No, that makes sense.
I thought you would be recording.
Good afternoon, Edward.
Good morning everyone.
It's still, my name isChad m over in the room.
That now is forced upon me over here.
Feel free to continue hacking andeverything over there, but, uh,
we'll be doing the keynote over here.
Uh, my name is Chad Oman.
I'm a community builder, strongadvocate for a democratized social web.
I sometimes dabble in computers,which has led me to administer MA
on Canada, the largest CanadianMA on incent for 36,000 users.
MA on Canada and I are based inEdmonton, and I'm excited to be
enjoying some gorgeous light fallweather here in Ottawa with all of you.
I'm thrilled to be herewith you and we, Canada.
Canada, introducing a couple ofincredible speakers over the next
couple of days who share my values.
And the societal importance for anopen and democratized social web.
What Elon Musk acquired Twitter,which I refer to now as Zitter.
Yep.
It was a significant one, which youour ability to organize grassroots
rallies, email and phone campaigns,and other forms of action.
We use Twitter to, for a range ofactivities from organizing the longest
run rallies in front of the Albertalegislature during the COVID-19 delta
wave to the to high school studentscoordinating school walkouts for,
uh, safe educational conditions.
However, with the blah, blah, blah, withthe platform's transformation, we've
seen a division in the digital landscapeand suppression of prominent activist
voices, which I believe is intentional.
Currently we're witnessing thegovernment launching public
attacks on teachers throughmisleading high budget advertising.
Simultaneously, the opposition is spreadthin across three or four different
Microblog Blogging platforms may be itchallenging to present a unified front,
whether it's in Canada, the us, or abroad.
Now more than ever, the roleof independent, open, timely
accessible journalism is crucial insafeguarding our fragile democracies.
The work of the t David Klima, theInstitute, the Alberta Council,
Canada Land sees on the Soapbox CabinRadio up in Northwest Territories,
all of these different publications,even the Beaverton, which seems
to be flying way too close to thesun these days talking very vital.
WordPress is behind many ofthese critical voices, and that's
why word cam is significant.
It strengthens the word plus.
Press platform, which is the soapboxthat many rely on and addresses the
current challenges of reach, like usingprotocols like Activity Pub and at Proto,
which we'll be hearing about in the nextcouple of days to reach more readers,
inform and ultimately influence citizens.
Um, so let's introduce ourfirst keynote, Dave Weiner.
Our keynote speaker for todayhas been a pioneering force whose
contributions have shaped thevery big fabric of the open web.
From his earliest work in bloggingsoftware to his enduring impact
on syndication, podcastingand content ownership, his
influence has been foundational.
Dave is a software developer,blogger, and podcaster.
He's an early developer of the open web,as I said, and created a lot of tools.
WordPress is built on today.
Dave grew up in Queens, NewYork has degrees in mathematics
and computer science.
He was a catalyst in scripting,uh, environments like Frontier
and Radio user land, and startedtwo Silicon Valley companies.
He's written for Wired and he has been afellow at Harvard and New York University.
Please everyone welcome Dave w
Very nice, so I can you hear me?
Um, so I need slides, but I needslides, so I'm gonna only do three of
them, and I have a whole bunch more.
If you go to scripting.com, there'sa link to all the rest of the slides.
Maybe we'll get to some of them,but I want to encourage you all,
if you feel like there's somethingthat you absolutely have to say
while I'm talking, raise your hand.
We'll get your mic andyou get to do that here.
And there's our.
Performative AV person whoshe does some interpretive
advance, but that'll be later.
I'll be happy to help with that.
I really like discussions.
I don't like trying to figure outwhat, what interests everybody here.
Um, I want to say that I spent,like most of the morning I got here.
I don't know.
7:00 AM was it 7:00 AM About7:00 AM this morning for no good
reason that I couldn't sleep.
And so, uh, I got to meet, I don'tknow, about a dozen people here.
And what I found out, I'm not a member.
A, the WordPress community have usedWordPress going back to its inception.
Um, I wrote, uh, the,uh, X-M-L-R-P-C-A-P-I.
That it uses.
Um, and, uh, that was a standardin the, uh, blogging world.
And, um, and I guess it still is astandard of blogging world because
amazingly WordPress still supports it.
It still works.
So you're looking at somethingthat was done in 1998 and
they still, it still worked.
And this is.
One of the, lemme go to the next slide.
You know, this is what I always,this is why I hate slides.
You know, what I do is I start talkingabout what's on the next slide.
And before I get to thatslide, um, put my glasses on.
Sorry.
But yeah, no, it's very,very rare in the tech world.
That, uh, a developer as successful?
You know what?
I don't want to actually, you know whatI call this, I call this WordPress.
I don't call it automatic, I don't call itMatt, I don't call it, uh, the community.
It's the whole thing.
That's the way I think of it, andI find it's the only useful way to
think of it because, 'cause as youknow, it's an open source community
and it really works that way.
I mean, and, um, and the ethos.
The values of this community areabsolutely incredible, and I've gotten
to see that in the last couple ofyears because I've been doing active
development on the WordPress platform.
And you can see the, the trailsof integrity in the platform.
The fact that they don'tdeprecate, deprecate is one of the.
Okay.
One of the worst words intechnology, it says basically,
we don't give a damn about users.
We don't give a damn about developers.
And I, you know, I have beendeprecated many, many times.
I, and I can tell you itdoesn't feel very good.
Let me, I name some places to Apple,huge deprecated, you know, I mean, I
have so much software that I've pouredso much effort from time and money into.
It just doesn't run on today's hardware.
And, uh, I don't know.
Google wants to deprecate theweb if you can believe that.
Um, they've decided that the web has tobehave, your app has to behave a certain
way on the web, which has nothing todo with the way the web spec means.
That sites that I have thatgo back to 1994 in some cases,
uh, but they don't work.
Uh, according to their philosophyfor how the web should work, my
philosophy is the web doesn't havean owner, and we're all guests on the
web, and guests don't make the rules.
And so Google could invent somethingnew, but they can't call it the web.
You also said open web, and thisis something I have a problem with
because you don't need the open part.
The web is open.
It's like saying wet water, water is wet.
You don't need to say it's wet.
So I mean, it raises the question oflike, well, if you're talking about
the open web, what kind of web are you?
What is the alternative?
And I think a lot of people think thatanything that runs in a web browser
is the web, but that is not true.
Not true at all.
And so lemme just.
Sort of, I probably have alreadygone through most of these things.
Right.
Um, so the stability, nobreakage, maintains compatibility.
The community, which you're lookingat here, or at least the part of the
community has value, makes, contributions.
A lot of the things you hear aboutthat are great about BlueCrest
came out of the community andit covers all of the activities.
The group that I'm mostinterested in are the writers.
You know, I, I did software.
The, like WordPress.
The before WordPressexisted with two products.
One was called Manila and the otherone was called Radio User Land.
And we always looked at it that,um, we were developers, we were
designers, and the people we wereall working for were the writers.
And so it was sort of a conflict, butthe writers were, when we, if they had
an opinion about how something shouldwork, we listen really, really careful.
And that's how I'm approachingWordPress these days.
Um, I have lots of experience withWordPress in terms of supporting,
uh, formats and protocols likeEvolution, RPC Interface and also RSS.
Um, they have not broken anything asfar as their RSS support is concerned.
Applications that ran10 years ago still run.
I also worked, uh, well.
There it is.
I also worked, um, with them onsomething that very few people
know about, uh, called RSS Cloud.
And what that gives you is somethingthat people assume that RSS implies
polling, that you're like gonna,you know, you have to always check
the feed to see if it's changed.
Ours says, club says youdon't have to do that.
You can register with a server that gets.
Notified of changes, and then youwill be notified of those changes.
And it, it's magic when you seeit working, it basically you
get, you know, instant updates.
So it turns out that RSS and WordPress arepretty good foundation for the social web.
And because, and let me just see,make sure, uh, well, yes, I left
out the biggest deal of them all.
See, it's hardly, you haveto read these things and you
have to wear glasses to do it.
Um, so yes, the API and I met Ryan.
Is Ryan in the room?
There?
He is Ryan.
And, um, Ryan's one of the heroes ofthis community as far as I'm concerned.
Um, he did the, uh, the rest API forWordPress and, um, that rest API is one
of the most unsettled accomplishments.
In all of technology, uh, what itmeans is, and, and, and this, you
know, came as a surprise to me.
I didn't know it existed until acouple of years ago, um, when I was
working on product called Feed Land.
And, um, and I wanted to add,um, WordPress identity so you
could use your WordPress accountto log into, uh, the service.
And, uh, so I found, I used node jsfor the server, server stuff and I
noticed that there was an API called WPComm, that's the node packages called.
And um, and it did the identity stuff,but it also did everything else.
And it's a remarkable thing to seethat any application that can access
a REST interface, which I think is afairly decent definition of the web, um.
Can now extend WordPress and it's acomplete covering of the user interface.
The reason I know that is becausethat's how they implement their
user interface in WordPress.
So if you see a function on WordPress,on a WordPress site in the user interface
of WordPress site, um, you can be surethat there's an API for it behind that.
And I've now been building onthat API for, I don't know,
about a year and a half.
And I haven't found an exception.
I've found incredible support in thecommunity for answering questions
about how these things work.
And I've been able to build a productthat I'm gonna demo for you in a
few minutes called Word Land there.
So, and people, I like this descriptionof WordPress and I know it's different
from the description that a lot of otherpeople use, that it's a worldwide text.
Database.
And where else do we see the ideaof a worldwide text database?
Twitter, uh, is a good example of that.
Uh, threads is a good example.
Blue Sky, even the Mighty Mastodonis basically performing the same
function and I've never installedpersonally installed Nest on server.
Um.
And I've never personallyinstalled a WordPress service,
but I'm told that WordPress is alot easier to install than that.
You agree?
Um, and if we can sort of coerceWordPress into the role that these
systems are playing, we can have alot more compatibility, a lot more
developers, because there are, Idon't know how many developers are
there that, that know how to develop.
With WordPress a lot.
Yes, a lot.
It would be a good answer.
Do you have an answer?
A lot.
Your head is up?
Yeah, we can do it via plug and
we can just wait.
Okay.
Say again
so we can do the get this thing sortout with the functions and everything.
I didn't understand how manyWordPress developers are there.
Just yell it out.
That's an question.
I don't know.
A
lot.
Yeah, a lot.
I thought you were asking, butyou're asking us to raise our hands.
Oh, I asked.
Oh.
Raise your hands, everybody.
Fox.
Let's lighten up a little.
You know, I used to run a conferencecalled Blogger Con many, many years ago.
One of the first thingswe did was we sang a song.
The first thing actually we didwas decide what the song is.
So everybody felt that they were obligedto contribute and pick something easy.
Do I need to do that or are youguys, I feel like a teacher.
I have been a teacher by the way.
Um, I feel like I'm obliged to, toget you going so I can get going.
Um, so that's really what I,I what the last thing I said,
that's really what I'm about.
Or.
Out of the web, and in order to dothat, I've chosen WordPress and RSS.
Those are the two things.
If I can't make it happen with WordPressand RSS, well I'll probably have to
look for another way to do it, but it'salways going to be of the web, the rule.
That's the rule.
Can't do it.
If it requires a centralization,then I can't do it.
This is, it's not like decentralized.
It's different.
You know, you decentralize something thatis centralized, but the idea is here, no
centralization ever allowed in this thing.
And the cool thing on thatis that, uh, both RSS and
WordPress are not centralized.
You can operate a WordPress serverwithout registering with any, I
mean, you have to register with DNS.
So there is some centralization required.
But it's basically the centralizationthat the web itself is built on.
And uh, and I don't think theother systems can decentralize.
And the reason is if you've builtsomething and you didn't have to build
it, decentralized or uncentralized,then you're gonna build some features
that can't easily be decentralized.
And that's why I don't buy when Blue Skysays they're going to be decentralized.
I say, no, you're not.
It's a nice idea that you're too far intothis thing in order to be able to do that.
But if from the very beginningyou don't do things, you require
centralization, you may not have allthe features, but the features you have
will not require you to be sent to us.
So.
So that was the first, the firstthing I wanted to talk about is
what makes WordPress so great.
Let me just grab some water first.
Um,
but as was mentioned, I played arole in the, uh, design podcast.
And, um, and it was based ona, an idea that a friend of
mine, Adam Curry, brought to me.
Adam at the time, was very famous.
MTV personality and I sort of thought,well, you know, this guy can't have
any actual ideas, but, and he's ahandicap a guy like any beautiful,
absolutely gorgeous person physicallyand whatever, he's like, you know,
if you've ever seen, um, interviewwith a vampire that's, sorry.
I mean that the most positive way.
And, and, you know, but one ofthe, that's got great advantage.
You can get a job on,you know, doing hosting.
Um, does anybody herenot know what MTV is?
I expect at some point that much
music,
sorry,
this audience may know much music,
but I think there was a point in timewhere even my mother knew would mtv.
But anyway, so he had this great idea andhe had to really hit me over the head with
it over and over and over again before.
Like, and he actually had to implementit in my program called Frontier.
And I was, I mean that got my attention'cause the guy is not a programmer.
And um, and he showed it to meand I said, actually, you know,
that's actually a pretty good idea.
And what he said was basically, youknow, audio can be transmitted over
the net just like anything else.
And um, and you canattach it to an RSS feed.
And um, and all of a suddenyou've got radio on the internet.
And I thought, wow, that'sa really great idea.
Let's do it.
And that's what we did.
It was like a matter of, I don't know,a month of software implementation.
Obviously it was not a verycomplicated piece of software.
Right.
And we had podcasting up andrunning in January of, it was 2001.
So, um.
Cool.
And it's been, and it's anotherone of those applications
that never was centralized.
Think about it, podcasting.
There's no central service youhave to register your podcast with.
All you do is you put it on a websiteand give it an RSS fee and tell
everybody where their RSS fee is.
And that's it.
And it is amazing how well it's worked.
Yeah, it, it wasn't an instant hit.
It took about four years frominception to the point where we
had a growing base of podcasts.
It wasn't until 2004 thatit actually started growing.
Um, that was when we gotsupport from NPR National Public
Radio in the United States.
And, um, there were, I know a handfulof tech podcasters at that time.
And then it's, the great thing thathappens when you start getting a
little bit of critical mass is otherpeople see what they're doing and
they say, wow, I can do that too.
And then this is like, peoplelove ripping off ideas.
They, they don't necessarilylike originating them that much.
That's what you, if you wanna getpeople to do things, you have to
do it first, make it look good.
It's like, I dunno if you ever heardthe Tom Sawyer sort, uh, story with.
Uh, painting, whitewashing the fence.
Yep.
All you had to do was make it look like alot of fun and then everybody wanted to do
it, and all of a sudden Tom Sawyer doesn'thave to whitewash the fence anymore.
So, you know, my goal from thebeginning was not necessarily, I mean,
I wanted to do podcasting, but moreimportant, what I wanted was, I wanted
radio to become an open protocol.
And so, um.
Well, almost from the beginning everybodywas saying, well, this can't last.
This won't last.
And basically some big companyis going to take this over.
And a lot of them tried.
A lot of 'em tried.
They're still trying to take itover and it hasn't happened yet.
And, and what we're talkingabout now, like if the first
podcast came out in 2001, that'slike ridiculously 24 years ago.
Uh, I'm not saying thatit'll never happen.
I'm not saying that it has such a charmedexistence that it can never be usurped
and centralized and owned and controlled,but it hasn't happened yet, and I think
there's something to be learned from that.
And, and I think, and I don't knowthe answer to this by the way, I
don't think anybody knows the answeras to why has podcasting managed
to stay so open and independent.
While text has become this nightmare ofincompatibility, I mean, it is remarkable.
How so?
What's the difference?
I have a theory and the theory is,and you can read the slide as well
as I can, it's, it's about MP three,and so when we de defined this,
there was absolutely no discussionabout what we would use to represent.
And there was no need to havediscussion because there was only
one answer that was MP three.
And um,
and that meant that right off the bateverybody interrupted with everybody else.
And that's the differencebetween text and podcasting.
And I think what we can do is wecan fix it for text and give it
the same chance that audio had.
Because, and this is where I go off intothe slides, and I'm not gonna go through
all that, but there's a history here.
Um, you know, WordPresscame out in, I think 2003.
Oh, what was that?
Oh, that's scary.
You should see it.
This's crazy.
Oh, that's yours.
It's not mines.
It was a, a, a black wolf.
That's all right.
I, I want you to knowI hate her to do that.
She thinks that's funny.
Right?
I was genuinely, we freaked out.
I, I was not acting.
Where, where was I?
73. Yeah, no, I said that.
Okay, so text, right?
We're talking about Yes.
WordPress.
Yes.
And WordPress.
Okay.
So what's the answer with textand why is it such a problem?
It's a problem 'cause, oh, Isaid WordPress came out in 2003.
Twitter comes out in 2006.
Twitter is the pivotalproduct in this whole thing.
And what Twitter did was said,said that text is 140 characters,
no more than 140 characters.
No titles, no links, no style.
You can't edit, no enclosures.
Can you tell that I'vekind of memorized that?
Because this is thestory I've been telling.
I know.
We love Twitter.
Twitter in the, in the, in the initialyears that it was, there was a revelation.
You could find out what people youwere working with or people you knew,
you could find out what their liveswere like and it was remarkable.
And, but, but it wasn't the web.
I mean, I think we need tounderstand that very clearly.
What they did was they took the web andthey locked it up in 140 character limit
and took out all the cool features.
The most important one they took out wasLinkedIn, and I don't think that any.
A system that doesn't allow writersto link has any business calling
themselves the web because it's, it'sthe fundamental feature of the web.
It's the thing that made the web, web.
And so I think, you know, and Ithink we should maybe start a group
somewhere of great thinkers whosay, okay, this is what the web is.
Or you could ask Tim.
Because Kim Burners Lee had apretty good idea of what the web,
you know who Tim Burners Lee is?
Oh yeah.
Just wanna make sure.
Okay.
He had a pretty damn good idea ofwhat the web was and, and this is what
happens when you get one person doingit and there's not a committee and
there are no big companies involved.
They're trying to protecttheir business models and keep
individual competitors out.
All the rest of he, he just lookedto see what we were doing with
texts on personal computers.
And said, Hey, that's good enough.
Let's just do that.
And that's evolution.
Evolution is a huge deal here.
What we're doing is evolution.
When we create these new thingswe're doing the things that
evolution, we're trying out an idea.
If it works, it becomespart of what we all do.
There's another good marker for whattext could be, and that's marked out.
And markdown is one of thegreat gifts that we've been
given at this point in time.
I think we'd be very glad that wehave it because it defines text
and it defines almost all thefeatures I was mentioning before.
The Twitter doesn't have, but whatit leaves out are all the dangerous
stuff that's in HTML that ourfeed readers have to scrape out.
We, as a result, most feed readers justtake everything out, but the taxes.
And that's no answer.
That's no answer.
So I think the first thing wehave to do is we have to figure
out what the MP three of text is.
And that's what I say.
I say either go to uh, the web, theHTML standard and say, okay, that
doesn't, but we're gonna have to,we're gonna have to limit it so that
you don't get I frames and embeddedcode and all the rest of that stuff,
because those were probably great ideas.
But they don't stand upto the evolution test.
We think that systems that arebuilt on those things are not
systems that we want to use.
So when I saw the API that WordPresshas, I thought, well, here's the answer.
This is what I've been sort oflike mulling over for years and
years, and how do we get into thisso that we have a social system.
Where people can connectand, but not be owned.
That's the, you know,you know the old story.
I mean, we've heard a million times.
If you can't figure out what theproduct is, then you're the product.
Right.
And that's what I want to undo.
I want to create systems that auditthat, that can peer with each other
just like the web does without any ofthe poison that the silos have put in.
And what I found is that, uh, thatWordPress totally lives up to that, that
what WordPress considers text is the web.
And that's remarkable.
I consider that a gift, buthere we are in 2025, after all
we've been through, oh, sorry.
Well, we don't need it anyway.
Um, after all we've been throughhere in 2025, WordPress is what?
Uh, 22 years old.
You get that right and it still is pure.
I mean, how did that happen?
You know, it's, it's a gift and ithas this fantastic API that says
I like programming and JavaScriptusing node js, and that means
I can build apps on top of it.
And it means that somebody canbe using Python and they can
build apps on top of it, or.
Some language we've never heardof and they can build up somehow.
But that says to me that WordPress,how much, how am I doing on time?
How much, when does this over?
Got?
18 minutes.
18 minutes?
Okay.
I gotta get the demo and then there'sgotta be some discussion, please.
Um,
lemme just go right into the demo.
How about that?
Does anybody have anything theywant to say or, or question?
They desperately want to ask.
Doesn't have to be D.
Okay.
Alright.
Have a question here.
Oh, awesome.
Get that van a mic.
That lady mic.
Oh, sorry lady.
That that old brought a mic.
Okay.
What did
you say?
Did I hear that right?
Yes, you did.
You might stand up everybody.
Thank you.
I think.
To your question about how many WordPressdevelopers are there are, let's, I'm
gonna call it 50 million because everytime we do a release, we see that
there have been a hundred milliondownloads, give or take, maybe 120.
And if we think half of thoseare maybe non-coding admins.
Then the other half, I think,worldwide are developers.
Wow.
Say that
number again.
Between 50 and 60 million.
Wow.
Globally.
See, that's pretty impressive.
That's impressive.
Compared to the other platforms out there.
I can tell you there aren't50 million Twitter developers.
Some degree of certainty because Iwas one and then I got booted off
the platform like everybody else.
Uhhuh.
Yeah.
I mean that did not, I mean, Inever thought they would do that,
by the way, but, um, yeah, I
did.
Uh, you did.
Well, I should have talked to you.
I dunno why I didn't ask.
I mean, I thought maybe at somepoint they would, but, um, as long
as I, you know, Jack Dorsey was new.
No, no, but Elon Musk,that's another story.
Yeah.
Alright, so let me get into the demo.
Alright, let's see.
I have a million other things tosay, but I don't have the time.
How do I get out of this?
Yeah, it's not doing it.
Yeah, this will do it.
Now.
I didn't actually need to do that, did I?
Alright.
And I think this is howI get full screen again.
Is this anybody?
Uh, can you
circle Ah, exactly.
You got it.
Okay.
So this is word land, and westart off with the timeline.
And the idea here is the timelineshould somewhat resemble the
timeline that you see in, uh, socialnetworking software like Twitter,
like Blue Sky, like Masteron.
And, um, and what you're seeing hereare the feeds that I edit personally.
Zoom in.
I don't think I can.
No, don't, I don'tthink we should do that.
Oh, okay.
My,
my experience, I want you to, I'vebeen doing demos for a long time and
my book on demo says you don't do that.
You don't do that becauseyou know what happens.
Boom.
She's great.
Can we interact
far more entertaining than I'll answer.
Okay.
So let's see.
Can you read this tonight?
Oh yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, um, so I have a bunch of differentsites and I wish I just had one.
I really do.
But reality is I have to havea lot because, um, let's see.
This is my main bog.
The one that I've had since, uh, 1994.
This is Word Camp Canada.
And, um, this, that I've been givenaccess to this site because I'm
one of the keynote speakers here.
Did you know that?
And, um, and then this is my link blog.
This is a great art on blue sky.
This is a, a feed that isauto I automatically generate.
And what it does is itpumps out beautiful art.
To Blue Sky actually every hour, butI only wanted the daily feed in here.
And this is a site called DayFirst, and I think that's about it.
Actually, I think there'sanother one in here.
This is a list of the sites.
And if I click on thathere, let's do this.
Let's go take out Dave Verse, becauseyou see Dave Verse and David, so
what this does is let's me just takeout, so I can take out my link blog.
Experimental scripting newsand just leave great art and
now you're seeing all the art.
I felt this was a really importantfeature to put in because, um, once I
had this work, and this is somethingI've wanted for many years, and I
finally said, let's do it in thisproduct, and, um, what I found is the
link, I do far more link blog poststhan I do anything else, and it was just
crowding everything out and I realized.
I need to have bettercontrol over this stuff.
Um, I wanna point out something else.
This is a example of a postthat has a lot of texts.
People say 140 characters is just themax, or they don't say that anymore.
They say 300 charactersin the max 500 characters.
There's no magic number there.
So what you need to do, in my opinion,is make it so the software doesn't
care how many characters there are,and just make it so you just single
click and get to see the whole thing.
And click again and get it back.
So, um, now I have to, I thinkprobably put the mic down
because I need another him.
'cause now I have to show youhow you write a post for this.
You want to help me with this?
Yeah.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Another,
don't let,
okay, so how do I create a new post?
I click the plus icon here.
And it confirms that Iwant to create a new post.
And then I say this is a demo of
Word Land
at the Word camp.
E does everybody knowwhat the EH stands for?
Thank you.
I am an American and I'msomewhat proud of that.
I have no idea, um, until they told me.
And then I can just go, blah, blah,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay?
And then I choose a site that I wantto post to and what it's offering me.
It.
This is, remember I saidthe API that Ryan did?
What I did was I made a call to the API.
I said, Hey, what are allthe sites I could post to?
And you can see there's a lot of them, butisn't it, he says, it's snazzy, I think.
I think it's beautiful, actually.
So then I went post it to Dave Verse, andthere's a reason why I want to do that.
And Evan is gonna raise his hand.
He's gonna be so excited.
You'll believe this.
Okay, hold on.
Lemme put this in here.
Evan will, he's ourother keynote by the way.
I'm totally looking forward to that.
Excited and I will flesh this out later.
I'll fix it all the weirdtext and then I'm just gonna,
I'll give it some categories.
Why not?
These are the things that Ifelt that writers would need.
The idea here was to create a word.
This is all going WordPress.
Everything I'm doing here is goinginto various different WordPress sites
and I'm making a tool for writers.
That's what I'm doing here, and it.
It has all the writingfunctions grouped in one place.
Now WordPress is great, but all thisstuff is scattered all over the user
interface of WordPress and it needs this.
That was my feeling, felt very, verystrongly about that, and I spent a year
and a half developing this accordingly.
And so, um, let's just say testingand the two categories and close this.
Note that down here it saystesting for the plan, and then
I click on the airplane icon.
And there it's gone.
And now is.
Thank you.
Wait,
I'm so excited.
This is not
the right moment.
He got excited, but I'm not sure he,
but you did play the scrap number.
I'm just resetting it.
Okay, so then I clickon the I icon and there.
Okay.
So there's, this is my WordPress site.
Oh.
What?
Why is it you think that's funny?
I don't see.
Okay.
But it is, I mean, itis my WordPress site.
Now I need to,
okay.
This is gonna be end of your,
how do we get to the here?
I know.
Show.
And I'm looking for dv.
Help me out if anybody see the dv.
Yeah, there it is.
Okay.
Notice the Mastodon icon there.
See if it's not loading it.
You see there has to be one thing thatdoesn't work in every demo, right?
Mm-hmm.
Um, oh, there it is.
Just took a while.
So.
Do you believe how now you can go?
Woo.
That is, by the way, a miracleof heroism by, uh, Mattias.
I'm going to, I'm gonna put your name.
Mattias.
Ferla.
Say again?
Mattias.
Ferla.
That's.
What she said,
lovely human being.
He is a lovely, lovely human being.
If you ever get a chance to chat withhim, you will laugh so many times because
he's just very, very happy fellow.
He did a podcast with Evan andum, a couple of weeks ago, and I
just listened to it on the drive.
I highly recommend it.
These are two extremely happy people andthey're laughing, and you know what it is?
They laugh a lot and they werelaughing at their own misfortune.
Right?
Did I get that right?
But what's beautiful about itand smile, because they won.
They won and they, and thebeautiful thing about it is they
didn't win just for themselves.
They won for you andme and everybody else.
What they did was they made this possible.
What did I just do?
Okay.
Oh, do I get my microphone back now?
You think I'm up to this?
Okay.
I don't
know.
I like how I like it.
Cool.
No, it really helps me.
I might have decent, I'vegonna have to decent typing.
Um, and, uh, you, no,I mean, it's wonderful.
I, now I want to go back into Wordman andshow you a few other things about editing.
So first, lemme do this page.
Okay.
We, we actually, were gonna letyou have a few more minutes,
maybe about another 10 minutes.
I'm pretty close.
Five minutes.
I'm pretty close to done.
Okay.
So I'm gonna show youthrough the icons here.
Um, we already saw this one thatgets you to the, uh, the, the,
the published version of it.
I'm not gonna bother with the, well,this is an RSSV, obviously, right?
And, um, this one allowsyou to edit the post.
And here you can do all the styling.
And I can put a list of objects in here,but this is something I really love.
This came in fairly late in the product.
You can ask for the markdownversion of that text and that made
all kinds of things possible thatweren't otherwise possible, aside
from the fact that we love markdown.
Um, that's cool.
And uh, I don't know, Iwrote it three minutes ago.
There's 89 characters.
If I click that, it tellsme there were words.
You know, it's the usual things.
It's got a whole menu of options sittingin here for things that you can do.
And I'm sure I forgot a milliondifferent things, but, um, now
we have time for questions.
Not really does anybody.
Um, thank you.
So have you considered putting theGutenberg Block system into your editor?
No.
Why not?
Because this is forwriters and writers think.
In these terms.
I don't even know what it would mean toput the good Gutenberg box system in here.
We can talk about that later.
I mean, I obviously, this is frequentlyasked question or I give you another
option if you strongly believe in this.
This is something I didn't mention,but the backend for the software,
there is intermediate software on theserver between this and WordPress.
It's all open source.
Makes it much easier forsomeone else to create an editor
like this than it was for me.
Because that's what I want to do.
I want to create a wholemarket of additives.
So why would you please writeone that works beautifully
for people who love markdown?
It's not that I don't lovemarkdown, it's just that it
isn't the, sorry, not markdown.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
Um, Gutenberg, sorry, I'm thinking Mark.
I got marked down on.
Should be an RSS feed that ismarked down, driven, or content off.
So, well, that's
a great question.
As a matter of fact, there is, there is.
And, um, you know, I'm the guy whoalso wrote the R SS 2.0 spec and, uh,
not like anybody listens to me afterI did that, but, um, it might, Evan
could is probably the only personin the world who can relate to that.
Okay.
Because he tells a similar story.
Um.
But yes, I mean, um, I'm running acampaign very quietly with developers
of feed meters and publishing tosay, let's get marked down in feed.
And there, and there ismarkdown in the feed.
Word land generates an RSSfeed in addition to the one
that WordPress generates.
And ours, we have something calledthe source namespace and markdown
is part of that, and we support.
So I'm starting by putting Markdown inour feeds and I'm encouraging developers,
like for example, uh, Brent Simmonswho does the Net Newswire product,
who's a long time friend of mine.
I asked him if he would do it.
He said yes.
So a future version of Net Newswirewill support this and it'll let get
some motion in our, some developmentsof innovation and hopefully
this time around people like.
I don't know, being, I would saychildish and say, well, you know,
we can't just let anybody do this.
I hope that people sort of look, andthis is the culture of the WordPress
community that I'm hearing is that,yeah, let's try out some good ideas
and see if we can make mistakes.
So the answer is yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So I wanted to make a couple comments.
One like markdown, 100%.
I love it.
Um, I think it's importantto point out that markdown is
also natively supported by.
Almost all AI chatbots andit's, uh, I didn't know that.
In what way a lot of the AI outputs fromthe chatbots are generated in markdown.
I got your copy Markdown.
Google Docs natively supports markdown.
So that's a really easy to takesomething mean, I have to say
good things about GoogleNow, is that what you No.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
You know, I Google all day,
like I, but um, that's beautiful.
I did not know that.
And I also wanted to point outthat you talked about global text
ecosystems, that WordPress is one.
I think that you should also considerthat GitHub and the GET Ecosystem
is a great global text ecosystem.
Totally.
And supports markdown.
And there's a lot of greatmarkdown content in that ecosystem.
And
you want to know what we should do?
I guess we should do that.
What we should do is we should implementthe API of WordPress on top of that 100%.
I I'm here for it.
Let's just do it.
You know what it is?
Interrupt.
Is the religion.
It's the web, it's WordPress, it's me.
I, I wrote a piece called The Rulesfor Standards Makers, and it's
actually become kind of popular.
And the first thing it says is that theonly thing that matters is interrupt.
Don't tell me about anything else.
You know, I don't, I don't like itwhen people say, oh, we don't like
X ml. Let's just use Jason on Go.
Really?
Why do you care?
You know what I'm saying?
It's like, interrupt.
So I haven't asked a questionyet, but the question Oh,
you haven't?
Yeah, my confidence.
I haven't asked the question.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I'm gonna ask if someone in this room.
Wants to get involved.
And I think that I'm kind of in that boat.
Like I do want to be a part of this quietgroup of developers who's, you know,
following along, what's the, the actionsthat they would take at this moment.
Can I
ask
for help
on that one?
Because you guys are muchbetter at doing that than I am.
Um, fair guy.
Given the line, what do we do?
I mean, can we, I don't want togo to the formality of getting any
kind of working group or anything,but let's set up an informal
communication channel somewhere where.
People who aren't tryingto stop evolution.
The problem is, if I set it up,my trolls are gonna show up.
And I've got a fair group of them, andthey, amazingly, they're very long lived,
which is something I kind ofregret, but, but somehow you
guys managed to do that, right?
I mean, yeah, I, and I think,um, some of the, some of the
part of this question may for.
You know, I have a suggestionactually, because we're, we're
definitely out of time, right?
Why don't we like, have lunchtogether and talk about this?
Anybody who wants to be involvedin something like this Sure.
Would that make sense?
Are we having lunch?
I didn't even ask.
Having at the table.
Well, I'm sorry, but please finish.
Oh, yeah.
Um, yeah, so some of the core, uh, teamscould probably, uh, address this a little
bit better, but, um, I think,um, uh, the RSS feed, um.
Would be something that, uh, would workvery well integrated into WordPress.
We could put Mark into the feed.
Yeah.
And I plan to do, I plan to askthem to do that, but not yet.
Okay.
So what I'm doing is I'm implementinga feed an RSS feed emanating from word
land and adding very few features,but as they come along and then I
want, and then we need to get users.
That's the most importantthing at this point.
This software is ready to use and.
So if like, we don't have anyusers, I'm never gonna make
that pitch to, to WordPress.
'cause because I, because I,you know, it's disrespectful.
It's like saying, I want you tomake this popular when I didn't
have the ability to make it popular.
So, you know, that's the first step.
Make it popular.
Second step, then take the collectionof features that we've come up
with and make a presentation andsay, it would be awesome if, and
give it a name too, by the way.
It should have a name.
Right now we call it the source.
Namespace, it's not a good name becausethere's a lot of things in that namespace
that have nothing to do with this.
It's just been sort of the placewhere I drop extensions to RSS
that I put in my own stuff.
So it, it needs to be alittle bit of a process.
It's too early.
The WordPress people that we've been,that I've been working with on this,
I've been enormously helpful andrespectful and professional knowledge.
They know their products so well, youknow, and, uh, and to be respectful, it's.
It's too early to ask, but yes, of course.
But yeah, and the, uh, um, the readerfor, to support the markdown in the
OSS readers, um, oh, I have that,I've already released that under
the GPL, that's called Feed Land.
And if you go to GitHub and look in myaccount, look for feed land and that's
all, all the technology and there'ssome very unique technology in there,
uh, there's a feature that allows youto subscribe to a subscription list.
And that turns out to be as powerful asanything I've ever seen on the internet.
It's what we have to do.
It's what I want all the podcastingclients to support so that a great,
uh, podcaster could say, here's mycollection of podcasts that I listen to.
And then they could add a feed to thatand that a subscription would go to
everybody that was subscribed to it.
It's an amazing, and we builtall kinds of stuff with it.
It's not like, I mean, it's one ofthese features that sounds like,
oh, well that would be nice to have.
But it turns out it's, it, it really makespossible so many things that otherwise
you wouldn't even begin to think of doing.
So, um, you know, we could,uh, we could put that feed
into the WordPress dashboard.
I think there's a lot ofit in terms of into what?
Into the WordPress dashboard becauseit's got an RSS regroup already.
Oh yeah.
But it could support the,the markdown extension.
Can you do that yourself?
Yes, you can.
Uh, that you've already built thatcould be moved into Word Press Court.
Can I help you?
Please?
Sure, you can.
I mean, may I help?
I know my, no, I'm not kidding.
I'm absolutely not kidding.
This, this kind of stuff.
I made the proposal to the people whodo Talking Cats, which is the podcast
and client that I use, but I thinkis an excellent piece of software and
I don't know, we got halfway there,but it's not a market feature yet.
And for them it has tobe a market feature.
Or it has to be a mat feature.
I'm absolutely sure if he's listeningand watching before we active
that, um, that would be awesome.
Anyway.
Hey guys.
Uh, Alex from Evolving Web.
I'm really, uh, happy to see the,the spirit of this product, which
is focusing on the writer andmaking them a clean experience.
Uh, and that's always been the, thebest part about WordPress too, right?
Uh, I'm sorry.
That's the what?
One of the best parts about WordPressis this focus on the writing experience
and more than other products.
I wonder though, a lot of writers workin Google Docs and I know your attitude
to closed source ecosystems and tools.
No, but I'm not like that actually.
Fair enough.
So, so how, how do you see Google Docsfitting into this writer's experience?
No idea.
Why would it, why wouldI, why would it fit in?
I mean, oh, I think that they, letme please, lemme try to answer this.
Okay.
I think the answer is that theyought to implement the support for
this a PII think that's the answer.
I mean, the door is wide open.
I'm also going give them use I,the, the API that I developed that
makes all this way simpler for, uh,for a browser based JavaScript app.
MIT licensed.
You don't, like, you could go, theycould go screw the whole thing up and
I couldn't say anything about it, youknow, and not that I wouldn't, I probably
wouldn't say something about it, butI'm a blogger, so what do you expect?
Right.
Okay.
Um, yeah.
Just to simply answer, the peopleworking in Google Docs could turn
on the optional feature to allow.
Copy is marked down featuresand just copy and paste it.
Rated anything
else Well, but I don't think that'swhat he was saying is that copy
and paste is good enough becausethat's not good enough for me.
That's what, that's what Substack says.
Substack says, oh yeah, youcan use it for your blog stuff.
All you have to do is select all,move every substack and paste.
And I go, I'm not gonna say it.
Not in polite company.
I think we have to wrapthis up at this point.
Are
you gonna
like
Sure.
I'll just wrap up.
Take us out if you want.
Yeah.
Big, big.
Thank you, Tim.