June 7, 2025 — WordPress has lost some popularity for personal expression, as many people now prefer to just use social media accounts. However, many attendees at WordCamp still use WordPress for professional purposes. In this talk, I will show you what WordPress can offer for your personal online experience, as well as for your family and friends. By using a number of free community plugins, you can turn WordPress into:

– Your own lightweight Mastodon instance that also supports RSS feeds and Bluesky through a bridge. Such an environment can act as a balance to platforms that try to keep you addicted to them. With the option to use Mastodon web and mobile apps, you can conveniently engage with your community without always needing to visit your WordPress site.
– A personal bookmarking, read-it-later, and notes tool where you can save and organize content without having your data used for other purposes. You can even read your saved posts offline on your e-reader using a plugin.
– A private space for friends and family, transforming your WordPress site into a private Wikipedia, a place to share family recipes, or a family diary for keeping stories, photos, and videos that might otherwise be forgotten in the scroll history of your messenger app. The support for Mastodon apps makes it easy for everyone to share, read, and communicate with each other.

Leave this talk inspired to create your own space on the web and contribute to a more decentralized internet without feeling the pressure to post something regularly that might come with a blog.

Presentation Slides »

December 24, 2024 — In his State of the Word 2023 address, Matt Mullenweg proposed to make 2024 the year of data liberation. I’ll show how we can make WordPress Playground a destination for liberated data so that you can see the liberated result immediately, and why putting it in a browser extension has some interesting other benefits.

Presentation Slides »

April 10, 2024 — WordPress playground allows you to run a WordPress purely in your browser, combine this with a plugin and Local GlotPress and you get a blazing fast translation experience where (instead of the typical tagble view) you can see the parts of the plugin you are translating, making it easy to verify the translation sound good in context and see your progress right on the screen.

October 22, 2023 — Kommerzielle Soziale Netzwerke können eine faszinierende Welt sein: Eine ansprechende Oberfläche, die es ermöglicht, zu lesen, zu schreiben und miteinander zu interagieren, ohne sich um lästige Instandhaltung sorgen zu müssen. Doch Vorsicht! Dieses Paradies kann sich schnell in Luft auflösen, sobald der Betreiber die Rahmenbedingungen ändert oder dich von der Plattform verbannt. Wir möchten dir eine nachhaltige Alternative vorstellen, um deine Online-Identität zu gestalten: Dein eigenes Blog. Mit neuen Protokollen wie ActivityPub kannst du es erreichbar machen und es zur interaktiven Schnittstelle machen, über die du mit dem gesamten Web kommunizierst.

September 27, 2022