Blogging

There are 137 posts filed in Blogging (this is page 1 of 14).

Cry me a river

This morning, Dave Winer published a long post about the new Blurt theme available on WordPress.com. He comments on how this theme competes with his WordLand application, which provides a streamlined editor interface for WordPress blogs, saying “…most of the things it advertised for were very much part of the pitch for wordland.” I am sorry to have to bring this up, but there are a lot of features within WordLand that are not a part of this theme, so this is a poor comparison. There are also many other issues with this post, so let’s get started with a review.

I created a test site to see what the editing interface was like. My first impulse was to click on the “plus” sign at the top, since that is an accepted WordPress shortcut to add a new post. This action brought up the familiar WordPress Gutenberg editor user interface. I typed a short phrase and posted it. The look and feel of posts published on the theme is very similar to Twitter. It also offers a comment text box for reader to add comments.

Next, I decided to explore the menu on the left side of the site. The Compose link brought up a familiar posting interface (i.e., “just like Twitter”). I entered a test post there. I then created another test post to see if I could do any linking or styling of the text, but I could not. This is a key feature of WordLand, so points to Wordland here. So – better editing experience with WordLand, ability to post like on Twitter with Blurt. It’s difficult for me to see how Blurt competes with WordLand.

On the Blurt topic, Andrew Shell says this was a theme put together by two WordPress developers in a week as part of an internal WordPress project called “Radical Speed Month”. From Dave’s response, I assume he does not know the developers and/or has not worked with them, since he did not know this new theme was coming. So what? Who cares? Go do something better, or different!

The majority of Dave’s post complains about how Automattic should have worked with him on this Blurt thing, and on his WordLand project, and how they should act as a “banker and distributor“, and not compete with developers on product development. My response – why should Automattic be working with him and providing him development support, or anyone else for that matter? They are an independent company with their own goals and directions. From historical items in his post, Dave recounts a number of examples where he developed a product and the “platform vendor” built something on his ideas, or did not work with him. Again – so what? Who cares? I think Dave should take a look at this Jason Alexander video talking about actors waiting for someone to hire them, and replace the word “actor” with “software developer”. Go build out the vision for WordLand that you wrote about in September 2025. We’ve been waiting for eight months, where is it?

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.