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An interesting post from Matt Mullenweg:

Builders are the site shapers, webmasters, the agencies, the companies, the content managers that think in a more page-first rather than post-first way. Tagging? Blogroll? Date-based permalinks? Who needs them. Give me custom fields, rich templates, a site editor, to craft beautiful sturdy pages that will stand the test of time. A store with a catalog of items where what changes is the inventory and ratings, not the content.

The Builders right now dominate our core development discourse, which makes sense. They hold a lot of the economic share with merchants and rich websites.

Our Core Division | Matt Mullenweg

There are some interesting comments on the post too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Glow Blogs over the summer, in particular the shift to the block editor. Currently creating a new site on Glow Blogs defaults to the classic editor and a classic theme. You can optionally choose create a site with a block theme and default to the bloc editor when making a site, or switch around later.

Given the direction of WordPress is the block editor it makes sense to change to make the block editor the default. Over the past few years we have provided a fair bit of information on the block editor. Not so much on the site editor.

Our users are not typically The Bloggers or Builders Matt talks about, but teachers, other school staff and sometime pupils. They have other jobs to do1. Schools do need sturdy pages that will stand the test of time and teachers might find the blogger approach to tagging useful. Designing presents more of a difficulty.

The approach I am thinking of at the moment would be a compromise. Advice on how to do the least amount of work to get a chronological record/blog type site or an information type/school site that start to work quickly.

For example for a chronological blog site: Twenty Twenty Five theme; edit the header to have a nice image; swap the footer for a simple one without links leading nowhere; change the heading blog; edit the Sample page to make an about page. Start blogging. Obviously a school site would be more complex.

A next steps could perhaps add some ‘widgets’, categories & tags to the footer, swap colours with the styles section of the site editor and the like.

That would certainly have been enough to get me started in class blogging. Concentrate on the content.

  1. Personally I found blogging about what I did in class was one of my most useful tools, but I do enjoy blogging anyway. ↩︎

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I’ve managed to make a small AppleScript that gets the selection from Safari & a link and posts it to RSS.chat. I already had a script that copied the selection and put it and a link on the clipboard ready to paste into a blog post. I’d also tried out posting to RSS.chat with bash from TextMate.

Putting the two together was fine until I selected anything complex. Converting that into a blockquote with a citation gave me lots of errors when I passed it to the shell. Finally I asked Claude. This brought jq into the mix. I already had that installed.

Currently I am using it on my own install of rss.chat, thinking of using it to gather interesting links for later consideration.

I run the script, and quite a few others from FastScripts. Not sure if my script be of use to anyone else but here it is.

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I’ve updated my rss chat server on my Raspberry Pi: John’s Pi chat. A new feature is adding a menu of commands to the menubar. I followed the instructions. Just for fun I decided to edit the example in drummer rather than locally. This lead to a mistake where I used the link button to add a link 🔗, rather than a url attribute, with the suitcase button . Anyway easy to fix. I made the outline public and used that in the config. Using Drummer for the first time in a long while reminded me of the scripts menu which, in my mind links to  today a type="link" node opens its url in a new tab; other types get their behaviours later.  Other types sounds interesting.

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Read The Devils Footprints by John Burnside ★★★★☆

I am unsure how much to ‘believe’ of the main character’s narrative. He claims a childhood murder and the insanity of running away from his wife and life with a 14 year old girl who he thinks might be his daughter. The nasty side of a Scottish small town. Queasy, uncomfortable & involving with lovely prose.

Like the visit from the angel, or that moment of terror before cock-crow, a flicker of light revealed how, mostly, we are creatures of chance – how, when the devil has work to do, he makes it look like an accident, at least to begin with, in order to lure us further into his trap, protesting mildly, if at all, but willing accomplices at the last.

and

I would come to where I was then: the dusk of a winter’s morning on the streets and the houses, dusk on the point, the starlight above the firth a perfect echo to the night boats coming in, and someone watching it all from an upper room, a man who might as easily have been someone else but, as it happened, was me: a quiet, solitary man in a world lit by new snow, leaning towards the window and touching the dark, empty pane, to feel the cool of something other than the night, remembering his fingers through the glass.