Tag Archives: ideas

WordPress.com idea: Guided signups

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Problem statement: Some users arrive at WordPress.com with intentions to launch a specific type of website. They know what type of site they want (e.g. photography portfolio) but don’t know how to use WordPress to achieve their goals. Although there’s lots of documentation available on features, we offer very little instructive, illustrated guidance on setting up different types of websites.

Each guide could have:

  • Links to example sites
  • Suggested WordPress.com upgrades
  • Suggested WordPress.com themes
  • Steps you need to take to configure your site
  • Frequently asked questions about setting up this type of site

This idea has been around the block a lot, and I recently rediscovered it in a notes folder. I think guided signups would be super useful for photo blogs, small to medium size business sites, mommy bloggers, etc.

WordPress.com idea: Nothing but custom CSS page template

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For those who have the custom design upgrade enabled on WordPress.com, it would be neat if we offered a bare, stripped to the basics page template you could style to your hearts delight. For instance, if I do a year in review post, it might be nice to prepare a unique design for that. Dustin Curtis is notable for producing custom layouts for each post.

Obviously you can do this now, but you first need to reset a lot of design first. If you switch themes, there’s no guarantee your resets will still work.

Taxonomies don’t matter anymore

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What is more frustrating to me than a lack of solid content categorization is that there is no single CMS out there that allows you to indicate follow-ups, updates, series, retractions, corrections and responses. Now that would be interesting metadata and it’d really allow us to keep readers in the loop and give them updates to stories they care about. Much more useful than telling me that this story is an education story and that that story is about air travel.

Stijn Debrouwere — Taxonomies don’t matter anymore

Call for volunteers: Hack Shack India

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So, the idea: bring together a group of fun, adventure-loving hackers to live and cowork in India for a couple of months this coming spring (we’d leave the States shortly after Liftcamp). I’ve visited twice already and loved it — for anyone who grew up in the Western world, India is an incredibly rich, diverse, and fascinating experience.

Currently, I’m looking for people who’d like to help me put this together. Interested? Let me know.

“Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?

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It’s time to iterate on the product formerly known as the RSS reader. Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr are going in a direction that emphasizes usability and ephemerality over durable value and utility. I want someone to do to the RSS reader what Apple has done to the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone — but it’s also a completely different paradigm.

Continue reading →

WordPress.com idea: Tweets as comments

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Often, when a post is publicized to Twitter (or Facebook), the ensuing conversation then happens on the other platform. The challenge with this is two-fold: the conversation happens out of context of the original piece, and isn’t as accessible as time goes on.

It would be neat to pull in responses to or retweets of a publicize action back into the context of the original post. Furthermore, those external reactions should be ingested in a structured manner, and the comments iA should reflect the nature of type of reaction.

This isn’t a new idea as it’s been done before but it’s still something to be vastly improved.

WordPress feature request: sharing links

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I wish sharing links with WordPress from mobile wasn’t so darn complex. It’s be nice to make it a one- or two-step action, instead of: write a title, choose tags, choose category, find the link, prepare body post with the link, think of something interesting to say about the link, and hit publish. Half of the time, all I want to do is reblog what was already written (while obviously fitting it within the aesthetic of my site).

One way we could get there with the mobile app is by offering a bookmarklet to auto-fill a new post, a la Tweetie.