Speakers

I’m primarily a writer, my podcasts reflect that, so most of the work I do on each podcast, beyond recording the audio, is in writing the show notes. 

I have a template the writing and audio flow through. Fairly standard stuff, the same approach used by Tumblr and many other blogging systems, including UserLand's Manila and Radio UserLand (I am the founder of UserLand). 

Here's an example of a show notes page rendered through that template. 

The idea of WordLand is to do all the block-oriented work once, outside of the writing environment, then flow the writing through it, far away from the heavy lifting. It’s always how I’ve done my blogging tools. 

I understand WordPress so far has a steady workflow through the block editor, but these are workflows for designers and programmers. WordLand is the flow for writers.  

Note: This post originally appeared on my personal blog.

The nice thing about a blogroll is that it can become a feed reader, in a very small space. It's been on my blog home page for over a year, and I use it a lot, largely because I have to go to that page a lot to see how something I've written looks. Then I see that one of my favorite sites has updated, and I take a quick look to see what's new.

From a technical standpoint, it's hooked into a FeedLand instance where I have created a category called blogroll, and put all the feeds I want in my blogroll in that category. All I have to do to add a new one is subscribe to it in FeedLand, and click the blogroll checkbox. 

Another developer wrote a post about using their blogroll as a feed reader, and I wanted to put my hand up and say yes — this is a good idea. People should do this. 

I like it because it's real innovation in reading, something that imho has been lacking in the feed world. Lots more potential here. 

And you're welcome to use my blogroll as your feed reader. I have put it on its own page but it's at a confusing location. Something to fix, maybe later today if I have some time or tomorrow. 🙂

Honestly I don’t think Automattic has done enough to tell people about a crazy new feature for WordPress blogs.

Here’s the feature.

You can use WordPress to write a blog post that appears on Mastodon.

You can read about it in a WordPress post I wrote to demonstrate the new stuff.

And here’s the same post on Mastodon.

It’s the same thing.

This is revolutionary, a legitimate breakthrough.

There’s a good thread of comments about this on Mastodon, and if you have questions, consider joining it. Or you can post a comment here and I can try to get you the answer.

And to be clear, I didn’t make this happen, it was done by some brilliant developers at Automattic with the power of ActivityPub. I just get to use it, and it gives my product WordLand a great feature, for free.

It’s pretty freaking excellent, if you ask me. 😀

I just heard that Evan Prodromou, a leader in the ActivityPub/Fediverse world, will be a keynote speaker at WordCamp Canada in October in Ottawa. I just wrote an email to him and Dan, which as often happens I realized while writing it that it should also be a blog post. So here goes!

Given that this is Canadian WordCamp, I was hoping that Evan might be there.

We've known each other since the early days of Twitter, when Evan was running identi.ca and I was trying to live with the limits of all the incompatible silos the tech industry was creating. Now we're starting to undo the crazy stuff, millions of people understand the importance of getting rid of lock-in, so finally we're empowered to fix a lot of problems. And at this conference, we have a chance to focus on one very important connection between WordPress and ActivityPub. 

First, I love what the WordPress team has been doing in making posts flow from WordPress to ActivityPub. I have been blown away by what it can do, and how it moves the needle so far in support of writers.

1. Because my new product WordLand connects to WordPress, posts that we write also can flow through to ActivityPub and can appear on Mastodon and any other AP-compatible system. It amazes me every time how well this connection works. 
2. It's also amazing because many of the features of WordPress writing make it through to Mastodon via ActivityPub: Posts can have simple styling, links, you can update posts, and a bunch more. I saw someone using a blockquote the other day and it looks great. I think almost all the features in WordLand make it across to Mastodon! Wow. 
3. But no one is talking about it. It's time imho to change that, and start making the Fediverse work for writers, and escape the limits of Twitter circa 2006. But before they can use it they have to know it exists.
4. And since WP uses features in AP that most clients haven't tested with yet, because there was no way to use the features until WP supported them, there are obvious and simple tweaks that will make my WP posts look even more excellent in an AP client.  
5. And there's the connection between RSS and ActivityPub. I've been writing about inbound and outbound RSS feeds being a powerful way for systems to interop. A quick path through the walls between the systems. We have to do this, if we don't what would that say about the "open" part of the open social web?

So imho we have a lot to talk about. 😀

Dave

PS: Can this blog be viewed in Mastodon? That is, have you installed the code that enables this compatibility?

PPS: Dreams can come true, like what I wrote up in 2022 about textcasting. Think about it. WordPress brings almost all these features to the ActivityPub world, for the benefit of writers and their readers and the open web.

First, thanks to the organizers of WordCamp Canada for inviting me to speak at this year’s conference and for allowing me to post to this blog.

I like to start these things really early and encourage a conversation that starts way before the conference and extends beyond. That way we can get more done when we meet face to face. And that’s really why I do this — to meet other people who want to do the same kind of stuff I do.

I did a podcast a few days ago entitled WordPress and Me. I’ve been involved in blogging since inception in one way or another, and over the life of WordPress I have used it, but never dived into it as a developer. I assumed that meant working in PHP, which has never been one of the environments I’ve mastered. These days I do all my server coding in Node.js.

But then one day I discovered that there was a comprehensive API for WordPress that ran in Node. So I tried doing some stuff with it, and it worked! I read through the docs and it made complete sense, in fact it reminded me of the API we built for Manila, in the late 90s, a precursor to WordPress. I discovered that WordPress had met me where I worked. So I continued experimenting and saw quickly that you could make a very nice editor with this API, so I went for it, and the result is WordLand, which is the primary thing I want to talk about and demo in October in Ottawa.

A few more notes from the conversation on Slack a yesterday.

• I found it interesting that the questions assume I know more about WordPress than I do. I’m not a newbie to what WordPress does as a user, but I am very new to working with it as a developer.
• I made the choice of APIs without realizing I was making a choice! From what I learned yesterday, I doubt the other API would have made WordLand possible. But if people really want to get the ball rolling, we should either clone the API so it works anywhere (that’s usually possible) or extend the wpIdentity package to support the other API. Since it’s liberally licensed, anyone can do it, it doesn’t have to wait for me to get to it.
• I think people will find over time that I am more receptive to the perspective of an independent developer trying to co-exist with a dominant vendor, having spent much of my career in that role. The problems of that were why in 1994, I completely turned my career in the direction of the web, it was exactly what I needed to be creative — a platform with no platform vendor.
•  I have, however, also been the CEO of a corporate platform vendor at UserLand, with the product Frontier — which is the environment that all this stuff happened in (blogging, feeds, podcasting) but it never got any credit for it. It’s a shame because Frontier is an amazing platform, but people really resent the platform vendor, and aren’t very kind to them. This happens everywhere, not just here. So I also identify with the position that Matt and Automattic are in.
• I want to make a contribution, not only by providing a really nice editor for writers using WordPress, something I can relate to because I am also a writer — but also to leave behind the code I used to connect to WordPress so that other editor-makers can build on that, and most important — our products can be 100 percent compatible, so users can use different editors to work on the same documents.

But even so there’s even more to the story. Luckily there will be a few months to work on that stuff before October! 🙂

PS: I tend to edit these posts after publishing.

PPS: Of course I wrote this post using WordLand.