FeedCity

WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026.

Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is what I see on the Posts page.

Does EmDash have a feed reader built in??

Suggestion for feed reader devs. Put a Check Now button on the page for a single feed. It shouldn't overburden your system because it's just doing an HTTP read and a little parsing. Not much more work than reloading a page in the browser. The benefit is you can see a current view of the news according to a specific feed without waiting. Makes the web roughly instantaneous for every feed, even ones that don't support rssCloud. FeedLand has such a button.

Things are changing a lot. Huge flow of ideas, and some catching up to do. Mind bombs in every direction.

Last night while watching sports I learned via ChatGPT about MCP.

Here's what it can do and people *are* using it for this

You could turn ChatGPT into an easy editor for WordPress posts.

Just as I have developed the habit of getting it to create a handoff.md file when I'm done with a session, I could write something with ChatGPT helping, I don't ever do that myself but i might, if it were easy. and when I'm ready to publish, I'd say "Please publish this on my daveverse site now." I might specify a category or two, or set defaults, it's good at that stuff. I've taught Claude to write code in my style, so I can maintain it (to answer Aral Balkan's question on Mastodon).

We create little hierarchies everywhere we go. So many places. I have no room for new ones, yet I have to make room because there are people there I want to work with. Now I have to manage it. If an alien came to Earth and asked why we don't just create a way for a little...

This is something we can and should research.

Let's give one of the ai apps a fairly good idea for an app we want to use, and help it -- not by coding, just by answering questions about how it will work, and Iterating over the product until it works like we want it. Sometihng simple, like perhaps a text editor for Mastodon. Something that isn't squished in a tiny little text box, and has icons for bold, underline, links, etc. It could be useful.

Then let's look at the code with an open mind. I think i've given it enough examples of good maintainable code that I could get it to produce maintainable code.

This was in reply to a Mastodon post by Aral Balkan.

Montserrat Monastery. It’s beautiful up here, but unfortunately this is as close as I’m going to get. Left late, then got off at the wrong stop so had lunch in a small town waiting for the next train, and then forgot it is Good Friday. Very long line with everyone on holiday. 🚡

A dystopian week, with a glimmer of hope: alternatives are available.

A little sneak peek of Inkwell for mobile in Vincent’s latest blog post.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anthony Nelzin-Santos, whose blog can be found at z1nz0l1n.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club m...

Plaça Espanya. 🚂

Matt Mullenweg has a great blog post with both positive things to say about Cloudflare and a critique of EmDash. So I was right yesterday that “spiritual successor” was the wrong way for Cloudflare to pitch this. From Matt, about why WordPress can be run anywhere:

It’s all built on open source and web standards. You can run it anywhere; there’s no lock-in.

That’s why we do what we do. It’s really hard. You can come after our users, but please don’t claim to be our spiritual successor without understanding our spirit.

AT Protocol standardizations is officially underway, with a new working group at the IETF:

For folks building in the Atmosphere ecosystem, and who care about how services interoperate and share data, this working group is a big opportunity to work out any ambiguities and unresolved issues.

Listening to U2’s new EP, Easter Lily. Bono:

We still look to vivid rock n roll as an act of resistance against all this awfulness on our small screens. These are for sure ‘wilderness years’ for so many of us looking at the mayhem out there in the world.

🎶

Congrats to the Flipboard folks on launching the web version of Surf. It’s an interesting mashup of different social networks, which is what the open web is great at.

Julien Genestoux thinks the open web needs netizens. I agree – and in 2026, that's indistinguishable from citizenry.

So, two other Matts at Cloudflare announced EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security. (Is it nominative determinism or a simulation glitch that everyone trying to terraform the web has some variation of “Matthew” in their name? I was in a call set up by Matthew Prince, talking to Matt Taylor … Continue reading EmDash Feedback →

"Nota shut down its news sites after Axios and Poynter found dozens of plagiarized quotes, phrases and photos."