Thanks to some careful gear-shifting in my professional life, I have opened up most of the year’s remainder for working on “exploratory” projects — Plerd included. A few things I hope to accomplish before Christmas:

• Write and publish a Plerd book. Plerd’s only user documentation for nearly five years has been its increasingly lengthy README file. It is overdue for a real manual, tidily organized and rife with examples and descriptive use-cases.

  I have wanted this for four years. I began working on this project earlier this year, in fact, but set it aside so that I could focus on all my already-open obligations. It deserves some serious focus from me, and I hope to finally apply that soon.

  I call the product a “book” even though I don’t know how bookish it’ll be, in the end. My hope involves some kind of reasonably attractive, electronically distributed document.

• Add Micropub support to Plerd. I learned about Micropub at last year’s IndieWeb Summit, and I knew immediately that I wanted to add support for it to Plerd.

  I intend “drag markdown files into a source directory” to remain the primary method for publishing articles with Plerd, but allowing Micropub as an alternate means would let a myriad of IndieWeb-aware client programs to hook into Plerd as well. This would let one use a Plerd-based blog as a site to post replies, notes, photos, and other flavors of IndieWeb posts besides the full-length articles for which it is currently tuned.

• Rethink Plerd’s executables. Plerd’s two executables, plerdall and plerdwatcher, need a rethink. They made sense in 2014 when Plerd had far fewer features, but I feel less satisfied with them today.

  If I end up dramatically changing the way the command-line programs work, that’ll come with a major version increase: Plerd 2.0. If that happens, I plan to continue making 1.X available, but only as a maintenance release.