Originally created as a “SPLOT” tool called TRU Writer , it offers a simple but elegant web publishing platform that lets visitors quickly publish full formatted and media rich articles, essays, papers — without requiring any logins or tracking of personal information. The author decides whether to be named or not.

The SPLOT Writer is a WordPress theme developed by Alan Levine while he was on a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University. You can install it on any hosted WordPress site using a theme available on GitHub. People who host their domains on Reclaim Hosting can installed a copy just like this in one click — it has much of the site preconfigured including plugins, menus. widgets, and example content. All you need to do is personalize it and change a few options (see the post with instructions),

Published written works are presented in a style similar to that at Medium.com, clean text, wide margins, all in a format that looks just as good on a mobile phone as it does on a large screen monitor.

A published work includes a header image which is upload to the TRU Writer. The body of the written work has a full featured rich text editor, and media can also be uploaded to be included within the body text.

Media such as YouTube or vimeo video, SoundCloud audio, tweets or flickr photos can be embedded simply by putting a URL on an empty line.

As an example see To the People of Sangamo County, which was Abraham Lincoln’s first political speech made in 1832:

The text of the speech has been augmented by embedded audio and video files.

Content can be authored directly in the Writer or you can copy the contents of anything written in a word processor, or already published on a web page, paste it into the Splot Writer editor. Most standard formatting (headers, bold, italic, underline, lists, blockquotes, hypertext links) will be preserved.

So find an essay or article and see what you can do with it by publishing online with the TRU Writer. Or explore the many ways other people are using this theme.

Got ideas? Submit as an issue in the theme’s GitHub site.