Aliveblog
Liveblogging done right, again:
a modern solution for modern WordPress,
built for Gutenberg and cloud-backed delivery
Leading news websites report that on an average day, 15% of their total page views come from their liveblogs. 1 And when a major story breaks, you can expect the associated liveblog to be one of the day’s most popular clicks. 🚀
Aliveblog is a new plugin from Tintou, bringing WordPress liveblogs into the world of block-based development, and the availability of cheap cloud storage.
It’s about time.
Aliveblog is the solution built for how WordPress sites are built today.
It’s faster and easier to launch, write, serve, and support liveblogs on any site.
It’s just a block
Just add a block into your post, and you’re live. No more weird workarounds.
Front-end authoring built for speed
Markdown-based content entry with a rich preview and keyboard shortcuts.
Clean up with AI
You type fast, you make mistakes. Let AI check spelling, grammar before posting.
Serves as static files
Content served as pre-generated files, reducing the burden on your server.
No update? No download
Sends 304 Unchanged responses stopping unnecessary downloads.
Global scale on tap
Pass the job of serving payloads to Cloudflare R2, Amazon S3 and others.
Highlight summary
Extend your layout with a timeline view, filterable by tag, to highlight key updates.
Contributions with attribution
Add existing site Users or create instant guest identities with relevant context.
Search engine friendly
Entries are offered to search engines in their preferred LiveBlogPosting format.
Timezone switcher
My timezone or yours? A dynamic toggle to convert server time to your local time.
Lightning-fast search
Instant free-text search powered by your browser, with term highlighting.
Hooks and filters everywhere
We know you’ll want to make it your own. Add all the actions and filters you need.
Liveblogs are often a mark of a serious news website. You will see major publishers like the BBC, FranceInfo, Al Jazeera and The Guardian running multiple liveblogs each day. They are a great tool for drawing and retaining readers, and often lend themselves to a more human tone of voice. But they need the right subject, and the right writer.
Short answer, yes. It makes innovative use of long-established WordPress conventions like blocks and comments, and ships with stylesheets which should work well for a liveblog experience out of the box. But chances are, you’ll want to adapt or extend its styling to match the rest of your site. The markup is straightforward, so that shouldn’t be difficult; and you can use the default stylesheets as a guide.
As easily as commenting on a web page. Aliveblog puts a form on the front end of the website, visible to site users with appropriate permissions, or users directly added as a Contributor. Aliveblog uses Markdown combined with a rich-text preview layer, giving the essentials of a WYSIWYG experience without the technical and cognitive burden of a rich-text editor. Behind the scenes, it uses the WordPress REST API, opening the door to other publishing methods in future.
Not any more. Aliveblog is designed to reduce the burden on your host as much as possible. It generates static payload files following every content update, which can be served without waking up WordPress and querying its database. And it includes the optioon to push payload files out to global-scale cloud service providers like Cloudflare or AWS, taking all that weight off your server – and off your mind, too.
Aliveblog is still work in progress. Commercial plans are in development.
Keen to find out more?
We are in the final stages of completing a first release build of Aliveblog. If you’re excited to use it in production, contact Tintou to request early access.