Scripting News: Early morning tease

Thursday August 28, 2025; 9:35 PM EDT

Everyone has heard of WordPress, right? I'm going to be introducing a very weird idea about WordPress, one that's going to bend your mind a lot, especially if you're a member of the WordPress community, but also if you're a developer who has used WordPress in an application sometime in the last 20 years, or a user who has used it to keep a blog, or to run a business website, or just someone who hangs around the web. It's famous, but not in the way I'm going to present it. I'm going to ask you to see WordPress the same way you think of Mastodon or Bluesky. It's a way of storing realtime text and graphics, and arrange them by time, and read and write them, subscribe to people, comment on what others have written, communicate with other people you find on a twitter-like network. If you look at the actual sofware, you'll see that WordPress and the other two systems have very similar features. They all store messages. And arrange them chronologically and in relation to other messages and people. But WordPress does it better.#

Last update: Friday August 29, 2025; 10:13 AM 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! :-)