WordPress and me

I wanted to do a brief podcast to explain how WordLand came to be, and what I learned on my exploration of WordPress.

This, for me, was like time travel. They had picked up on a lot of what we were doing in the 90s and early 00s, and even though I was alive while this was happening, my attention was focused elsewhere. So when I found the wpcom package in Node.js, I was astounded. I thought you worked on WordPress in PHP, which I've never developed in (long story). And further, I found that the API was very much like the API we did for Manila in the 90s. My instantaneous realization was that you could do a nice writing tool built on this API. I had to do it. And the result is WordLand, which I'm going to demo at WordCamp Canada in October.

WordLand is a good editor. For some people who write in WordPress it will be a godsend, and for others, a revelation. There should be a lot of editors in this space, because there is no one editor that's good for everyone.

I've made wpIdentity, the back-end of WordLandm open source, MIT License. There should be lots of great editors for WordPress, and they should all interop, not just by import/export, rather by letting the apps access the same files, so if I want to use two editors to work on my file, they should be able to. The open format I chose to use is Markdown. We would have used it in RSS if it existed when RSS 2.0 was coming out, but it didn't. We're making up for that now.

I want to go much further. I think WordPress has all that's needed to be the OS of the open social web. We needed it and it's always been there, and I saw something that I want to show everyone else, that the web can grow from here, we should build on everything that the WordPress community has created. It's a lot stronger foundation that the other candidates for the basic needs of the open social web, imho.

We've done a lot of work over a long time. Discovering WordPress at this level has been like time travel for me. This is where the work we did 20+ years ago went. It really is as if I was Rip Van Winkle, asleep for 20 years, who wakes up and found out that while he wasn't paying attention someone had built a whole city around the little village he came from.

Anyway, I really ramble, as always -- I apologize for that. But there are some good ideas in here, and it's a story I've been wanting to tell.

Dave Winer