Blogging

There are 135 posts filed in Blogging (this is page 1 of 14).

A first look at the GutenbergLand editor for WordPress

On April 12, 2026, Dave Winer announced a demonstration version of a second editor (GutenbergLand) integrated with the wpIdentity package that powers Dave’s WordLand editor for WordPress.

The editor allows you to add blocks like when using the native Gutenberg editor in WordPress.

Here is a screenshot of WordLand for comparison:

I was able to select my WordLand test blog as the location for my GutenbergLand post, and was able to post some text, then another post where I added a title. In WordLand, a title can be added to a post in the editor user interface, but in GutenbergLand, the title has to be added via a menu command.

From a basic editing standpoint, I would say either editor can be used for creating WordPress posts on WordPress.com sites. Some setup is still required to be able to post to WordPress self-hosted sites (Jetpack plugin is required, see this Github issue).

Blogs, comments, and feeds – oh my!

In the past few days. it looks like Manton Reece implemented a feature request from Dave Winer in the Micro.blog service that Manton runs. Dave asked for a RSS feed to be created so that he could be aware of when people comment on linkblog items that he posts to Micro.blog. If this were available, Dave would not have to go to the Micro.blog user interface to the Mentions link to see if anyone “mentioned” him in a post.

Now, in and of itself, I would agree that this is a useful feature. To me, being able to use RSS and feeds in general to get some notification of content updates from a web site or weblog is incredibly useful. As an aside, WordPress has supported this from day 1 (here is a comment feed from my blog). As another example, when Colin Walker and I were collaborating on MyStatusTool, Colin proposed a RSS namespace to support comments within a RSS feed.

However, the nit I want to pick at is – Dave Winer was interested in who was commenting on his linkblog posts. But – in past posts/podcasts, Dave has said that blogs should not have comments. Yet, he wants to know who is commenting on his posts. This begs the question – how can people let Dave know that they have commented on his posts? Answer: they can’t. Well, here is one way that this can happen (for Micro.blog users).

Another way is the comment system that Dave is implementing as part of his WordLand development project. But….he hasn’t rolled it out yet. And… you have to use his tool to make a comment so that he can then be made aware of that someone had a comment. Seems limiting, doesn’t it? In the past, Dave has relied on Github as a comment space (when he wants to have a discussion, he creates an issue there and points to it). However, that is a space controlled (and moderated) by him, so some comments might get deleted by him. Again, not encouraging.

So – how can people comment and/or have a conversation? They have to be using a tool/service that supports this (as an example, Micro.blog). Just this morning, I can see several Micro.blog conversations where Dave Winer is participating (see here, here, and here.) I am guessing that Dave is using the Micro.blog reading interface to respond – that is what I do, but maybe there is another way to do it.

It just seems to me that there is something of a double standard here (write comments about my posts on your blog, I don’t want it on my blog, but I want to know what you are saying…) – am I missing something here? Anyone – feel free to share your thoughts as comments on my blog!

Creating new types of feeds

I saw a post by Tantek Celik today describing how he created an h-feed microformat from a list of HTML elements. He then showed how this microformat could be read and parsed by the Monocle feed reader. He then pointed to a post by James Gallagher about how he publishes h-feed and uses the Granary tool to convert to RSS and other feed formats.

This is an interesting topic. I have looked at microformats before, to me it seems to be a way of adding to HTML to make it machine-readable without the construction of a separate feed. I have nothing against innovation in feeds, but I am not sure how popular the use of microformats is within the feed reader ecosystem.

Followup on podcast criticism post, and thoughts on feedback

A few days ago, I wrote a post about podcasts as criticism (like literary criticism), and received a generous comment from Alan Levine, who I linked to in the post. He gave several other examples of media where the media in question was used to comment/critique an example of that media, and I appreciated reading his response/feedback. I agreed with his examples, and wanted to mention it here.

Thanks to WordPress sending a pingback on the original post by Alan Levine, Alan was aware I posted something that linked to his post. Since I allow comments on my site, Alan was able to reach out and offer his thoughts. It did not bother me – in fact, I enjoyed it! I also did not worry that some of the “flow” of interest from my five regular readers might be usurped by Alan Levine. I hope to hear from more people in 2026. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!