Back in August I released a WordPress plugin for showing a FeedLand river — the stream of items from the feeds a FeedLand user subscribes to — on a WordPress page or post. As of yesterday it's officially published on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/river-embed-for-feedland/

That means you no longer need GitHub at all. From your site's dashboard:

1. Plugins > Add New, search "River Embed for FeedLand", install, activate.
2. Settings > River Embed, enter the FeedLand username whose river you want to show.
3. Drop the [feedland-rivers] shortcode on a page, post, or widget.

Everything from the original post still applies: it fetches the river server-side and renders it in a sandboxed iframe, so it can't leak feed content into your theme and your theme can't clobber its styling. No third-party fonts or scripts. You can show more than one river with the username, category, and server shortcode attributes — see the live example I've had running since August.

Bugs and feature requests welcome on GitHub issues.

I've released a WordPress plugin that shows a FeedLand river on a page or post: feedland-rivers.

Drop the shortcode `[feedland-rivers]' onto a page, point it at your FeedLand username in the settings, and it fetches the river JSON server-side and renders it in an isolated iframe. No FeedLand front-end scripts, no third-party fonts or stylesheets beyond an optional favicon lookup. Here is an example.

You can also show more than one river on a site by overriding the username, category or server per shortcode instance, e.g. '[feedland-rivers username="alice" category="tech"]'.

It's not on the WordPress.org plugin directory yet. Grab the zip from the latest release and upload it via Plugins > Add New > Upload.

I'd appreciate beta testers. Let me know in the issues if something looks wrong or the instructions are unclear.

I took a quick look at blurt, the new WordPress short-form blogging theme available on WordPress.com.

It's a theme, just like Baseline is a theme. Themes can alter the behavior of WordPress in almost any way imaginable. It's still just a theme, so if Blurt is not using too much WordPress.com magic, it should be able to used on a self-hosted site.

The artificial 500-character limit is clunky. The compose box simply is disabled if there are too many characters. If you edit the post in the WordPress dashboard, when saved extra characters are silently dropped.

With WordLand I can post 600 characters, and they don't get cut off. If I try to edit that, the save fails. It's an early version, Blurt doesn't know how to handle posts coming from outside its UI.

I'm not sure why everyone thinks a character limit is a defining feature of social media. That should be up to the writer, not the platform. It should be a threshold, not a wall. micro.blog seems to handle this well (at 300 characters the UI show a title field you may choose to use or not).

All in all, it's a cute idea, and I look forward to see how it develops. (Sorry for the fart joke title.) (Actually I'm not sorry. 😃)

It's been a while since we checked in here, so here's what's going on with the Baseline theme.

• v0.2.3 adds support for WordLand linkblogs. For posts in the 'linkblog' category, the link URL will be rendered as a link at the end of the post. A date headline appears above the posts for that day. The customizer includes an option to use the linkblog layout for the home page, for sites that consist entirely of linkblog posts. See https://links.daveverse.org for an example.
• v0.2.4 adds support for the feedland-blogroll plugin. If the plugin is installed, the home page will be rendered in two columns with the blogroll in the right column. See https://daveverse.org for an example.
• The RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress hasn't been updated in a while and wasn't working as expected. I wrote a simple RSSCloud External Ping plugin to add the cloud element to the RSS feed and ping rpc.rsscloud.io on new and updated posts. If it keeps working well I'll submit it to the wordpress.org plugin directory.

Upcoming changes will include:

• Now we create an artificial title for titleless posts. That is suboptimal when there are a lot of titleless posts. We need to offer an option to suppress the artificial titles, and perhaps show date headlines (like for linkblogs) instead. 
• The now theme has so many options it is becoming unwieldy to develop. We need to break it down so the options (linkblogs, blogrolls, etc.) are plugins or separate themes in order to streamline the basic Baseline theme.

I've published a minor update v0.1.5 to the Baseline theme. It now shows a minimum number of posts on the home page, even if you haven't written any posts in the past two months.

Now that linkblogs have been added as a feature to WordLand, we're thinking about how best to display them with the Baseline theme. I've put up a prototype of a linkblog in WordPress to experiment with the layout. (The prototype gets it's data by polling the RSS feed once an hour rather than from WordLand, but the basic idea is the same.)

I'm trying out a new logic for the home page. Instead of using infinite scroll to eventually show all posts, we're showing only the posts for the current and previous month, just like Scripting News. We don't link to anything older, since old news is no longer news, and good older posts will have links from elsewhere. 

There will be an option to show the traditional  WordPress pagination links to older posts for those who prefer that behavior.

It's nice to have the baseline around, because now I have something to match the presentation of H3's with. The next version of WordLand will have that worked out.

Had to back out of the Styles panel of the Settings command, I did it way too fast, each feature it added had to be tested in this very particular context.

The context is Medium Editor, Markdown and WordPress. None of which were designed to work with each other. We're lucky to have a core subset that works, enough to support writers.

I think to get a really complete editor, you have to start with Markdown or HTML and work it out with WordPress.

I have made the style of H3 agree with the style of in the Baseline theme.

My answers to the questions from May 4, 2025:

1. As I understand it, with a Business plan on wordpress.com you can install any third-party theme. 
2. Looking at the WordLand timeline, every post has a headline of author name and date, whether there is a title or not. That looks more balanced that simply having no headline for titleless posts.
3. I think that whether WordLand can add CSS to a site or a post depends on the WordPress.com REST API. At first glance I don't see anything about styles. On a self-hosted site it would be possible to extend the API to accept CSS (ChatGPT), but would WordLand to access that over wordpress.com?
4. OK
5. OK, we can try that
6. OK

Other problems I've noticed

1. Block quotes are not styled properly (they are indented, but no line to the left).
2. On the home page for untitled posts, there is no link to the story page for the post.
3. Bold italics were not working, but do now (fonts issue).
4. Inline code markup like this  isn't very distinguishable from normal text (issue on GitHub).

This is a list of things that I want to try out on the new baseline theme.

Here are five great MLB first basemen and what made each of them especially interesting:

1. Lou Gehrig – The "Iron Horse" of the Yankees, famous for his durability, humility, and tragic early retirement due to ALS, which now bears his name.

2. Albert Pujols – A modern legend known for his all-around hitting, consistency, and longevity, finishing with over 700 home runs.

3. Willie McCovey – Towering lefty slugger for the Giants, feared for his monstrous power and iconic presence in the batter’s box.

4. Keith Hernandez – Brilliant defensively, redefining how first base was played with range, quickness, and leadership—also a memorable personality.

5. Frank Thomas – “The Big Hurt” dominated the ‘90s with his intimidating size and incredible hitting eye, combining power with patience.

Thanks for listening, this has been a test!

I've applied the single column layout proposed by Christy Nyiri. I personally think it looks fantastic. 

Here are some WordLand styles.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

This is a block quote. (This doesn't seem to be styled yet.)

Bold, italics, underlined (hmm, it's not underlined). 

An ordered shopping list:

1. Bread
2. Milk
3. Eggs

Notes as an unordered list:

•  The next/previous links have returned to the WordPress default instead of large arrows only. Update: That was my bug, now fixed.
• As Christy noted, the child elements of the Post Template block are a little weird at inheriting global padding, as evidenced on mobile.
• Are H1 and H2 way too big? Update I've bumped down the font-sizes of H1 to H3 to large, medium, and normal. H1 now matches the size of the post title, and H3 matches the size of normal paragraph text.

Here's a paragraph that appears under the unordered list.