Designing a values-centered life from first principles.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
If I ran my life

People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Designing a values-centered life from first principles.
I grew up in the 20th Century. Because of that, I suspect my first experience of the word “totem” was probably in a piece of fictional media (television, probably) where the word “totem pole” was used. That usage was likely not respectful to the Native Americans depicted in the fiction. see Reel Injun That doesn’t...
Maybe it’s been too long since I’ve seen Downton Abbey, but I like The Gilded Age even more. Great balance between the different characters' stories and also the train business, which I love.
Tuesday afternoon session in Belfast
But what about Substack and Ghost? A lot of people do their writing there too? What about those people. Here's the cool part for all people who write on the web. The API we use in WordLand to hook up to WordPress is open and documented. They don't break their APIs in WordPressLand. At least so far. You could say that API is a standard. And I bet it would be a lot easier for Ghost, for example, to support a limited subset of that API than it has been to get ActivityPub support implemented. Because the WordPress API is what I would call "really simple," and that's the thing I value most about a good API.
Now here's the real reason I need WordLand and if you write for WordPress sites, I think you'll want it too. It's because WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of web writing. If you ask someone how they do their site, in 2025, it's probably going to be WordPress. So if someone invites you to write a guest post on their blog, chances are pretty good I can write it in WordLand, and it'll be archived in my collection of writing, and easy for me to find, because that's what WordLand does for writers. So I was able to create the new post on the WordCamp site in less than a minute, and it was completely painless. And that's the point. Here's the screen shot:
I needed a "featured image" for my WordCamp post, so I gave ChatGPT a simple assignment. "Imagine a place called WordLand." Last year this was a miracle, now it's so-what, but I still think it's a freaking miracle.
Lots of embarrassing typos in a post yesterday on why I need WordLand. I did something unusual, I fixed the post this morning, and cleared up some of the ideas. It was an important post and equally important to get it right. I also cross-posted it on the WordCamp Canada site.
Chris Aldrich
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• Chris Aldrich
Chris Aldrich
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• Chris Aldrich
Listened to a segment on today's Brian Lehrer podcast about how to keep the good feelings from a vacation when you get back home. Here's my idea. Before you leave make a list of the things you like about being on vacation. Take it home, put it somewhere you can find it when you're feeling down and want that feeling back. Pick one of the things on the list and do it. Your subconscious will tune into it as an act of self-love and give you some of the body chemistry that you felt when you were hanging out at the beach or hiking the Applachian Trail. A similar idea in a Bruce Sterling talk in 2009.