WordPress.com, the desktop app

Here it is: the new WordPress.com desktop app.

There was a time when desktop apps to edit web sites were needed because editing in the browser was such a lousy experience.

But then Dave started adding buttons to the pages of his sites that read “Edit this page”. I have always thought that this was an extremely powerful tool: rather than having to dig in the bowels of the back-end of a content management system every time you needed to change something, you just went to the bit you needed to edit and hit a button. There and then.

With today browsers you can do even better: you can just click on a bit of text and, if you have the priviledges, you can edit it.

For the last couple of years we tried to use this “edit in the front end” approach for most of our projects (for example La Libreria dei Ragazzi and AgriProFocus are all edited in the front-end).

So, what do I think of a desktop app to edit a web site? Is it even more removed from the site than the back-end? Hard to say. So far I enjoyed writing this post on my blog. It has been a long time.

I don’t think anyone is reading this anymore…