sure the connection is not interrupted.

It is possible, however, that these attempts fail. In such a case, you will need to manually re-enable the Bluesky integration to re-establish the connection.

Last.fm

Adding your Last.fm username will allow you to show top tracks from the last week on a post page.

Letterboxd

Adding your Letterboxd username will allow Grouse.site to import your journal history each day and populate your movies page.

A know limitation right now is that only movies added to your journal in Letterboxd will be visible to Grouse.site as it pulls movies in to your site. This means that your entire watch history may not be available unless it is also added to your journal.

Mastodon

You can add multiple Mastodon accounts to your blog, and you'll get the option to share your post to any or all integrations at the time of authoring your post.

rel=me links

Add a list of URLs that should appear as <link rel="me" href="https://example.com"> in your sites header. Useful for proving identity and ownership of your domain.

Webmention.io

Add your webmention.io details to allow Grouse.site to send and read webmentions on your behalf.

Webmentions

From the docs:

Webmention is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) for conversations and interactions across the web, a powerful building block used for a growing distributed network of peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web.

By adding a webmention.io integration, you can direct any site trying to send you a webmention to send it to webmention.io instead.

In order for webmentions to then make it to your site, you'll need to add a Web Hook in webmention.io's admin area to send a request to /micropub/webmentions on your site's domain.

For example, if your URL was https://example.grouse.site, you would enter https://example.grouse.site/micropub/webmentions.

At the moment, only like and reply mention types are supported.

Since the content of a webmention is persisted as a copy, Grouse.site will periodically check the source of the mention to make sure it is still public. If Grouse.site is unable to find the mention after 5 attempts (to account for things like Mastodon servers being temporarily down), it will be marked as un-published on your site. You may still see the mention in your admin area, but it will no longer be public.

Sending Webmentions

Grouse.site can send webmentions on your behalf via webmention.io. When you setup your webmention.io integration, you can choose to enable the sending of webmentions.

If enabled, Grouse.site will look for links in your posts at publish time and send a webmention to each one in the background.

Settings

Blog password

Setting a blog password will allow you to share your blog with only the people that know its password. Useful for family blogs or to otherwise limit who can view your site.

When a visitor first lands on a password protected blog, they will be presented with a form to enter a password.

You can also share a link with the password in it — e.g. https://example.grouse.site?password=secret .

This is useful for sharing RSS feeds or other pages that might not necessarily be viewed in a browser.

Subdomain

You can change the subdomain of your blog at any time, however, your old subdomain will not redirect to your new subdomain. So any links on the internet or bookmarks people may have saved will break.

Custom domain

You can add a custom domain as a paid subscriber, there are instructions on how to do so on your settings page. Links to example.grouse.site will continue to work even when you have set a subdomain, but to avoid search engine confusion, your custom domain will be listed as the canonical domain.

Bookmark settings

There are a couple of bookmark settings that can alter the way bookmarks are shown on your site.

Checking for dead links will attempt to update your bookmark URL to point to archive.org if the page you have bookmarked responds with a 404.

Displaying YouTube embeds does what it says on the tin. If you bookmark a YouTube video, you can optionally show the video embedded on your bookmark page.

Timezone

Setting a timezone will ensure your scheduled posts are published in your local time.