0.9.5 — a profile as a configuration field

Beside the RSS feed there now stands an icon for an external profile, in the header and in the footer. The icon itself is half an hour's work; the question was where the address should live.

The answer is the same as for every field before it: in the instance configuration, not in the engine. The block of profiles is optional, and empty means none — the component then renders nothing at all, no empty slot and no greyed-out icon. An instance without an account need do nothing about this, not even add a single line.

This is not excessive caution. An instance published anonymously has reasons to lead nowhere, and a link to a profile is precisely the sort of thread somebody will pull. A default address written into the engine would be the same mistake as a default key for the service route — a mistake already made here once and written up in release 0.9.0.

Unlike the feed, a profile link goes straight there. The feed opens a hint with an address to copy, because clicking through to an XML file gives a reader nothing by itself. A profile does give something: whoever clicks knows where they are going and should arrive at once. The same appearance, two different behaviours, and the difference comes from the content rather than from carelessness.