A week from today there will be a virtual Tinderbox meet-up (Note: Calendar times are Pacific Time.) where the topic of discussion will be "Blogging With Tinderbox." It won't be an in-the-weeds tutorial, though you will likely get many good ideas and some inspiration.

Preparing for that event, I made a Tinderbox outline of some of the topics we might discuss and one of them included bits of "friction" with Tinderbox as a blogging tool, and Mark Bernstein, developer of Tinderbox, Michael Becker, Jack Baty and I got together to discuss the session.

One of the bits of friction was creating a web link in a post. Well, Mark took that to heart and now I'm happy to report that that rough patch has been sanded down quite a bit.

If you're an adventurous sort, or like to witness the development of an app and the discussions and thoughts that go into it, you can buy a "backstage pass," and participate in another Discourse forum as new features are added, existing ones refined and beta releases offered to pass holders. That's how I know that this feature has been refined, I'm running a beta.

It's a double-edged sword, in many ways, for Mark to be such a responsive developer. Sometimes, in the fog of electronic communication and the confusion of misunderstanding, he can be subjected to some unreasonable demands. But he's a model of forbearance, and a surprising amount of the time he will add features to Tinderbox, or modify existing features, to meet the reasonable needs of users.

His accessibility in the forums and in the meetups is unique, in my experience, in the developer community. Perhaps I'm wrong. I don't get out much. But it adds a dimension to using Tinderbox that is absent, not to say "missing," from other apps, and one of the reasons I enjoy using Tinderbox.