I've heard that Automattic is running a special deal where developers inside the company can take a month off to do their own project to make WordPress better for users. #
I would like to propose that in the spirit of interop and the web that we work together on a project. I have a specific one in mind. #
My product, FeedLand can make single page websites with news from a specific group of feeds. They're easy to set up, all you have to do is subscribe to the feeds, map them to a category, and then set up the shell, and FeedLand takes care of the rest. You probably want to assign a domain too. ;-)#
The OPML is automatically updated every time a feed is added or removed. This is what we call "dynamic OPML." You can import it to any feed reader, and re-import it to reflect changes.#
This is also a nice thing to automate, so users don't have to repeat the import manually, there's no reason the software can't do it. If you make a feed reader or podcast client you could let users subscribe to OPML feeds. That would imho break open the podcast client market in a very good way.#
BTW, feedland.social is a server I use for development at this time. No one else can create an account there. Use feedland.com if you want to try out the product. #
I know there are more feeds about WordPress out there. I want to get them added to wp.feedland.org, so we're presenting more comprehensive news about WordPress. I can't imagine anything that would be more useful to WordPress users. #
There's so much happening, and honestly a lot of confusion too, and we know in the near future there will be a lot of new products shipped by the teams-of-two. Think of all the news that will generate!#
This project would be immediatlely useful for following the project itself. #
I remember from the early days when blogging booted up that these were the most valued experiments. I did a site that reflected changes in all blogs we monitored called weblogs.com, and it instantly became the backbone of the blogger's web. And that was followed by RSS that did it on the item level, not the site level and brought in all the big news orgs because it fit their format better.#
All good software projects are recursive and this one is no exception. ;-)#
Import my OPML feed to your favorite feed reader and use it yourself to get an idea of what kind of info we're getting. Or just follow my site, and send me an email when you see one that should be in the list. I'll start a thread on GitHub where you can do this. #
We can grow this very quickly, imho -- once people hear that there's a great distribution system for news about all of WordPress, they'll get on board and start new blogs to share what we learned.#
If you have a link WordPress news site that you feel should be included, or a comment or suggestion re this proposal, or an idea you think I could help with, please post it here .#
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! :-)