There is a new short-form blogging theme for WordPress.com called Blurt. I have a few opinions about this, so I figured I’d chime in.
This is one of the hopefully many things we’ll see come out of Radical Speed Month at Automattic, which only started a week ago. For those of you not following Automattic too closely, it’s essentially a month-long hackathon where pairs of Automatticians get to ship something with no oversight. “No design reviews, no product sign-off, no marketing sign-off.”
This project seems to be the output of Joseph Scott and Dave Martin. When I saw Joseph’s name, I was excited because he’s the maintainer of the WordPress RSS Cloud plugin.
It’s Not P2
This theme is interesting to me because I remember a long time ago, there was this really cool WordPress theme called P2, which was basically a microblog theme published in 2009. This became a hosted solution that, although no longer available for signups, is still used for much internal communication at Automattic.
At some point, some core logic was split out into O2, the plugin component powering much of it. However, this plugin seems mostly abandoned. This is significant because that means that Blurt is certainly not using it under the hood.
What’s Cool About Blurt
The first thing I noticed is a section that supports importing your posts from existing social media sites. It supports X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. I think this is new, because on an existing WordPress site, these are not listed under the normal WordPress import, which lists things like Blogger and LiveJournal.
On the sidebar, there is a compose button that opens a modal dialog to write your post. One thing I’m not excited about is that it actually limits you to 500 characters, which I think is a bad call.
They promote the idea of “reblogs that actually work,” which are what they call retweets. I believe this relies on some underlying WordPress.com infrastructure, so I’m not sure how open/extensible it is.
In general, the design looks nice and is very clean.
What I Hope To See
I’m not going to criticize Blort at this time because it’s a quickly released experiment. I hope there will continue to be more updates to it over the next three weeks (and beyond).
However, I really want to see this open-sourced and available to install on a WordPress.org site. Ideally, there will be a slew of plugins released as well, bringing this functionality to other sites and themes.
I hope this can become the modern version of P2, or even a self-hosted version of Tumblr (owned by Automattic).