I have started a new blog. It is at breathofthehorizon.blog, and it exists for a specific reason: I am building a reading app for WordPress blogs, and I needed a real WordPress site to test it against.

The name comes from a feeling — that particular quality of early morning light when you are outside and the horizon looks like it is breathing. The blog itself is quiet and unhurried, which is the tone I was going for.

The App

The app is called Cozy Reader. It is a mobile reading app — Android first — that lets you add any WordPress blog by URL and read it offline, without ads, without recommendation algorithms, without anything except the writing.

You add a blog and it becomes a book in your library. You open the book and read the posts as chapters. There are a handful of themes — Paper, Linen, Lamplit, Nordic, Nordic Dark — and you can adjust the font size and line spacing. That is it. No comments. No sharing. No notifications. Just reading.

I work at Automattic, which builds WordPress.com. WordPress is how I have published things online for most of my adult life. There is a world of writing on WordPress blogs — personal writing, technical writing, photography, long essays, short observations — that does not fit neatly into the social media feed format. It is slow-moving and thoughtful and I wanted a better way to read it on my phone.

Where It Is At

Right now Cozy Reader is in active development. I am building it with Expo and React Native, targeting Android first because that is the phone in my pocket — a Nothing Phone 3a. The backend is SQLite for local storage, with WordPress REST API calls for fetching content.

The core reading experience is done. You can add blogs, read posts, bookmark things, switch themes, and use it offline. The harder parts — handling the full variety of WordPress HTML, supporting both self-hosted installs and WordPress.com hosted sites, getting featured images to show correctly — are mostly sorted now.

I am in the device testing phase. Working through a checklist on the Nothing Phone 3a: cold start times, scroll performance at 60fps (turns out the phone runs at 90fps, which is a nice surprise), offline behaviour, theme rendering across all five themes, how the app handles long post lists and edge cases in typography.

The plan is to release it openly when it is stable. Open source, free to use. If you write a WordPress blog and want to be able to read other WordPress blogs from a calm, book-like interface on your phone, that is what this is for.

Why a Dev Blog

The dev blog at breathofthehorizon.blog serves a practical purpose: it gives me a real WordPress site I control, where I can publish posts with all the content types the app needs to handle — headings, blockquotes, bullet lists, code blocks, images with captions. I can write something, publish it, pull it into the app, and immediately see whether it renders the way it should.

But it is also just a place to write. I am enjoying having a quiet corner of the web that is not connected to anything else. No analytics. No follower counts. Just posts going out into the void, which is how blogging felt in the beginning and still feels best.

If you are curious about Cozy Reader as it develops, breathofthehorizon.blog is where I will be writing about it. And when it is ready to share, I will post it here too.