Leaflet: first impressions

I've been following Leaflet's development since it was first announced, but this was my first time taking it for a spin once I decided it was the standard.site implementation that best fit my needs. So far I've only written two medium length and one long blog post, but I already have some positive things to say:

Setup was trivial.

I really like how simple and effective the theme experience is, and how it propagates into the ATProto layer via the standard.site integration.

The analytics are great. I'm happy with how many views I got on a first blog post, and a third of that traffic came from the Leaflet network rather than my Bsky followers.

You can subscribe with Leaflet reader, with your email, or both - and either way you can see who those subscribers are.

The Bluesky tagging and embed features are really nice.

There are some areas within the app that are a bit of a drag:

There are some FOUC issues that are distracting when you have a very different theme.

It would be great to make "view as theme" work like a dark mode checkbox does. I love my red-and-black aesthetic but there are some times when it clashes with how the editor works (like block highlights).

Human-readable URLs, ideally with some browser-side config to aid in default patterns but remaining customizable.

Static pages in a menu, as is common on platforms like Wordpress or Ghost. I want an "About" page!

There are some editor quirks, like drag-to-select just generally being a bit... odd.

Image embeds should have both alt text (invisible but searchable) and captions (visible beneath the image, searchable). Ghost does this really well.

Code blocks! Ideally ones with Mermaid support too.

I did hit a weird glitch on a publish where I was able to write an entire post, but got told I was "logged out" on trying to publish. After logging in, publishing appeared to hang indefinitely; the result is that the post successfully published on Leaflet (and therefore to my PDS) but was not syndicated as a Bluesky post (I had to do this manually). Seems like there's a bug here.

And then I have some thoughts on reading and writing interfaces:

I move between desktop and mobile a lot. It would be cool to have a mobile app, especially one with seamless interop with the Bluesky app. I'd love to be able to open Leaflet posts for a more focused reading experience.

I would love a fully featured "publish-to-standard.site-via-Obsidian" integration. I wouldn't use this for all writing, but perhaps certain interlinked articles or on certain publications. This isn't totally straightforward to implement, however; for example you'd want support for formatting and images.

Overall, this still feels like a beta product, but also that it's good enough to be worth paying for! I'm happy with my choice.