I'm keynoting the WordCamp Canada conference in October in Ottawa. It's the first conference I've attended since before the pandemic. #
The timing is ideal, and the location is significant. As an American, I don't want to try to attract people from around the world to a meeting in my country. Right now, I wouldn't come here if I didn't live here. #
I'm also not happy with the tech industry of the US. I'd like a fresh start, a return to our roots, with the assumption that the people control their destiny and the role of developers is to give them to the tools to try out new ideas. #
With WordLand I've created a product for writers, filling a need that's been there since the beginning of the web, using the practices in writing tools we learned in the 80s. It doesn't have the artificial limits imposed by Twitter et al. I think they're senseless. So we're going to blow that door wide open. No character limits. Simple styling. Links. Editable. #
And it's also a product for developers. There's no lock-in anywhere in this stack. So you can make a different style of editor. Or play with new ways to view timelines.#
I wanted to take discourse in a different direction too. A good design for the social web shouldn't require intense moderation. The reward for spammers is practically nil. Also, it'll be good for small groups in a way that Twitter et al never have been. #
So far I haven't invented any new formats. We're building on what works now. WordPress is a remarkably deep product, so deep it could be used as operating system. and that's exactly how I've chosen to view it and it works incredibly well. Some of what we're building on is based on work I did with Joseph Scott of Automattic in 2009, believe it or not.#
And as a bonus we get a great bridge into ActivityPub, from the great work Automattic is doing in bridging WordPress to ActivityPub. Think about it and you'll see how connections in and out of WordPress can facilitate a lot of interop, not just via RSS, but any format that comes along that people want to use. #
Imagine that WordLand is the editor of a twitter-like system built around RSS. It saves your writing to WordPress, where it is published on a website and via RSS. You don't have to use WordLand or WordPress, because RSS is an open format. Any editor that generates RSS is part of the network. Designed to be simple. #
All that's missing is a timeline viewer, and that's what I'm working on now. It's coming together pretty nicely, imho. Not an easy project, though on the surface it looks like it should be. Also there's nothing proprietary about my timeline viewer. There could be a thousand of them. Anyone who has written an RSS feed reader will have all the low-level bits they need. #
Hoping to have all the connections working by the end of the summer. #
Once done, it will be the completion of the vision for RSS as the foundation of the open social web, the place that all the open formats agree on, so we can get on with interop and say goodbye to lock-in. It can be done, I'm almost 100 percent sure of that now. Still have a little ways to go. As they say -- still diggin!#
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! :-)