Being me, I downloaded WordPress’s new Calypso app (available for now only in Mac desktop version) after I heard Matt Mullenweg talk about it on The Gillmor Gang.
My original idea was to start a new blog, because I redirected the old Stealthmode blog, which has been on WordPress.org for a decade, to Medium recently, and the old posts don’t come over. So they’re stranded on WordPress while the new stuff is on Medium.
I’m not the only person with this problem. I’ve been a blogger since the original Microsoft small business email product in 1996. I switched to Blogger in 1999, and then to Typepad in the early 2000s, and then to WordPress when I fell in love with Matt at the first Wordcamp. However, the number of alternative places to publish — or rather to find the audience — has dramatically increased, and I’m constantly writing IFTTT recipes to take my posts and push them to other outlets: LinkedIn, Facebook, WordPress, and Medium. Dave Winer is right; I don’t really own my content — my distributors do.
Back to Calypso. In order to assuage my curiosity (“squirrel”!) quickly I did a post to Buppy the Puppy’s blog. Buppy’s blog is on WordPress.com, and I could use the app as an interface.
I can report that the app is wonderful, if incomplete. It’s a huge improvement over the existing WordPress. You can’t download it from the Mac App store, I guess because it’s still a beta. If you want to try it, go here: https://developer.wordpress.com/cal…
Matt told the Gang that it’s entirely rewritten in Javascript, and is designed for much easier interaction and notifications. Like everything else in WordPress, it’s open sourced, and he said it led to a more radical transparency within Automattic, the company that forms the business side of the WordPress community.
But there’s a huge problem: it doesn’t work yet on mobile despite a responsive design. I don’t understand why the re-build wasn’t done with a mobile first mentality, but perhaps that’s because it was started almost two years ago. I’m sure they know they have to grapple with mobile, but Matt admits the company has 10x the number of web developers on staff as mobile developers.
