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.)

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.

Scott, a discussion on the support repo about whether we should have H4 in the popup menu led me to consider an option I had been thinking about in the background — letting the user configure the contents of that menu. It's basically a list of names, chosen from these:

bold, italic, underline, anchor, h1, h2, h3, quote, unorderedlist, orderedlist, pre, removeFormat, justifyLeft, justifyCenter, justifyRight, justifyFull, indent, outdent

They all seem to work. Special provisions need to be made in the baseline site for h1, h2, and h3, esp h3.

h3 should be the same font-size and line-height as a paragraph, but boldface. 

It's the best way to add a headline to writing in wordland. Imho any other size starts getting into MySpace territory.

For Change #5, I once again used an add_filter function to replace the HTML generated by WordPress, this time for the next/prev links. The links show only an arrow at 1.5em (24 px), no underline, with the post title in the title attribute of the anchor tag so it shows up as a tool tip.

For Change #10, since we can include PHP code in the theme, we don't need to use JavaScript to filter out the Uncategorized category. We can use an add_filter function on the get_the_terms hook in functions.php to remove Uncategorized before the wp:post-terms block displays the categories.

The block also has a parameter for the prefix to the displayed list, so we changed it from "Posted in " to "Categories: ".

I thought Change #11 would be simple. The icons are in a social-links block, and an RSS feed is among the supported services.

However, adding

<!-- wp:social-link {"url":"#","service":"rss"} /--> 

to the sidebar failed. I had to dig into the WordPress code itself to find the service is named "feed", not "rss". The correct syntax for the RSS feed icon is

<!-- wp:social-link {"url":"#","service":"feed"} /-->.

🙄

Hooking up the correct link to the icon is a task for later.

Update: We put an add_filter function in functions.php to put the actual feed link on the icon (Commit 38b1a45).