Leaflet Lab Notes

Pub subpages & other recent features!

Lab Notes 013: publications can now have nested pages — illustrated here with pages about embeds, comments, and more

by leaflet.pub|

October 21, 2025

|

We now support subpages in Leaflet publications!

Here's what it looks like — we made pages for features we added but hadn't blogged about earlier:

Embeds in Publications
A few different ways we support embedding content in Leaflet: iframes, Bluesky posts, and link previews

Embeds in Publications

A few different ways we support embedding content in Leaflet: iframes, Bluesky posts, and link previews

Embed blocks

Last month we added support for embed blocks, which is especially useful for YouTube, Bandcamp, and other media players.

We even improved on our initial implementation from docs (which used simple iframes) by adding iframely support to autodetect a bunch by default!

You can add a link block or an embed from the block menu, but we automatically add the embed (e.g. for YouTube) when supported.

Bluesky post embeds

We also support Bluesky post embeds, actually added that a bit earlier :) Here's an example — our announcement of this feature!

no prefetched post rip

Link preview blocks

These add to our default link blocks, which we've had for a while, and you get by default if you paste a link and click embed (or add the "external link" block), like so:

Magic circle (games)
In games and digital media, the "magic circle" is the space in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a game world. As noted by Edward Castronova in Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, the boundary delineating this space "can be considered a shield of sorts, protecting the fantasy world from the outside world". Instead of being impenetrable, however, an examination of contemporary virtual worlds reveals that the magic circle is actually quite porous. More directly, there appears to be a relationship between virtual worlds and the outside world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_(games)

Embed block examples

A few more examples of embeds in action!

Comments in Publications
Our own lexicon and comment implementation, which now supports attaching quotes from the post

Comments in Publications

Our own lexicon and comment implementation, which now supports attaching quotes from the post

We now support comments directly in Leaflet posts, which open in the interaction panel linked in the post header & footer.

no prefetched post rip

This uses our own lexicon, so it's separate from Bluesky posts.

Comments support nested replies, and we've added support for attaching quotes from the post too — highlight part of a post and click comment to try!

You can turn this off per-publication in pub settings if you'd rather not have comments on your posts.

This goes nicely with our earlier quotes feature, which opens in the same interaction panel — quotes for sharing to Bluesky, comments for discussion within the context of the Leaflet post.

We've got some ideas for other things that might go in the interaction panel as well, like mentions/backlinks, or post tags…

The big missing piece here, still WIP, is notifications — right now there's no good place to see new comments / replies, so we're working on a basic notification system that'll support that!

Discover, Reader, and Bluesky Feeds
A set of new reader-focused features within Leaflet AND several new Bluesky feeds to help discover and follow longform writing!

Discover, Reader, and Bluesky Feeds

A set of new reader-focused features within Leaflet AND several new Bluesky feeds to help discover and follow longform writing!

Discover and Reader

We recently integrated our "Discover" page within the rest of the Leaflet app, and added a new Reader page!

From the Reader page you can browse posts from publications you're subscribed to, and see the list of your subscribed pubs.

no prefetched post rip

Leaflet Bluesky Feeds

We also added several new Bluesky feeds!

One we've had for a while (formerly Publications) but renamed:

  • Leaflet Reader — new posts from pubs you subscribe to

And we added three more:

  • Leaflet Discover — all new Leaflet posts

  • Leaflet Bluesky Follows — Leaflet posts from your bsky follows

  • Leaflet Quotes — all Leaflet quotes shared to Bluesky

These are a great way to give different lenses on what's happening on Leaflet, and find new things to read, as well as follow publications you're already subscribed to right from Bluesky.

This is one of our favorite features from Leaflet docs, great for collections, project wikis or documentation, essays with branching tangents, and more.

Each published page also has its own interaction panel for quotes and comments. These are linked in the page footer, as well as an icon in the page preview (if quotes / comments exist) like so:

Not shown here, but yes, you can have sub-subpages and beyond…nest them as deep as you like! And soon: canvas pages, too 👀

Excited to see how people use this in more of a blogging context. Also working on support for publishing one-off docs to atproto; subpages + social features will be fun to play with!

…and with that, we should be just about caught up on documenting major new Leaflet features in Lab Notes!


Get updates from Leaflet Lab Notes!