Bullet points --


Blogging lost to Twitter because Twitter had one-click subscribe.

Subscribing in feed readers required too many steps: copying URLs, menus, pasting, confirming.

This friction discouraged adoption compared to Twitter’s simplicity.

Feed reader developers (2002-2006) competed instead of cooperating, creating cluttered subscription buttons.

Twitter succeeded because it eliminated that friction.

FeedLand solves this with one-click subscribe and checkboxes next to feeds.

Users can see others’ subscriptions, similar to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook.

Private feeds are possible but niche; public following is standard and expected.

Emphasis on factoring UI: reduce steps, as with “Edit This Page” in 1999.

Argues against “refactoring” as redundant term; factoring applies to UI design too.

Rebooting the blogosphere requires cooperation and a universal “follow” button.

FeedLand’s checkboxes make subscribing or filtering feeds simple.

Introduces “Radio WordLand” release with advanced checkbox features.

Checkboxes can filter out topics (e.g., “no Trump news today”).

Idea came from observing repetitive TV coverage like Boris Yeltsin’s death.

FeedLand timelines can be filtered live using checkboxes tied to feeds.

Example feeds: Dave’s WordPress blog, Great Art feed from Bluesky, link blog, Scripting News, podcast, WordCamp Canada 2025 feed.

WordCamp Canada keynote in Ottawa, Oct 16–17, 2025.

WordLand integrates categories for organizing feeds.

Commitment to “Edit This Page” feature: too valuable to abandon.

Broader goal: restore writer-friendly features Twitter removed (links, styling, no character limits).

Criticism of Bluesky/Twitter/Threads for perpetuating character limits and stripped-down writing.

Aim: build software that forces platforms to support the web by user demand.

Automatic/WordPress bringing ActivityPub to blogs is “heroic,” bridging web and Mastodon.

WordPress posts in Mastodon retain titles, styling, links, and images—better than Twitter/Bluesky.

Believes competition will pressure other networks to drop artificial limits.

Concludes with confidence: momentum is building, new features will roll out soon.



Transcript follows --


So, I know almost nobody is looking at my software. I may have had feed land out there for a really long time. And it doesn't mean that it doesn't have breakthrough ideas in it. It does. Ideas that I'm pretty sure aren't in any other software and need to be there.

And in some cases, there are the reasons why. Blogging. Cost to Twitter. And um? Because blogging did lose to Twitter. And um, and there's a reason for that. And the reason is, I'm really going to tell you something here. This isn't going to be like, you know, mishmash, confusing.

It's, here's the answer. The answer is one click subscribe. In Twitter, all you have to do to subscribe to a feed. There's always a button there that says, follow this guy. You can click it. That's it, you're following them. Well, if you were to like, make a list of all the things you have to do.

In a feed reader. Let's say you're looking at a web page, right? And you say, wow, this is a great blog. I'd like to subscribe to this thing. And um? Now, what do you do? You want to just go through it. Let's just go through it all, right? So what you would do is copy the URL of the page?

It's in the address bar, top of the screen, copy it, put it on the clipboard. And then open up your feed reader in another tab in your browser. And, uh, do whatever you have to do to start a subscription. So, in, like, feedland, what you do is, you choose.

A command from the main menu that says this. There's a subscribe sub menu. And then, underneath that, uh, you just say, subscribe to a feed, so you choose a command from a sub menu. And then you paste in the URL, and you click the OK button. Anyway. And if it has the right embedded information in the page, that's all you have to do, and, and it's, you can pretty much rely on it, like every WordPress site has it.

It's like you can subscribe to a web page, and it will find the feed, right? Um, but if you can't, if you're if your feed reader can't fight it, then you have to go find it. And now you're going in, and it's. Well, it's a it's a dark art.

And a lot of times when you're in that mode, you don't end up fighting the feet so. But how many steps was that? I mean, one button versus all that. It's not just that, it's that it's all of the. Mind space that it takes to go through all those steps.

Because when you're thinking about doing this? Your mind is on a million other things, and that's there was the friction right there. That was the reason, now, techno, technically, that could be solved. That problem could be solved. And um? Could technically? But politically, and in terms of the. I don't know the personalities of people that were writing feed readers in.

Let's say, you know, between 2002 and 2006. Every one of them thought they were the whole world, and so why would they want to cooperate with one of their competitors? They're trying to defeat everybody and wipe them out, and so I'm not going to do anything to help you.

Yeah, and of course in the process, they wouldn't help themselves. So you ended up with these really bizarre collections of buttons on the web page. On each web page. For each product. Each feed reader, you can subscribe to it. And. Yeah, it got ridiculous, and eventually they disappeared because they were unnecessary.

They were ridiculous. Twitter made it so damn easy to follow somebody, and that was the reason one. So, back to feedland. Feedland has that it has one click to subscribe. And it's got a browsable system where it's like a social media app. In that. I can see the feeds that you're subscribed to, just like I can see the people you're following on Blue Sky.

Or, you know, on threads or on Mastodon or Twitter or? Even Facebook. I can go see who you follow, right? It's all open it. And I feed readers generally aren't that way. And they should be. Because the precedence already been set and the users like it, and it's not controversial.

You know, there's a place for private feeds, and there is a need for that. But it's a very Niche need, and you can make a product that just did that. Or you could have a user preference. You know? And so, anyway. So, if I'm looking through a list of feeds, and I see, oh, that looks interesting.

I think I'd like to follow that. There's a checkbox next to the name wherever the wherever there's a list of feeds in feedland. There's always a check box next to the name. You click the check box, and that's it. You're subscribed. That's it. That's all there is to it.

One click we got through it. We built this is, by the way. The method. You know, they talk about method acting, and um, well, I have a method for. These kinds of things. I mean, we came up with this was called edit this page. It's not the same thing, but it's similar, and that was in 1999, and what we did was just keep track of how many steps it takes to fix a an error in a piece of text that you're looking at.

You're looking at something you wrote, and you see a mistake. How many steps is it to correct the mistake? And that's a big thing. That's a very, very big part of the. Flow of writing in? A web-based browsing excuse me web-based writing tool. And it's called factoring, and it's like we do it in our software all the time.

Internally factoring or some people call it refactoring. I think the re part is is redundant. It's like saying. Cold snow. Or wet water. Refactoring factories, what you're doing anyway. It's a small. Yeah, and you can do it on user interfaces, too, and you have to do it. And that's because it can sometimes wipe out a whole industry because he didn't do it.

So, you know, we're starting to talk. Uh, tentatively, amongst what we used to call Yi old school blogosphere. I spell blogosphere differently. I go bologgo, b-l-o-g-g-g-o. New word sphere, so we've managed to take one very long word. And replace it with two words where one is an actual word, and the other one is just cute.

It's blargo. Oh, it's okay if you want to write it the other way anyway, um? It occurred to me that since we're. We're contemplating rebooting the blogosphere. Why don't we not make the mistakes we made last time? Why don't we do that? I don't know if you could hear me.

I said, why don't we make the mistakes? Won't we not make the mistakes we made last time. Why don't we be the more mature people we are now and recognize that we all have an interest in the success of the rebooted blogosphere? And that. Therefore, it's in all of our interest that there be exactly one button that says, follow this.

I mean, you're looking at somebody's blog. It could be their subscription list. It could be an item I mean. Go ahead and use the check boxes. They're great. I mean, that's a real solved problem now. Seriously, so there's no better solution. I'm also just to mention in the. What I'm calling the radio wordland release?

There's a new feature with checkboxes. They're even more powerful. And um, I'll give you a hint if you want. The hint is, I wrote about this, like 15 years ago, and I finally did it. And you go search for checkbox news. On my blog on scripting.com. And I wrote it all up.

I, I figured something out that the news. Needs to. Break it. It just needs categories. It's really that simple. You just need categories. Um, and when a new story comes along, you come up with a new category. They're just like hashtags, right? And, uh, you have some kind of a nice display on your TV set.

And it's for all the active categories. All the things that the news is actually producing news on right now. So there would be certain things that would be, you know, all the different nuances of trump. We're going to get every fucking theory about that, you know, and. Right, I mean.

And maybe I would just like one big check box. That's, like today. I'd like, no news about Trump, please. If you have to tell me about something that he did, don't make it about his personality or any stupid thing, he said, or how he, like, how? I don't know whatever I don't care.

I, well, today I don't want to hear that. Maybe tomorrow, I'll be in the mood today. I'm not in the mood. So, what you do is you have all these check boxes for all the stories that are? They're active right now, and they come and go like thing that gave me.

This idea was I was watching CNN or MSNBC or something. And um? And Boris Yeltsin died. And, um, and that was of course like, stop. I mean, how long does it take to deliver that news? I knew who Boris Yeltsin was. Um. And, and I don't think I saw a whole lot of news about Boris yeltsin's life things that were new to me because they don't go that deep on American TV.

They just tell you Boris Yeltsin's dead, and they say it over and over and over. I mean, you've heard the news in the first sentence. That's it. That's all there is really to know he's dead. What's next? Oh, somebody else is going to come to a car. Do you have any idea do the Talking Heads on CNN?

Have any idea? No, they're idiots. They don't know anything. They just tell you, they spin it, so it's good for one party or another. And I'm like, whatever, if I want to like, sort of, tune out and just play a video game on my iPad or something. It's perfectly good TV to watch.

Maybe sometimes I don't want that. So? In this product. There's a place where? There's a line of a a column of check boxes. That have the names of feeds in them and next to them are just, you know, they're checked or not checked. And that list. Includes the names of all of.

The sources. That have news items in your timeline right now. It's right there on your screen. So, what I have for me right now, because I'm working on my editor. So, what I have is a collection of feeds. That are just all the things that I write on the web that have actually got feeds.

So, there's the day first blog, which is a WordPress blog. There's great art on Blue Sky. That's a feed that's generated automatically and every hour on the hour. It puts out a nice hard piece out to its own channel, you know, on Blue Sky and a lot of people subscribe to it.

The pictures get a lot of likes and check boxes. It's just something I thought was really cool was happening on Twitter. And as I was getting them, I decided I'll just like download them into a GitHub repo where there's just a huge number of pictures with the captions on them, so you can see who wrote them and everything.

So that's the great art obluse on Blue Sky. Initially, I had there's two feeds. There's one that's hourly. And then there's one that's nightly. And I went with the nightly one here, because otherwise, like, I just don't write. It seems like I write a lot, right? But I don't write that much, and so if I have to have, you know, hour by hour, but that was before I had the check boxes, so maybe I'll try try that again.

And I'll maybe I should just explain how this works. And then there's links.dayverse.org. That's my link blog feed, right? And then they're scripting news, which I'm sure you know about. Then there's the scripting news podcast. And then there's word Camp Canada 22, 2025. Which I have an account on now because I'm one of the keynoters that that conference, it's October.

16th and 17th in Ottawa. And if you, if you're around, come, come see it. I'll be, you know, I have all the time in the world, and we'll just talk about stuff. There's a lot to talk about right now. And okay. So? I don't think it really knows how they.

I forget how this, I mean, I just wrote this, but it was already like three weeks ago, and it was fairly complicated, so I think if I recall correctly, it basically goes based on. Um, what's in the feed? And that's where the check box check boxes apply. And. And if you uncheck a box, you don't see those items anymore.

They go away. So, if all I want to do is, see what I posted on scripting news? On, check it. I uncheck everything but scripting news, and then my timeline just has scripting news stuff in it. I think. Well, first of all, I think it's a great idea. It works really great.

It didn't, you know, all these things. I try out ideas, and sometimes I think it's going to be great, and it doesn't turn out to be great. And I just okay, I'm not doing it. You know, I have no room for features in a product where I don't think they're great.

They're not going in. Sometimes, I think I have to have them. And there are features like that, too. But Not something speculative like this, but I don't think something like this would work in a Twitter like system, the idea of the of what I call radio word land, and for all I know that's going to be the name of the product.

It could be the name of the product actually, but um. It's funny, isn't it? It just occurred to me the other day to call it that I was sending screenshots to some friends and. And it, and I started writing a little bit about it. I said, oh my God, this is Radio, word, land, and then I put it in the title in the subject.

I still really like it. I'll always like the name radio I always thought radio was a good word for what we were doing with blogging, especially once we had the, uh, the feeds in there, you know? So? Yeah, I don't think it would work in in the Blue Sky model, because, um.

Because they have so many feeds there, it would just be overwhelming and who wants to sit there. And you know, really fine-tune, which ones are in right now? This is meant to be something that's very temporal. It's not meant to be something that's permanent, because I don't know you could take it out, or I should mention something else that the the.

The things that are candidates to be in your feed in the first place. Two kinds of things one of them is. All the WordPress posts sites that you've created posts for using wordland. If you haven't created anything with wordland in there, we don't put it in the main in the timeline.

But if you put something in there then, okay? If it's been within the last, you know, n hours, it's going to be there, you know? And um? And then there's another set of feeds. And right now, I think it's gonna be a little bit easier in this. But right now, the way it works is you go over into feed land, and you create a category.

I call my day verse, but you could call it anything it's configurable. Okay. And then you subscribe to when you, uh, the feeds that you want to be in that in your timeline over back in wordland. Uh, it's very easy to put categories on feet, and you just make the categories up.

It's entirely up to you what you want to call them. And, um, and all you do is just collect the feeds you want by just putting them into that category. And um? And I didn't explain it. Well, it's very simple. It's not, people get the idea. It's does. It's not like complicated or hard.

So, um? And then, that is also. That's how I get the great art from Blue Sky, because like that's not a feed that I edit in WordPress, it's, you know, it's generated by an app that I? Um, the same thing's true with the podcast. The podcast is not a WordPress blog, because it's it it.

I manage podcasts. I have a way of managing podcasts that you know that I like. Um, you know, I, I had have had some time to sort of figure out what I like in terms of a podcast editing user interface, and that's how it works. And scripting news has never been a WordPress site.

Um, the word Camp Canada, however, is a WordPress site, of course, right? It's wordcamp, and of course, I have a WordPress blog myself, and I've. I've told you, this is my world is WordPress right now, and um, and for the first year you'll be for the that's easy for me to say, um, excuse me.

But for the foreseeable future, that's it. I mean, I have, I think that WordPress. Well, I can't think of anything else that can do what WordPress does. So, as long as I'm like, creating well what I'm creating right now is a social network around two things WordPress and RSS.

That's it. And since RSS and WordPress are so close to each other anyway? Well, there we are. Wait, I just want to say, I mean, there's a lot more. The check boxes are nice. In the two places we have them, you know. In feedland, where the check boxes indicate whether you're subscribed to something or not, and then now?

What I'm tentatively or just for fun calling radio wordland, um? Control what's in the timeline? What's visible in the timeline so you have a lot of control over what you're looking at there as you're looking for the things that and I should mention, there's an edit button on everything you can edit.

That took some work too, by the way. That meant that, well, that meant we had, you know, what the hell with it? I'm not. That's something I'm not gonna dive into. It was some work to get that to to go, but I felt I'm not releasing a product without edit this page, because that was 1999.

It's now 2025, and I'm sorry, but it's 26 years later. I'm not giving up on that feature that was too good. I guess maybe now would be a good moment to say that the whole theme of what I'm doing is to get back into the writer's vocabulary. All the features that Twitter took out all of them.

I'm not giving up on anything anymore. I don't accept character limits. I don't accept no styling. I have to be able to link it's ridiculous. Those of us who love the web and we were willing to put up with that. We have to stop doing that. We have to believe in the web and we have to support it.

And when somebody undermines it, we have to say, well, we're not going there with you, and they can come into our world. The blue skies can come into our world. But they're not going to look very good. I have to tell you. With no linking, we will go. Why do these guys?

Why don't they allow linking? What's this bullshit with the 300 character limit? I mean, once you get out of the habit of that, I mean, I haven't got out of that, but I still post to Blue Sky. I still do. And I still think that it's bullshit. I'll be very strict.

That's technical term. Here it is absolutely bullshit that they they took with them that character limit idea. I mean, they didn't have to do that. I want you to know that they absolutely did not. There's not. Every day that stays there. It tells you they don't love us. They really don't love writers.

They don't give a shit about us either, I mean. And I'll tell you what I mean. I think that one of the purposes of all the software I'm writing is to create this thing that makes it so that they have to support the web. That's what I think I'm doing.

I think it's sad that I have to do all that. I almost should be a, you know, an Emeritus in this world? I'm certainly old enough to be that, and I certainly have done my share of contribution. If there was a blogging World Hall of Fame I got, I would be in it.

Are you kidding? Totally would be in. And. And yet they have the nerve not to listen to me, and I think I find that very offensive actually. Someday, our world will grow up and we will start. Uh, listening to each other, and we will start making sure our products work well together and that we don't take.

Something as beautiful and wonderful as the web and rape it, which I don't think that's too strong a word. I don't. I think that when you take out all the features that make it work as a writing environment. And you never put them back. I think we've got a problem so.

I think I think we can do it though. Really do? I really do. I see that I see the momentum and it's like, uh. How long have I been going here? I need to check this. Oh my God, 23 minutes. All right, this is the last thing I'll talk about.

It's the thing that automatic is doing. With. Wordpress and activity Pub. And I don't know how many people have been following what they're doing, but if you think that this idea of a distributed internet is important web. Excuse me, let's use the right term there because what they are doing is heroic.

They're they're bringing the web. Into Mastodon. And it should be with anything that supports activity Pub, but I have a feeling right now. It's primarily Mastodon that they're targeting. And. What that means is that I told you about Dave verse. Make sure it's diverse.org. That's my. That's my WordPress blog.

And. Here's really freaking cool thing about this, and I know I've said it in in my blog in writing. But I don't think I've ever said it in a podcast so you can hear how genuinely exciting this is. So? I can go. Look at my blog post. In Mastodon, and there's no character limit, and it has a title, and it supports styling.

And it supports links. All common HTML styling it supports, it seems to. I can include a picture in there. It, it doesn't cover everything yet and but what I hear is. Well, what I see is fantastic. And nothing short of fantastic. I'll tell you why. It goes along with what I said before.

Is that my role here? Well, first of all, I'm making some beautiful software, and I think people are really going to like it. So, that's number one. But the reason I had to do this, why I had to take basically a year and a half of my life, and do this?

Is because, otherwise, the blue skies are now the blue skies and the twitters and. Uh, threads, and whatever else comes along. They're never going to let go of the bullshit limits that Twitter put on our writing on the web. They're never gonna do it unless they're forced to do it by competition.

That's how it works. They'll do it right away as soon as there's user demand for it over in their on their side. People complaining about, well, your shit doesn't look very good over here. Why don't you fix that, or why do I have to go over here to write something that might take a few paragraphs, you know?

Why do I have to go over there? Why can't I do it over there in your world? That will end that they will pay attention to that. They're not paying. They don't listen to me. Absolutely! You know, it's like gotten really bad. I don't know how they, I don't know.

I mean, they must think that my opinion of them doesn't doesn't count for anything. But I'm going to make sure that that's not true. Really motivated there. You have to be careful who you motivate too much, because sometimes people surprise you what their capabilities are sometimes that happens. Okay, folks.

I gotta go, but. Things are really happening. There's going to be a lot of new stuff coming out in the next few weeks. It's really it's. It's got to happen right now, so. We here we go. Okay, talk to you later, bye by.