A few years before WordPress came out, I did a product called Radio UserLand which was a combination blogging tool and feed reader. Two main screens, a streamlined UI. You could get in quickly, write and publish a post in a minute, and see it show up in the reader a moment later. It worked, and it added a major new component to the blogging world, and I think still represents the simplest most focused UI for writing. It was a really popular product. #
The same idea, really simple blog post writing and editing, with all the features that should be available to web writers, optional titles, links, simple styling, enclosures, the ability to edit. The things the common social web apps generally don't have. #
This imho is a huge opportunity. I wish this is where the focus in the WordPress community was, but I think right now the world is building around WordPress, not on it. It could be great, it could totally solve the problem of a new document standard in the social web that makes it really like the web. Instead they're fighting over who owns what part of the WordPress trademark, at least as far as I can tell. #
Last year I created a Node.js package called wpidentity that acts as a bridge between a browser-based JavaScript app and the WordPress back-end, and the result is fine. It suggests that there could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea! #
And I think the users, the writers, would love it, because we developers could compete to delight them, and not have to worry about building a huge server capability as Automattic already has debugged and scaled. And maybe the battle that's going on now could fade into the background.#
Last update: Saturday October 5, 2024; 1:59 PM EDT.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)