Imperfect

reply by email

Today, I added a simple "reply by email" link to my post template and all prior posts. I hope this addition improves our quality of life. Would you fancy testing it with a post of mine?

It would be nice to confirm whether it works or could use improvements. Perhaps you even have some exciting feedback, insights, or questions to share.

Revisiting all of my posts to add this link has me wondering how feasible, if at all, the following features could be for Bear Blog:

  1. Add markup above and/or below all prior posts
  2. Search then replace markup throughout all posts

While those can save time and effort, they might not be needed as it stands. Adding markup took me less than half an hour. I don't yet have a need to replace my post template for prior posts in the future.

I fully understand that either feature might not be feasible or needed by enough users. The current way is manageable, even with unintentionally hitting the rate limit a bunch (sorry).

Updated in 2025-02-23: Here is the HTML I used for my links:

<a href="mailto:username@email.com?subject=re:%20{{ post_title }}">Reply by email</a>

?subject= is a mailto: link parameter that tells your default email client to pre-fill the subject line with whatever comes after. Then, I use re:%20{{ post_title }} as the parameter value. %20 prints a space. The {{ post_title }} attribute prints the post title. For this post, clicking the reply link would pre-fill re: reply by email in your subject line.

You can learn more about similar attributes under "Insert blog and post attributes" in the Neat Bear features page of the Bear docs.

A few workarounds exist for more maintainable reply links:

  1. If you don't mind links being excluded from Atom and RSS feeds, an upgraded Bear blog can hold reply links in the header or footer directives instead of each post.
  2. While header directives work, so do navbar links without needing to upgrade.

For maximal coverage, you can mix and match the above or even use inline links.

As for search then replace, I can't think of markup needing it besides the above. I'm sure valid applications exist, but they might be too few to justify building a feature for. Do you know of any?

Special thanks to: