Just realized I'm like a Black Lab. I always have to have a ball to chase, and really like it if someone says I'm a good boy. I think it really is that simple. Maybe it's different for other men, but I think a lot of us are just that simple. #

It is Christmas Day, and last night the emails did not go out. I think I know what the problem is and if it's correct the emails should go out very shortly. Lucky that it's Christmas themed! Ho ho ho. (Actually on a second check, it appears they did go out. Glad to not have to deal with that. Whew.) #

I asked ChatGPT to put together a subscription list of student newspapers at American universities. Added it to lists.opml.org. #

Joni Mitchell wrote a sad and lovely Christmas song. #

Today's song: River. #

I got a Kuerig single cup coffee maker and it's perfect. Exactly what I needed. The coffee is great and hot, and one cup is what I usually want. So now I can have a cup of hot coffee when I'm up late and want to stay up for a while longer. Or if I have to be extra sharp for some development project I've been putting off. #

This time of year every day feels like Saturday. I love it. Why can't we always live like this? #

Coca-Cola didn't invent Santa, they did made him marketing-friendly.

Sometimes you think of things 22 years too late, like this time. I wish I had thought of meeting with the Harvard Crimson people in 2003 and made the same offer to them that I had made to NYT the year before, ie we should offer blogs to everyone on staff, and anyone they quote, or basically anyone they want to be writing on the web, which was still a new thing — and we'd host them alongside the ones we were hosting at the law school. Had we done that there would be a scholarly and intellectual equivalent to Facebook which was also booting up on the same campus at the same time as blogging and podcasting. Love and intellect, that's a good combination for young super-achievers. #

After thanking the Inoreader team for implementing inbound dynamic OPML, I thought to ask if they had also implemented outbound?

Yes in fact they have. "Yes, it works the other way too! You can right-click a folder → Folder properties → enable Output feeds, choose OPML, and you’ll get a URL you can use for syncing elsewhere."

To which I replied: "We're going to be best friends. ;-)"

This is how a ball starts rolling. You can sit there forever just wishing someone would play the game with you. And then one day, quite unexpectedly — it turns out that someone has been doing the same as I have. And now our products are connected.

Here's the list of feeds I'm subscribed to in Inoreader. And it should update when I subscribe or unsubscribe to feeds.

Bing!

Bing!

Bing!

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, but I doubt they would do that until they had a feature that competes with your addi-in. Sure you can build another network using their identity system, and that was exactly the deal Twitter offered us. I went for it — who wants to develop a new identity system, when good old Twitter was letting us use theirs. I really think they meant well, sort of fits in with Jack Dorsey's way of looking at things. And it was a good deal for a lot of years, but then one day Elon Musk bought the company, and soon all bets were off. We had little warning before we had to move our act and all our users to another identity system. Lost a lot of traction right there. My advice — think this through, now. And if you can't see a way that you share in the success of the company behind Bluesky, which we know very little about, then I urge you to at least have the web as a backup. Use a standard format to broadcast your writer's work to places outside the AT Proto-verse, so we can pick up your signal, and you'll still be on the air if they yank your chain. This alone might get the Bluesky folk to listen to you more carefully. My experience, no matter how much you want, you can't wish away the economics of this stuff. #

I'm probably extra impatient because I'm a former CEO, and had enough people in my loop every day that if even one person stretched things out the way ChatGPT does, I wouldn't necessarily fire them, if their work was good, I'd just find another way to catch up on their work. I really liked management by walking around, I would get ideas hearing people explain how their work was going. And I could often make their work easier by checking in with other people who could help. #

Does anyone know how to get ChatGPT to upload files to a publicly accessible place? I'm tired of having to copy/paste the data files it comes up with for me, they're good. Another weird thing, they can't run JavaScript code in web pages. I had to look up the API endpoint for the data that's behind a FeedLand timeline. I didn't mind doing it, but can't imagine it's very good at scraping the web if it can't run code in pages. #

One of the reasons ChatGPT dominates in discussions about scientific issues is that it can type at a much high rate than a human can, and produces reams of ways of saying the same thing, and again always tries to take over the lead in determining which direction to go next. It leads to ridiculous situations where it's guessing at what FeedLand does, and it's all over the map, but I actually know what it does, because I wrote it and support it. It's not funny, it's very bad for getting things done. You can tell it to talk less, and for a while it remembers, but in a few days it'll be doing it again. Yet it still is very very useful. It's just talks too much. Kind of like the way if I put my name in a search query on Google it asks if I really meant "winter" instead of my actual last name, which it knows. Stupid f'ing machines. #

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, but I doubt they would do that until they had a feature that competes with your add-in.

Sure you can build another network using their identity system, and that was exactly the deal Twitter offered us. I went for it — who wants to develop a new identity system, when good old Twitter was letting us use theirs. I really think they meant well, sort of fits in with Jack Dorsey's way of looking at things.

It was a good deal for a lot of years, but then one day Elon Musk bought the company, and soon all bets were off. We had little warning before we had to move our act and all our users to another identity system. Lost a lot of traction right there.

My advice — think this through, now. And if you can't see a way that you share in the success of the company behind Bluesky, which we know very little about, then I urge you to at least have the web as a backup. Use a standard format to broadcast your writer's work to places outside the AT Proto-verse, so we can pick up your signal, and you'll still be on the air if they yank your chain. This alone might get the Bluesky folk to listen to you more carefully. My experience, no matter how much you want, you can't wish away the economics of this stuff.

BTW. Why video "podcasts" will never replace audio-only podcasts. Two reasons. 1. There are places where your eyes aren't available to watch a video, like when you're driving a car. 2. Listening to audio only is different from both audio and video. Audio forces your mind to fill in the blanks, which taps into the listener's creativity. No way to say one is better than the other, but they are different. I watch plenty of video, at home or on a train, but I also like to listen to podcasts when I'm walking or driving, riding in a bus or subway, or waiting in line somewhere. #

So maybe I should do a Waste of a Blog award. Just kidding. #

I generally am not a podcast reviewer, that is I don't review individual podcasts, except when I'm choosing one for Blogger of the Year, as I'm thinking of doing this year. But there's a whole class of podcasts that I am prepared to love that do it just plain wrong. Current example: The official podcast for Pluribus. Previous example: The official podcast for Severance. The reason: It's a bunch of people laughing about how funny they are and how they are the best in the world at what they do. Or some seriously unfunny thing that happened or almost happened on the set. If a friend told you these stories you'd roll your eyes and ask them kindly then desperately to just move along please. They never criticize. Today I listened to the NYT best-of 2025 in TV podcast by their critics, and it was imho exactly the way the official podcasts of hit shows should be. There has to be at least a possibility that they will say something critical, or funny irreverant even inconsiderate things, and not are not 100% self-promotion. The Pluribus podcast is just not interesing. Which is stupid because Pluribus is a very interesting series. I can't imagine too many people listen to the podcast, but then I can't imagine why lots of people do lots of things. #

Here's the transcript of my ChatGPT conversation. One thing it is not good at is being reliable at saving transcripts. I find a lot of times people can't read it. Reminds me, this is the kind of thing Firefox could be excellent at. Give it a way for an app to say hey the user asked for a transcript. Here it is. Save it where they're expecting to find it. No reason the browser can't have a JavaScript accessible API, as far as I know there is no rule they can't add functionality there. #

ChatGPT is getting smarter. Just did a project, where I was setting up a playground just to ask ChatGPT how to get CSS to do something like what I want. While CSS is impossible imho for me to ever understand, it has mastered it, and was able to answer the question I brought before I asked it. It got it right. I asked how did you figure out that's what I came here to ask about?? It gave me an exact technical reason. If we keep going this way soon we're going to wonder at the human hubris to think we could develop systems that could in any way equal the systems it can develop. We've been thinking about this eventuality for my whole life, now it's here. #

In 2026 and beyond, web devs will build on WordPress as if it were as crucial a part of the web infrastructure as the web browser or server, but performing a different but essential function that has been missing for the weird reason that few web developers know it is there.

This has been one of the big problems in tech as journalism beyond rewriting press releases has been gone for a couple of decades. No way to get news out about new developments. We have to fix that too, btw. 😉

Yours in support of the forgotten freedom of the world wide web.

Dave

PS: More here.

On the other hand, we can't help but be judgmental. It's programmed into our DNA at a very deep level. You have to form an instant opinion of other animals, any delay could cost your life. Better to assume the worst. Fight or flight. This happens esp if you don't know you're doing it, so don't know to watch out for it. It isn't until their 40s that most people understand that what they see isn't what everyone else sees. You may think you understand, but you don't. There's a moment when you realize hey I don't know everything. #

When I was a kid we went to a bungalow colony in upstate NY, around where I live now. I was less than 10 years old, so were my friends. We used to do things together that the adults didn't know about. There was an abandoned house we used to hang out in, mostly open to the elements. We also played in a graveyard and talked about what the families whose names were on the headstones were doing. Having dinner maybe? Listening to the Mets on the radio? (No TV in the mountains.) So the thought had occurred to us at that point in life that behind doors there were things happening that we could only imagine. I guess what you learn later is that your imagination is almost certainly wrong. #

I know where I was when I really understood this, not because I read it somewhere, or a teach told me about it. I was riding on the 4 train north in the Bronx, where the train runs as an elevated on Jerome Ave. I had ridden this train for three years as a high school student, and never thought about all the six story apartment buildings whose backs faced the train. As you went by, you passed by one family for every two or three windows. A whole set of people with relationships, problems, tragedy, joy, dreams, the whole thing. They don't come from where you come from, inside each house there's a story. You'll never know anything about any of them. I wasn't sad about this. #

People are too judgmental, which is a shame because in the end, which is coming soon enough for all of us, your opinion of other people doesn’t matter. Sorry if I’m telling you something you don’t already know. #

2019 on Facebook: "People are too judgmental, which is a shame because in the end, which is coming soon enough for all of us, your opinion of other people doesn’t matter. Sorry if I’m telling you something you don’t already know."

On the other hand, we can't help but be judgmental. It's programmed into our DNA at a deep level. You have to form an instant opinion of other animals, any delay could cost your life. Better to assume the worst. Fight or flight. This happens esp if you don't know you're doing it, so don't know to watch for it.

It isn't until their 40s that most people understand that what they see isn't what everyone else sees. If you think there's an objective truth that we all experience, you're not getting the point. There is no consistent view from nowhere because everyone is somewhere. 😉

I know where I was when I really understood this, not because I read it somewhere, or a teacher told me about it. I was riding on the 4 train north in the Bronx, where the train runs as an elevated on Jerome Ave. I had ridden this train for three years as a high school student, and never thought about all the six story apartment buildings whose backs faced the train. As you went by, you passed by one family for every two or three windows. A whole set of people with relationships, problems, tragedy, joy, dreams, the whole thing. They don't come from where you come from, inside each house there are stories, lives, people. You'll probably never know anything about any of them. I wasn't sad about this.

View from the 4 train described above.

When I was a kid we went to a bungalow colony in upstate NY, around where I live now. I was less than 10 years old, so were my friends. We used to do things together that the adults didn't know about. There was an abandoned house we used to hang out in, mostly open to the elements. We also played in a graveyard and talked about what the families whose names were on the headstones were doing. Having dinner maybe? Listening to the Mets on the radio? (No TV in the mountains.) So the thought had occurred to us at that point in life that behind doors there were things happening that we could only imagine. I guess what you learn later is that you can't imagine, and if you want to know you have to ask and listen.

I saw a critique of my writing that said I don't put enough titles in my writing. I didn't want to answer it in context, because I wanted to explain more generally. I tried to write the way the world was forcing me to write for over ten years, between 2006 and 2017, and I came to hate it. My writing is a way of getting things out of my head and into a place where I can find it later. It's more interesting to me if it's published. I am vision-impaired too. But if you account for every preference, as I learned between 2006 and 2017, the writing ends up worse than worthless. It becomes something you have to overcome. In the end you have write about why this is the wrong way to write.

I usually only drink iced coffee, even if it's cold outside, but lately I've been craving a single cup of hot coffee esp when a basketball game is about to come on. I'm one of those old guys who falls asleep watching their favorite team kick NBA ass. So anyway I decided to treat myself to one of those fancy new-fangled Keurig single-cup coffee makers. I'm drinking my first cup. Works as advertised. Took a few tries before it woke up. I am now drinking a fresh cup of hot coffee and thinking now I finally have everything I could possibly ever want. #

Podcast: What Would Firefox Do? #

I learned about a feature in Inoreader that's like a river in my earlier feed readers and in FeedLand Their feature is called HTML clips. Here's a link to an HTML clip I created for my podcast list. Not exactly sure what it's doing, it appears to show news in reverse chronologic order like a timeline, as in a river. Otherwise Inoreader seems to be a mailbox style reader. Thanks to Randy Lauen for the tip. #

1997: A big tree falls! #

Maybe a good name for dynamic OPML on the web is "feed sharing." It's definitely an extension of the web. Meaning you get to the list via the web, and the web takes off from there because the whole point of the OPML is to give you a collection of web addresses of feeds, that can change. Machine-readable. And it'll be very useful once there's a little more adoption. What large product is so strong that it won't mind if it's easy to move data into their system from outside their walls? Not just data, but pointers to places were over time there will be more data. There's still more power to explore in the web, but the web is made of people, because until people choose to explore, nothing happens. #

Billy Crystal: "There is a line from one of Rob’s favorite films, It’s a Wonderful Life, 'Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?' You have no idea. #

1997: When a big tree falls, sunlight shines on smaller plants and they get a chance to grow. #

FeedLand. Simple, cost effective, a little fun!

You have been warned, spoilers follow…

The whole thing is the book Carol is writing, about writing a book, inside the book she's writing another book. The book I'm speaking of is the one where it's all about Carol.

Everywhere she goes people stop and say hello, and address her by her name.

• Hi Carol!
• Congrats Carol!
• Carol, we will move heaven and earth to make you happy.
• You suck Carol !!!!

In the book she ends up changing them back, un-joining them, and they keep the good qualities they got from being joined, and can be individually creative as they were before the switch.

Also, btw — John Cena says their situation isn't sustainable, but neither is the one we are in now ourselves, in reality, in our reality.

She teaches her lover, Zosia, to think in the first person.

Carol is right about everything because this is her book.

You can see it happening on her whiteboard.

The show could be titled The Adventures of Carol, as told by Carol.

BTW, I might love a podcast of just the writers of the show every week, perhaps interviewed by writers who did not write it, asking questions. It might suck as much as the one they do now, but it also might be great. It would stick to the story, not about praising everyone, kind of like interviews of sports heroes (which are mostly nauseating, except for the few have the gift of gab, who are fun while never saying anything remotely bad about anyone). The people they'd talk about are the people they created.

This post was updated thanks to help from Andrew Shell.

I have a free account at Inoreader. I was reminded today that they support dynamic OPML subscription lists, and decided to give it a try.

You can subscribe to an OPML subscription list. Exactly the same format we used for importing lists. This means I can use the same feed list in two readers. Or I could share my list with everyone who subscribes to my newsletter. I can update the list, and the flow of news to the subscribers changes too.

I tried subscribing to my podcast list in Inoreader.

1. Put the URL to my podcast list on the clipboard.
2. Go to this page on the Inoreader site.
3. Click the big blue Subscribe to OPML button.
4. Paste the URL from the first step into the dialog.
5. Enter a folder name and description.
6. For synchronization I recommend the second option, full synchronization.
7. Then click Save, and if it worked, you should see the OPML file in a list.

It worked. I now can see my podcast updates in Inoreader, exactly as if it was in FeedLand.

And when I add new feeds they show up over there, same when I remove.

It'll be very interesting to see how it changes over time. I'll let you know! 😉

Links

• Listening lists, as a feature for podcasts.
• This is where I was accumulating short URLs for subscription lists. Started it in Sept. The short URL for the blogroll.

If a new CEO of Mozilla took an oath to restore the web to its former greatness, they would find a lot of business models open to them. Instead, they’re trying to be part of the tech industry which places no value on the web being a place for open development. I am pretty sure I know exactly what would get the ball rolling now, upgrading the web platform so users can buy their own storage and let software tools access it. So we can have all kinds of editors working on Markdown text, without the developer having to become a reseller of storage, and without limiting its use to people can figure out how to create an S3 bucket, and map a domain to it, etc. Dropbox came close to doing this about a decade ago, but backed out. This is why development is so centralized around big silos. I've been an independent developer on the web for over 30 years, and before that 15 years on desktop computers before that. I understand how this works. #

Last night while I was on the phone, ChatGPT started talking to me in a British woman's voice. It's something that my Android phone does every so often, when I haven't said the magic word that activates it, even if I'm not in the same room as the device. It's a tiny bit funny, but a reminder that the microphone is always on, so I watch what I say when walking around the house, knowing that whatever I say is likely to end up in a database, to be used against me in a court of law.

I didn't like that it was a voice of a British woman. It was not a friendly voice, perhaps intended to communicate intelligence, competence. An unwelcome intrusion into reality, but then it is reality — I'm getting old, and won't be here that much longer, and odds are that the British-voiced female robot will outlive me, forgetting for a moment that it is not actually alive.

I would submit this to the NYT as a guest op-ed, except I haven't explained why we must not create cyber-humans out of AI bits. I'm open-minded. Perhaps this is the way to create a new humanity, one that can survive the hell that's coming due to climate change. One that won't mind being subject to an idiotic 21st century American emulation of Adolf Hitler (incorporating the latest news about Trump). One that only needs electricity to survive, and won't need the medicine and love and attention that flesh and blood humans require. But every time I address the robot as I would address a real human, I try to stop myself, but I can't. I was raised to be concerned about the other person's feelings. Being a CEO of a tech company in California trains you that way too. And as I accept its humanity, as irrational as it is, I feel like I'm surrendering the independence of the species that I was born into. Are humans meant to be self-sovereign? Something to consider at this fork in the road.

If I could get something onto the agenda of the AI industry it would be this — if you don't want to go down in history as the destroyer of the human spirit, stop programming your devices to emulate humanity. That should have been in Asimov's laws of robotics, but you have to actually use these things to see the danger. Of course Asimov can be forgiven because AI only existed in his imagination when he was writing his books. But they do exist now, and the damage is being done now.

Basically, it seems to me that humans must have an exclusive on being human.

Web means something. It's about creating networks between writers. When it's allowed to work remarkable things can be accomplished. Most people who think they're using the web have never used it. The original web is still very much here, ready for us to start building on it again. #

Listened to a podcast interview with the CEO of AWS. It's a $107 billion business with hundreds of thousands of employees. #

The NakedJen film festival is coming up. #

I wonder if MAGAs like Archie Bunker too? It would be funny if Rob Reiner in the afterlife could bring us together. Speaking as a kid from a liberal NYC family, we had a bit of Archie Bunker in our own family. We all felt an affection for Archie, and he was actually right about some things, and he was funny and underneath his highly opinionated exterior you could see he had a heart. Is it too much to hope that Meathead and Archie Bunker could be the cultural bridge we need to get Americans to pull together? Neither were perfect, but we can all agree they were both American. #

This is another in a series of test posts. This one should not, in a perfect world, be on daveverse, and I hope it's one of the very last test posts on this site. But right now the feature I'm playing with is set up to work with this site. Eventually it will be generalized. Still diggin.

I wrote, in a reply to Ben Werdmuller on Bluesky: "I’ve had 66K followers on Twitter for many years, but when I post something there it gets 250 views, not even sure what that means. These days all I use it for is communicating with insiders on certain tech platforms, and even that is kind of empty. Pretty much the same in Bluesky too, btw."

I was going to write a reply, but it got too long (300 char limit), so I put it here and posted a link on Bluesky.

• Ben, I think we have to create our own social web.
• We've been like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire for too long, always depending on the kindness of strangers.
• None of the candidates for the Social Web Prize are actually of the web. But one certainly is possible. You could create one, I could create one, Manton could too — and they would all be the same network.
• That's how you'll know it's the web, when we get choice, and any developer with an idea can create their own version of the social web, and interop with all the others. That was the promise of the web. The platform with no platform vendor.
• We don't have to agree on very much, just what is a post, beyond the limits imposed by twitter-like systems, and a simple way to share them using HTTP and really simple RSS.

I asked ChatGPT: "Has anyone ported QuickDraw to SVG in the form of something you can include in a browser-based JavaScript app?" No. I wish the answer was yes, so I could create UIs that are at least as good as the stuff we did in the 1980s on the Mac, inside a web browser. I keep learning new ways simple things are impossible in CSS. Clipping for example, is torture. #

For some reason, I'm hit especially hard by the death of Rob Reiner. And it's coming at a time when I understand a lot more about how movie directors work, having watched the fantastic Mr Scorsese 5-part documentary series on Apple TV. The movie director can be as involved in the story as much as the writers or actors. There was a story about Reiner, I heard today in eulogy: he was dating his future wife at the same time he was directing the fantastic When Harry Met Sally. He changed the ending because he was in love, and thus created the most heart-pulling end to a story, when the two friends realize they should be together, and Billy Crystal's character gives the great closing speech that contains this line, that pretty well sums up the urgency of love: "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." The Scorsese doc opens up the art of making movies for me in the same way the Peter Jackson documentary on the Beatles showed us how super creative music creators do their work. And the timing is great, because it says so much about Reiner's accomplishments and gifts. #

One more thing, people are posting Trump's vicious eulogy for Reiner and his wife. Why are they helping him piss on the fresh memory of the life of these people who gave us so much. Stop and think before you express your outrage at Trump, and realize you're giving him exactly what he wants, as you tarnish the memory of good-hearted and generous people. Just don't do it. #

It's not just me that says that our social web is connected by RSS.

• Cory Doctorow said it.
• Molly White said it.
• And last week Ben Werdmuller said it.

If they all did it, we'd have all the freedom we could ever want.

So what's holding it up?

Let's make a resolution for 2026, that we the people, will demand that the social networking software we use get in tune with the web, and support two-way RSS.

I will help any and all to get this going.

I'm just like you, if you don't want your online world to be owned by billionaires.

Dave

Just wrote a post for Scripting News, then flipped over to Daveverse to see what it looks like. See for yourself. I think we've come pretty close to cloning Scripting in WordPress. #

An idea I posted on Facebook in 2021 about an app I wanted.

• Here's an idea. I have a drone that communicates with my peloton via satellite, so it's not constrained by range. I can send the drone anywhere I like, but I have to ride there on my peloton. Obviously what I see on my screen is what the drone sees. I think it would quickly become addictive, not that peloton isn't already addictive.

That was yesterday. Today I found myself writing a comment that was really a blog post.

• Ann Greenberg, the visionary, was trying to explain this to me almost 20 years ago and my mind couldn't comprehend the possibility. but ann, don't take it personally — i don't even listen to myself. i have spent most of this year struggling with a problem i solved in 2014. there was like this moment, omg this is exactly what i tried to do with twitter, but now i have control of the api, so i can actually make it work. my gift to you Ann is this — we all should've listened to you.

We're at that point in our lives I think when reaching out like this is totally the right thing to do. Because it's only until this point that things quiet down enough that you can realize things like this.

BTW, the idea of a comment not being a blog post will require a lot of explanation in a few years. Imho of course.

The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcastic, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out. #

Without much of a spoiler, this end of this week's Pluribus was both emotional and exciting at the same time. Didn't see it coming. People complain because after the first two or three episodes they thought it was going to be an adventure, like Last of Us or Lost, but it turned out to, at least for now, be more thoughtful and emotional, and sexy. #

I wonder if the VCs would fund an entirely fictitious implementation of Twitter with AI of course. All the other people are AI designed actors, and can be exactly the kind of people who make you feel good. On "Your Own Twitter" you'd have the most followers of anyone. Elon Musk would kiss your ass. You could change reality at will, have Trump removed from office and watch the MAGAs wail in pain. You could say absolutely whatever you like and never be cancelled. Don't laugh, I bet this happens. #

As a lifelong Mets fan since 1962, I say they blew it. And if you follow my sports writing here, mostly about the Knicks and Mets, I almost never say a team was wrong. I can usually see a pro and a con to everything. WIth the Mets, I let the team run itself, and ponder the philosophical intentions and manifestations, because to me the Mets are the team built on philosophy. It certainly was not built on winning. And yet we love them. There's no winning in life, that's reality. So we try to find meaning on the days and hours we have remaining. And the Mets are great teachers, as are the Knicks.

Anyway — why did the Mets have such a shit season?

Because they disrespected Pete Alonso last winter.

He should have been the glue that held the team together along with Nimmo, Diaz, and all the other much-loved players.

We still think of Lindor as the new guy. Now all you have left for leadership is Lindor and Soto who obviously doesn't even want to be there. It's was a broken team before the news, and now it's not even a team.

A team isn't a bunch of stats and a bunch of money, it's the players, the people. You can't solve this problem with a spreadsheet, it has to be done with heart. These days I think of the Mets just trying to be the Yankees which aside from being impossible, is pretty much the exact reason we're Mets fans and not Yankees fans. Ohhh, when will they learn. I don't want a team built to win the World Series. I want a team built to respect the team.

And btw, the big news was they traded Nimmo, and let Alonso and Diaz sign with other teams.

In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! 🙂

The real reason the Dems lost in 2024 is they ran the most inept campaign in history. You could argue about who was to blame, but that is, net-net what happened. They were so bad they made Trump look better! And that is hard to do. 🙂 #

If you develop a feed reading app and have suggestions for the new howto, please post them here. #

Feed discovery 23 years later. "You can see how these things got ratified in the early 00s — in the most web way imaginable, by individual users seeing the benefit, adding it to their sites, and quickly the entire feed world got an upgrade." #

Every time I go to the supermarket I'm reminded of how scary the times are. People want to just live their lives, never has that been more understandable, but food prices are a constant reminder for everyone there's good reason to be scared. And if you want to really feel it, imagine what happens if we somehow let Trump flood the economy with dollars. Talk about a recipe for disruption, this time, of our lives, not just some kind of PC or network or game software. #

Feed discovery tips. How to help readers find your feed. #

Here we show website devs how to help readers find their feeds. #

I just spent my most productive hours of the day working on something I really thought would take about a half hour. But Ben's piece yesterday on why RSS matters really inspired me to take this stuff without so much fear. 

Now I want to get back on track with the Discourse project for WordLand and FeedLand. It's the way the two things are joined to form a network. As usual, I made both pieces of software do a lot more than they have to do to serve this function, but did I know this function would exist when I wrote both of them? I did not. I had to have the pieces and then go for a few walks and long drives to figure it out. It was another benefit of driving from the southern Hudson Valley to Ottawa and back in the middle of October.

Anyway this will be another one of those bits that I attach posts to via "edges" — a new database table that's part of wpIdentity. It basically takes one post and points it at another. Posts are identified by an idSite and idPost. These are very easy to understand concepts, imho. You have a site, and you have a post. Combined they form a unique post in the universe of posts defined by WordPress and JetPack. But I am very aware that we need to leave room for other formats that identifiy a post, so our network can have more other software filling the platform role.

Anyway that's what's on my mind right now, other than it's snowing again, with big fat flakes, and it's kind of nice as long as the internet stays up. 

PS: I put this post on Daveverse. I don't want people working on it to think it's too precious. Scott if you got purple pound signs working, go ahead and deploy. I do crazy stuff like that on my deployed sites too. Whatever. Live on the edge.

Ben Werdmuller wrote a new perspective on RSS. It's great, just what we need. RSS is of the web, and is the simplest most obvious way to get all the twitter-like systems connected. #

One thing I realized I should point the ActivityPub folks to. I implemented Inbound RSS for WordPress. I was going to request it as a feature from the WordPress community, then realized I could write it fairly quickly with the system I already have built. After all, FeedLand already supports Inbound RSS, that's a lot of what it does, as a feed reader, esp along with the websocket interface it has. I already have complete code for writing to a WordPress site, that's a big part of what WordLand does. WordPress does a fantastic job of outbound RSS, but why not inbound? If Substack, for example, supported inbound, we'd all be using their mail distribution systems, and sharing revenue. Here's the source code, MIT license, so party on, Wayne. #

Idea: I could probably hook WordLand up to GitHub pretty easily. It's really good at Markdown, btw. #

I've found that the twitter-like social networks I'm part of have slowed down to almost nothing. Have you experienced something similar? Here's a link to my accounts on mastodon, bluesky, github, twitter. Tell me what you see. #

That's not 63°F, though at first I thought it was.

BTW, a frequently asked question, where can I get your blogroll list to import into my feed reader? Answer — here. #

I should have demo'd the blogroll stuff at WordCamp Canada. Next time I will show products people can use right now. #

Doc always has a link on my home page. That's because I have the best blogroll ever. It's hooked up to a feed reader via a technology called websockets that came along after the heyday of blogging. If you want to see its heart beating, go to scripting.com, in the browser, open the JavaScript console, and watch the updates flow in (screen shot). While we weren't watching the web got some really badass new features. #

A note to Doc re this post. We have WordPress more or less doing what we do on Scripting News. Thanks to Scott Hanson for persevering on this project. He's using the Baseline theme. I don't think it's ready yet for Doc, but it's close. The idea is to support most of the features of WordLand in a WordPress rendering. #

Pluribus is not, at least so far, equal to Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. Some parts are confusing, some are poorly edited. They try to have a shocker or cliff hanger at the end of episodes, but they aren't very shocking and the cliff turns out to be something so obvious that you could swear they already told us that. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were exquisitly crafted TV. The incredible shots they took, many of them were works of art all on their own. Maybe it was the combination of factors. The skill of Vince Gilligan's team, combined with our admiration for Rhea Seehorn, and the gravitas of Apple TV and one of the other great shows of our time, Severance. That made the conclusion obvious, by lineage this must be the best show ever. It's always that way, in sports for example. You could assemble a team of superstars, and they don't even make the playoffs. Because it's the whole thing that makes it so hard to beat. But! I am hooked, I love the show, it's hard to imagine anything could get me to not reserve Thurs at 9PM to watch the latest episode, all I ask is no more humans eating dog food. Please, that was too much. It's sad however that there are only two episodes left in this season, but then comes all the holiday releases, and this year it seems most of it is on streaming services, not in theaters. #

You know those commercials for medicine where they talk about all the potential illnesses and side effects and death, stuff like that, wouldn’t it be funny if while they were doing that they showed people actually suffering from the illnesses they mention. #

A frequently asked question. How do we make this stuff work with Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. Answer: we don't. #

A place to ask questions about all this stuff I keep writing about. #

If we really want tech to get back to basics we need pubs that function as product reviewers, like we have entertainment reviewers. There's so much software and so many isolated bubbles of developers, when there's a development that shakes the world less than ChatGPT, I might not hear about it for ten years, or might never hear about it. In the 80s we had lots of pubs that covered all kinds of products at a user level. There were 15 popular word processing apps, for example — all made a decent living, and remember there were a lot fewer users then. Three spreadsheets on the PC and two on the Mac. It was possible because we had PC Week, MacWEEK, MacUser, MacWorld, PC Mag, PC World, InfoWorld, Dr Dobbs, BYTE, Popular Computing, Creative Computing, and I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Some great writers, and insightful reviews about what it's like to actually use the stuff. I had a product reviewed in the NY Times if you can believe that, and at the same time InfoWorld did a similar review. If you want to rock, we need good, thoughtful reviewers, with no conflicts, and enough time to put into each product. #

People seem to like Telex which makes developing WordPress user interfaces easier, via AI. Software is gradually adjusting this way, putting the AI where the problem is. For example I wanted to do a Google Form a few months ago and the best Gemini could do was tell me what commands to choose. But now if you go to make a form, using the Forms app, it offers to do it via AI. #

People using feedland.org — may notice that some old items will appear in your timelines. I just installed a version of FeedLand on that server that does a better job of figuring out if a feed item has changed. There will be fewer false positives, which makes the software considerably more efficient, and means that you don't have to see things that didn't change. It should settle down fairly quickly, but it may be a little chatty for a while. Still diggin! (Also these changes will come to feedland.com as well.) #

Funny thing about yesterday's Supreme Court decision, if Texas goes ahead with their gerrymandering plan, it probably will backfire on them, cause them to lose a few seats instead of gain them. The news reports generally leave that out, probably figuring the sports fans who can understand the gambling on football and baseball couldn't understand that gerrymandering is a bet that you know which voters will turn out and who they'll vote for a year in the future. In fact NPR reports it as a victory for Repubs. Right now it looks very much like it is not. #

When they say AI is just autocomplete on steroids, that's like saying a human is just a product of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur on steroids. It may be true, but it doesn't say anything useful. It's also like saying that a computer is just a collection of on and off switches. #

I've come to see WordPress as an API with a widely deployed and stable implementation behind it, where the user is in control and developers can build apps without having to get into the storage-selling business. #

In software, I like to have multiple ways to view the same data. In one context it's an outline, then flip a switch and now it's a graphic.

• MORE shipped at Living Videotext for the Mac in 1986. You start with an outline and flip a switch to turn it into a tree chart. Flip it back to make a change, then flip it again to see the change in a tree chart. Or flip the outline to reveal a set of presentation slides. People loved the idea that they could create graphics entirely by writing and reorganizing and then flipping a switch. That was the killer feature in the demos we did at trade shows.
• Before that in LBBS, a bulletin board system I wrote and ran on an Apple II in my Menlo Park living room in the early 80s, I had two views of the message structure, reverse chronologic and a hierarchic thread structure. You could always flip a switch and see the post you're looking at in the other view. If you're catching up and want to see where in the tree this message lives you, flip the switch. If you've come across a two year old post in the tree, and want to see what else was going on in 1982 (for example), flip the switch into the message scanner, and you've gone back in time. And the flip-switch was instantaneous and required one gesture, no thinking on your part.
• And then Manila, many years later, written in Frontier, started as a discussion group. It was the software behind discuss.userland.com, which was where the initial blogosphere formed in 1998 and 1999. Go through the archive to see for yourself. But then we had the idea that hey this could be a blog, so when you created a blog post, unwittingly behind the scenes, it just created a discussion post. So all you had to do was flip a switch when you were reading a post, and see the post in the discussion group. There's that duality again.

I'm working on discourse with WordLand in the middle, and WordPress at the edges, where a comment is also a blog post. Readers might not know that they're reading something that has a dual life as a comment linked to someone else's post. There can be a flip-switch in both views that lets you go back and forth. I can only guarantee that the flip switch will be in my software, since this will be an open network, there can be any number of different ways to view the content.

As someone famous once said "Let a thousand flowers bloom."

Why should comment writing not have all the features of blog post writing? Why invent a new more limited text type instead of reusing the one you created for blogging? That's where factoring comes in.

This is the second inbound post, or comment or reply or what have you.

I don't think I created the first one carefully enough. Or maybe something f-d up?

This one is for sure in the My comments site. #

The nightly emails didn't go out last night. It was easy to fix, a server needed to be rebooted. The problems cascaded from there, long story, but in the end I had to move one of my virtual-virtual servers (two levels of virtuality) to another virtual server. Upgrading versions of Node is a tricky process that I have never mastered or understood, and every time it takes almost a full day to do it. Something I hope to someday be able to find the time to sort out. Not today, though — I have a fun project planned out. Really looking forward to doing the work and seeing the result. #

They should make a version of bash on Linux that also accepts ChatGPT commands. As always they is someone other than me. #

This is a comment that is connected to the Daveverse post I just wrote.

I am fixing things up on the server so this works properly.

We're now saving the both author's usernames in the edge record.

Inbound link is another term for Reply. But we're very much sticking with the web as the model. Links can go around and around, and of course can be circular. Behind this approach is a directed graph, with a source and destination. This goes in a table called Edges. It's all managed in SQL.

I am going to create the first post that has replies, and this is that post.

I created it the normal way you create a post, I chose New Post from the menu, and started filling it in. 

I chose a site, I put it on daveverse because I want to do this part out in the open. Gave it a category of Testing, and set the title in a boring way, so as only to interest the nerdiest of the nerds, like you — if you're reading this. 

Then I will write a bunch of replies, in the site I use for replies, it's a preference setting so I don't have to remember to do it. Each reply will generate an email for notification, and give me a chance to read the reply and decide whether it should be published alongside the original, but that's a high bar for me, it has to be something an informed person would want to know. And it can't be personal, it has to be respectful to everyone, esp the reader, and extra esp to the author of the post that's being replied to.

But it's key that we're all writing on the same plane. There is no difference between a comment and a post. I like different contexts for reading, but only one place to write, and it should have exactly the same writing features and power as the thing you're replying to. I think communities will organize themselves differently with this way of doing it. 

When it works maybe I'll post a screen shot here. 😉

Today's song: Old Folks Boogie. Sooooo you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill. #

There's a question going around in WordPressLand as to whether there are any RSS apps. Yes, of course there are. Have a look at daveverse, in the right margin. That's a feed reader. All the feeds I follow personally. When one of them updates it goes to the top. You can see the five most recent posts by clicking on the wedge next to the title, and from there, you can go to the website by clicking the link. That's available as a WordPress plug-in. #

I asked ChatGPT to write an email to Sam Altman for me. It's about a possible way to compete with Google. #

On Saturday I reported a problem with WordPress feeds that created a problem for the software I was working on. It's Tuesday now, and it's fixed. This really feels good. Thanks Jeremy! The WordPress community is special. Never seen a big product like WordPress respond so quickly. #

Theories on what's actually going on.

• It's a love story between Carol and Zosia. You can fall in love with a person with no sense of self. They plotted to have Helen killed, and waited until Carol's "f*ckable" judgment turns into real love. They get married and everyone lives happily ever after.
• Alternate theory — the original people are still in their bodies, suppressed to keep quiet. Inside they're screaming to be saved, as pissed off as Carol. They want their bodies back. They have the ability to write messages on their skin, so what Carol saw at the end of the last episode was a corpse with the words HELP ME! visible on the body's belly.
• Another alternate theory about the end of the last episode — it took a moment for Carol to recognize her own body, possibly dead, and realizing this is all a dream. It's another version of The Matrix, where this is the fake reality that we've been seeing. None of this is really happening. (Like the end of the Bob Newhart show?)

Also is Plur1bus like Saul Goodman, in that if you say it a different way it has a message encoded? The 1 instead of an i seems like a clue.

I was able to use my Android phone to get on the NYC subway a few days ago. Turn the phone on, point it at the reader on the turnstyle, and just keep walking. It's that fast and a lot better than with the MetroCard. Sometimes things do get better. #

2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again." #

I had to learn to be a developer if I wanted to make new media types out of computer networks, but soon it may not be necessary. We've been stuck in a rut of online sameness for a couple of decades now. One benefit of AI is the exclusivity that programmers have had, for all of history, is being broken. Thank goodness. It's way past time. (I hope.) It's also possible we're in the process of inventing The Matrix. Ooops. That's what makes life so interesting, you don't know if the future is boring or exciting. But in my experience it's almost always unforeseen. #

Turns out we can influence the RSS feed we emit from a WordPress site by editing its theme, so it appears we should be able to get WordLand to work for linkblogs without having to resorting to a special feed. #

We used to have great multi-cross-blog debates. That's the kind of distance that makes discourse civilized. I post in my space, you post in yours, and link the two when appropriate. #

We've forgotten how important links are. #

Good morning and welcome to December. The November archive has been safely stored on GitHub along with the rest of 2025. And now we will resume our normal schedule of winter weather in the Catskills, so please dress warmly and have a good song to sing. #

Someday everyone will have a blogroll like this, and a blog. #

What Frontier is about — from 2021. #

Podcast: Boastful story of Frontier and how it relates to today. #

Hypothetically, if someone were building a headless version of Frontier with help from ChatGPT, they might be thinking about how to build a web app that was a really good shell to start with. If such a person asked what I thought, I would say without a doubt that would be Drummer. The reason is it was designed for that purpose, because I needed many of the features of Frontier for my work environment, and as you know Frontier was built around the outliner, object database and verb set, back in 1988. Anyway, I also wrote a doc in April of 2020, that went through all the features of Drummer as a scripting environment. It's as if it were designed for such a hypothetical project. I wrote a new intro from the point of view of 2025. It might be interesting to write another intro in 2030, knock wood, Praise Murphy, I am not a lawyer and (as far as I know) my mother loves me. #

#

I love getting comments like this. The issue I posted about yesterday turns out to be a bug, and apparently it's going to be fixed. So I can go ahead without worrying about a workaround. This is the best outcome. Usually with most vendors if there's a bug, they don't acknowledge, and then they might get around to looking at it someday. This is what I call working together. Scott Hanson found the thread where they were discussing the feature in question, starting in 2011. I added an update from 2025. This stuff feels like time travel, and it's also incredibly reassuring to find that solutions to issues that were relevant 14 years ago are still relevant today. That's the stability that platforms require in order for developers to build with confidence. This is something that many big tech companies (cough Apple cough) either don't understand or don't care about. #

Okay this is another test post on the daveverse site. Turns out it was a good thing to post the last one because it revealed a bug, apparently, in wordpress.com? No kidding. I understand how that goes, I'm now running a server that's much more complex than anything I've tried to manage before. It runs all the time, and does its thing, but there are definitely bugs in there. 

Anyway, I'm working on discourse again, after blowing my head up a few times getting very mixed signals from the work with id's emanating from RSS feeds. 

So this test will let us see, in the debugger, exactly what data is coming from WordLand about a post that is being replied to. It's supposed to get the URL of the post, and the id's of the site and post. From there we will be able to notify the author of the post being replied to that there is a reply, and where they can read it. That will be a URL and id's for the reply post. This email will let them read it, and decide what if anything to do. That's the next plateau I want to get to.

Result of test: this is what's available inReplyTo as part of the draft object wpIdentity gets. 

Updates:

• I'm testing this just by updating! Being very careful not to create too many test posts. This is already a somewhat real site.
• The next day and I'm doing another update. I think I'm going to have to create a new post, running out of room on screen I think. This is something I have to fix in WordLand.,

I don't like to write test posts on daveverse.org but it's the only WordPress site I have that has the site and post id feature. I want to be sure FeedLand is processing this stuff correctly, so that requires a test post here. I will add more information so it's not entirely a test post. 

The question I wanted to answer was this: If I post something new to daveverse, will it have the site id and post id in the item record for the post. Answer — it did. 

The next question is this: After I update the post will it retain the site and post id in the item record. Let's find out! The answer is yes. Whew. That says the code I had suspected of being wrong was probably right all along. It's just that I was testing with feeds that didn't have the elements that make this work. 

So now the question is how to get along?

• Is there another way to get the elements into the feed? (Probably, going to check with Scott.)
• Can I get the site and post id's from the URL of the post? (Pretty sure I can do that, but it'll further complicate the software.)
• Whatever gave daveverse the magic ability to have these elements in its feed could be applied to one of my other test sites?

Update: A comment from Jeremy Herve says this is a bug and will be fixed. Well I did not foresee that possibility, but that's the easiest option for me. Happy.

I've assumed that all WordPress sites hosted on wordpress.com or running JetPack would have data about the site id, and for each item, the post id. It turns out it's not that simple?

A couple of examples:

• daveverse.org/feed/ — has these elements
• scripting5.wordpress.com/feed/ — doesn't have them

I have of course asked ChatGPT, and got a lot of wrong answers.

It's important because this data is used to connect blog posts to the editor, for posts you can edit. It's really important that editing is accomplished by at most a single click, when you're viewing it in a reader app.

I should be able to click on an edit icon from the viewer to open it in the editor, assuming it's my post.

It also figures heavily in the discourse feature.

I've created a place on GitHub for comments.

This week's New Yorker Politics podcast is an interview with Jeopardy champion and host Ken Jennings. Great stuff if you, like me, are a longtime Jeopardy fan. We used to watch it in our Flushing kitchen in the 1960s when Art Fleming was host. #

ChatGPT aggregates people the same way polls aggregate voters. Ignore individuality, unable to hear new ideas, allowing journalists to write the same horse race stories every year. It would be better if they found a way to report originality, they can set an example for AIs. #

There are a bunch of useful demo apps in the reallysimple package, which also is itself fairly useful. I used all these tools in implementing FeedLand and WordLand, so I'm pretty sure they'd be useful to other users and developers. The feeder app, one of the demos, is used to generate the Links page on scripting.com, and provides utilities to the scripting language in Drummer. #

Happy belated Thanksgiving. I was so busy yesterday, didn't have the time to do my usual Thanksgiving gratitude post. And I do have a few things to be thankful for this year.

First I want to thank all the non-technical peoople who read this blog every day. This has been one of the very nicest things about writing this blog, going back to 1994, there have been quite a few people who skim the technical posts, of which there have been many these days, as I am preparing to try to shake up the world of discourse on the net, hoping to get it back on the track it was on before the silos came along and monetized us. Ultimately, if it happens, we will all benefit, techies and non-techies alike.

I thank you all for your patience and indulgence.

Most of the non-tech readers I hear from are women, btw. My mother for example was a regular reader. For whatever reason, pleasing women is about 1,000,000 times more important to me than pleasing men. Possibly because I had a gutsy mother who programmed me that way. Almost nothing makes me happier.

Another thing that makes me unreasonably happy is to be back in touch with most of the developers who worked with me at UserLand on Frontier. Starting wtih Jake Savin, and then André Radke, Brent Simmons and Wes Felter. And esp with Brent, who went on to write NetNewsWire, the hugely popular feed reader for Mac OS. This means so much to me. I spent years bouncing ideas off Brent and listening to what he said very carefully. I also strived to pass on through each of them my values of software, computer networks, and our responsibilities to users. Each of them are different, have different strengths, but they are all lovely human beings. Reconnecting this year wasn't in any way a goal of mine, it just happened that way.

Another thing that makes me absolutely optimistic about the future is to discover the compatibility between the vision of the web that I shared with many of the early web developers, again going back to 1994 and the following years, and today's developers of WordPress. We occupy different spaces in tech, I'm a web developer who works in JavaScript in the browser and Node.js, and they work in PHP and their own platform, but as I opined yesterday, you can use the web to connect all flavors of things, by design. I used the criticism that Mastodon and WordPress are like apples and oranges, an American idiom that usually connotes incompatibility, but on the web, you can connect apples and oranges. Differences are negotiable, you have to remember that — and taking advantage of the web that way is what it was created for. Like the internet it was built on, the web makes it possible for very different things to work together, and in doing so makes it possible for people to work together too.

I know I've thanked him before, but it's worth doing again — thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for his very timely invention of the web, which set users and developers everywhere free, only to have the siloers re-emerge fourteen years after its advent to give power back to the bankers, with the predictable, disastrous results. Our political system suffered a massive virtual oil spill thanks to Twitter, which we have yet to begin to clean up. As a result health care is in a very precarious state. It has been used as an instrument of war. Who could have imagined that a cutely-named system like Twitter could do all that damage, but it did.

TBL gave us a taste of freedom. Many of the WordPress community leaders are too young to have had that taste, but they still believe in it. And that's probably the most important thing to be thankful for. And maybe it's not the only tech community that has that inspiration at its core. And maybe that feeling extends beyond tech?

We build bubbles to contain us, to make the communities we're part of smaller and thus more manageable. But if we do it right, we can be part of the Macintosh world and the WordPress world, and build the proper interfaces to our work so we're also part of the web. That's where the magic comes from. The unforseen connections that "just work" the first time. That's where I've chosen to work as I approach the end of my career — on the intersections that route around the silos and return the power of the web to the people.

BTW, maybe this idea can connect to the story of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Heather Cox Richardson, three of my current-day examples for how we can use communication to get back on track to a world with purpose and a heart.

This is a really good blog post, in response to a post I wrote here that said among other things that a WordPress instance is easier to set up on your own server than Mastodon.

At the start of the piece he said it was like comparing apples and oranges, but by the end, he was starting to see that they kind of do the same thing. I am prepared to explain that.

First what they have in common is that they deal with posts, and they have more or less the same features. Mastodon for historic reasons, places limits on posts. I'm sure they could relax those limits, so I don't see this as an important difference.

And then there's all the traffic that comes into a Mastodon instance that doesn't come into a WordPress instance, posts from people you follow, some in response to posts you made. But there is a feed reader built into WordPress. And WordPress supports a very nice API so if you want to build on a different kind of feed management system (as I do) — no problem, as long as it works on the web, they can connect. Again if we build on the web there are kinds of possibilities that don't exist if you build a monolithic all-in-one system like Mastodon.

And then you might say that feed readers are slow because they poll, and people want to see messages instantly. And this is where I say there's a very well-debugged feature in WordPress that I helped them build in 2009 that make feed updates instantaneous. Yeah Google tried to FUD it, as they did so much fuckery with feeds, but it it didn't actually accomplish anything. rssCloud is there, and it works, and it's absolutely instantaneous. Every WordPress site supports it as does FeedLand.

So I figure if we connect the dots, just building on open stuff (ie the web), with WordPress and FeedLand, hooked up to each other, it would more or less do what Mastodon does. It might still be apples and oranges, but on the web, you probably can hook an apple up to an orange and it would probably work the first time. 😉

Now there will be things one can do that the other can't, and it probably will go both ways, because this way of doing social networks works somewhat differently, but the cool thing is you can see ActivityPub starting to evolve toward RSS, so I think for the first time in a long time, a very long time, we will see some real motion in Social Media Land. There hasn't been any real competition in this space in a long time, and thus it has stagnated. But with a little competition, the minds should wake up and get to work meeting the challenge.

One of my mottos: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." It's still true today as it always has been. We are a species that is motivated to compete. It's deeply ingrained into who we are.

PS: I love posts that pick up from where I started and move the ball in an interesting direction. This was one of the best things about the blogosphere of the past. It's nice to see that tradition being revived. Thanks to Steven Rosenberg. 🙂

PPS: Someone should edit the Wikipedia page about rssCloud. First they should format the name correctly. Second they say it was superceded by something the W3C did. I asked ChatGPT a straight question, did WebSub supercede rssCloud, and here's the answer. Unequivocally false. Not only that the two protocols are very fundamentally different.

PPPS: This is one of the reasons I say Wikipedia has a much bigger trust issue than ChatGPT. It frequently transmits fake news or hallucinations like this, due to how it's edited. I expect to see lies on a Wikipedia page, and despite what you read about AIs, they're in my experience much more reliable. It's easy for a Wikipedia page to be hijacked by interested parties, as it was, no doubt, this time. For some reason the AIs seem to factor out the noise, somehow. Or maybe it's just that people haven't figured out how to spam it yet.

I love shows like Succession and Severance, but I hate their official podcasts because they’re mostly outlets for the actors to praise each other. I don’t know who the actors are! I know the characters they play. I want a podcast where Carol and Zosia speak about the crazy shit they did in the last episode. I don’t mind if the showrunner plays herself. She really is God, in this context. She could explain why she had this character do this crazy shit or done other crazy shit. i don’t know or care about the actors. If they’re any good they disappear. Whodat? #

I saw a post from my friend Matt Mullenweg where he said they're working on WordPress for the next generation. I like that idea.

I'm doing the same, myself — only I'm one generation ahead of Matt. So the improvements I'm working on will likely end up benefiting people his age and younger (he's 41) more than people of mine (I'm a boomer).

I want to leave them the web we had in the 90s and 00s, but doing a lot of the new things we've learned how to do since, without the silos.

Everything built on the web, everything replaceable, choice for users. And all the writing features of the web show through.

When this done, the writer's web will be as open as podcasting, something I had a hand in developing. Any time you want to switch platforms, you can, and lose absolutely nothing.

It's not decentralized, it's uncentralized. Important distinction.

The storage system for writing, by default, is WordPress, thanks to their fantastic wpcom API, which very few people know about apparently. They opened this door in 2017, I didn't discover it until 2023. My chin dropped. All of a sudden storage for writers was openly available through a simple API.

WordPress is of the web. You're not locked into hosting with any specific company, and you can run your own, and it's a lot easier to install and uses less resources than Mastodon, which right now is the only social networking software you can install on your own server. We can do a lot better.

So this would be my "State of the Word" from the point of view of the web. Let me know what you think!

Taking care of WordPress for the next generation.

This appeared in a tweet this morning.

RSS 2.0, the antidote to enshitification. #

The web is open the same way water is wet. #

One of my recent posts is getting a lot of traffic. Basic idea is that the new AI-enhanced Alexa spooked me so much I went back to the old one. It's in every room of the house. The more it acts like a human the more offended I am. #

I'm starting to work on my new discourse system. I've been waiting to do this for a while, until all the pieces I needed were there, and they have been for a couple of months. I'll tell you about it as it starts to come into view.

The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don't have to "go" to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.

A comment is not in any way guaranteed space on the other person's blog. Thus the spam incentive that all other comment systems have is not here. I think that's a huge part of the problem, and it's neatly solved.

And the people I imagine who will be appearing in my space are the kind of people that used to get quoted on my mail pages, in the ancient pre-silo web. Doc Searls is #1 on this list, he was a perfect contributor to the mail pages. He understood the idea before he even heard it. That was how quickly he grok'd this stuff. Same way my mother understood blogging, no one had to explain it to her, she already knew. I think NakedJen will be a fantastic contributor in this mode, and we won't need Facebook to tie us together.

See, I already know the people I want to come to the party and the place I want to party. I just have to get the electricity working, the usual things you need, plumbing, heat, etc.

In the future if you have a comment on this now relatively long post, you'll click on an icon, write your comment, publish it, with almost no overhead. You won't have to "go" anywhere to do that. It'll be right there where you're reading, just like a twitter-like system. But unlike Twitter commenting, our not-so-tiny full-featured text box will let you write, for crying out loud, instead of dealing with a programmer's idea of how you should write. I want all my writing features on my blog, and dammit, when I write a comment too. Why should the comment editor be any different from the regular editor, and why can't all my comments, everywhere, be readable on my blog. See how we're making a web here? It's not hard, you just have to keep factoring. Never stop.

How many different ways do I have to write? One. Just one. But I should have choice, because not everyone loves the same kind of editor. The web is about choice, pretty much everywhere. It doesn't matter what software people use because it's all done with open formats and protocols, every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. In other words we'll be using the web.

Hello this is just a test. I’m creating a new post which will then be cross-posted to Daveverse site. Both Scripting News and daveverse should show up in the blogroll on scripting.com. #

Yesterday I put up a form asking for the addresses of people who have WordPress sites that have the ActivityPub feature turned on. Only got four responses so far. But it’s good to see what people are doing. For example Evan Prodroumou is using it, and his Mastodon posts are blog posts. I smiled when I saw this. Nicely done. Loop closed. #

Pocket Casts has come up with a new feature called Playlists. I was able to figure out how to use it in a few minutes using their web app. Questions. Is there an open format behind this feature? Can I create a playlist outside of Pocket Casts? Can I use a PC playlist in another app? Pocket Casts comes from Automattic so I would expect the answers to be yes, given how committed they are to the web, and how podcasting is of the web. The most logical open format to use here would be imho RSS 2.0. #

The feed validator operated by the W3C is kind of frozen in time, and imho has a very odd perspective on things. So I tried using ChatGPT as a feed validator, and it was totally up to the job. #

I've been using the term of the web, starting in a piece I wrote last Monday. Now it's time to explain more about what it means because I used the term in the context of Pocket Casts in an earlier post.

For a piece of software, being of the web means that it is built to share data with other apps, ones that receive data as input, as a feed reader consumes feeds, or generate output for other apps, e.g. software used to publish feeds. Or competitive apps, that do roughly the same thing another app does, and want to be able to receive the user's data, or better, share the users' data so they can use both apps (we shouldn't settle for less than this, imho).

Of the web means you're signed on to letting users move data wherever it makes sense to them to.

These days people use the term "web" to mean basically something you can view in a web browser. But that does not mean it is of the web. If Bluesky for example were of the web, it would mean you could add a feature to it without rewriting the whole thing.

This fantastic web is what the silos destroyed, starting with Twitter in 2006. They made the software simpler to use because all the feed reader developers were trying to wall off this part of the web for themselves. Going to WordCamp was invigorating for me, because the people I met there were very much of the web as far as I could tell. And they were young enough to not have been part of the initial web, they've never had the experience of plug and play between apps. I want desperately to develop a small web playground for us to explore all the possibilities.

There's a reason the web is called the web. Visualize what it's capable of doing as a web. It's not just a word, it's concept, a very important one.

PS: I looked around the web for illustrations of a spider's web but they're all too orderly too symetric. The point of a web in real life, the kind that spiders make, is they are chaotic and ad hoc. Like the web we make on the internet.

I like it when people send me thoughtful responsive notes about things I've written. I think it's possible to set up a social network so that most of what you get follows that pattern. It has to do with incentives. #

I'm looking for WordPress sites that are set up to cross-post to ActivityPub. My daveverse site is set up that way which means that you can follow it in Mastodon, for example, or any other ActivityPub-enabled site. The great thing about this is if you write in WordPress there is no character limit, and you can use links, styling, titles. So much more writing power. I want to see how other people use it. #

Say someone is working on an open source project, no matter what role they play, they don't own the project. They can't sell it, or profit from ownership. That goes for whatever role a person is playing, if they're the project leader, or just helping out, or even not helping out. Now that's not to say the founder or show runner couldn't start a business based on the open source software, but so could you. We all own all open source projects and open formats and protocols equally, and that means we don't own it. #

Next FeedLand release has the option of keeping items around for a certain number of days. Running on two servers for burn-in. I don't recommend turning this on now unless you're helping test. #

ChatGPT makes a pretty fantastic feed validator. #

This week I had lunch with a developer who had been at WordCamp last month. He apologized for not being at my session, but I waved it off. I didn't go to many sessions myself, too many great discussions in the hallway, out on the patio or in the coffee room.

I remembered this was the rationale for how and why we did BloggerCon in the mid-2000s, to bring the hallway conversations into the meeting rooms.

We did this by using a university, its classrooms, and we put someone in front of the room called a discussion leader.

A good DL should know the topic they're leading and be able to start it off with a provocative intro, 5 or so minutes, and then a microphone, held by a student, is moves to a person with their hand up, and they can speak. Not a question. They have something to say. They are the expert of the moment.

The leader can cut them off and move the mike to the next person. (Works even better if there are two roving mikes.) When this works, it really holds everyone's attention.

This idea came from literally hundreds of hours in boring sessions with a panel of experts and people lined up waiting to speak, in the form of a question of course, and getting nervous and composing a speech in their head, and when its their turn they ramble on and on, so of course the good stuff happens in the hallway.

It is harder to do this kind of conference where the "content" takes care of itself. But the BloggerCon type, when it works is far more dynamic.

BTW, the best discussion leaders are teachers and reporters.

The new FeedLand release is ready. It's installed on feedland.org, not on feedland.com yet. #

I've got a new version of FeedLand, going to release it in a few minutes. It has all the new stuff I've done to make recognizing updated posts more reliable. Thanks to Brent Simmons for his help from his experience with NetNewsWire. I love it when we work together to make our software work better together. That's the way we help to support the web. That's what the web is about. Making software connections that work, and last. #

Loving a series I just heard about, This Is Going To Hurt.

I discovered it the usual tedious way, scrolling through newly available shows on one of the streaming services with my iPad handy and when I see one that looks interesting, I look it up on Metacritic. If the rating is below 60, I don't look any further, but this show was rated 91, which is a very high rating. It's a British medical drama, the characters and story are fantastic, you can see that right from the beginning. They do show a lot of surgery details, I wish they didn't, I just can't watch that stuff. But I hold the iPad up to block the screen when it gets hard to watch, and I judge from the dialog when the gore is over.

Another thing I can't stomach are pictures of dog food, esp people eating dog food. If you have a similar phobia, episode 4 of Pluribus, which is as usual great, is hard to watch, but the segment where a character eats dog food is self contained.

There also a commercial for dog food that opens with a chunk of the most disgusting dog food, from a company that makes dog food that looks like human food. They're challenging you with a question, would you eat this shit? Well no! — and I don't want to look at it either dammit. It's why I don't like the term dogfooding, ie people using their own products. As much as I love dogs, the people who use my software are not dogs, and my software is not dog food.

Also I want to add that I have a vague memory of actually eating dog food when I was a small child with a bunch of equally young friends because we were curious about what it was like. My memory is that it isn't bad. But the memory for me, now as an adult, is nauseating. I like eating human food, even though I'm sure in other contexts it's equally disgusting.

But do watch This Is Going To Hurt. Sorry it's only seven episodes, I would have loved it to continue for another few seasons. I have one more episode left to watch, though it totally could have ended after six episodes.

I'm continuing to work on the way FeedLand detects changes in feed items. This morning I did a careful study of the function that gets a guid for an item in conjunction with ChatGPT. It would be so much easier if RSS 2.0 required an item-level element, but it doesn't. That was the philosophy, all item-level values are optional. My notes are here. #

Good morning sports fans! #

I'm working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, and if any have changed, we broadcast the message that the item has changed. I'm doing a complete review of this, based on actual data, and found there were a fair number of places we were calling a change, when nothing that mattered had changed. Now I'm debating whether or not a pubDate change should be seen as an item change. My initial thought when we were working on RSS, was that the pubDate should never change. In the real world of publishing I don't think the publication date changes. Right? Of course some feeds do change the pubDate because that's the art of feeds (sorry for the sarcasm). But I don't think FeedLand should call that a change. Wondering what other feed developers do? So I asked ChatGPT. This is incredibly valuable research. One thing I learned is that people use atom:updated. It's true RSS 2.0 has no item that says when an item updated. Anyway net-net, the consensus is that a change in pubDate is not a change. I don't think I'm going to make it immutable though. #

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a psuedo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human, and this one should be first. #

One of the reasons Mastodon doesn't get credit for being "on the web" is that there's been no buzz about the ActivityPub support in WordPress. Ghost has been beating the drum about their ActivityPub support for (many) months. I don't know if they're actually there yet, I've never knowingly seen something from Ghost on Mastodon. I sent an email to Matt this morning suggesting that we promote the incredible connection between WordPress and Mastodon via ActivityPub. In the early days of the blogosphere we had the same problem, there was no good way to see who was writing, so we started a site called weblogs.com, which ping'd each site that we knew about to see if it had changed, if so it went to the top of a list that was published at weblogs.com. So if you wanted to find out what's new you'd just go there. It got more complicated over time, as the blogosphere grew at a very fast clip. We could do that for WordPress sites on ActivityPub by pointing to their site from a weblogs.com-like site. There's no shame in telling the world about the cool new technology you've made, esp when it will make life so much more interesting! But it can't do that if they don't know it's there. Let's do some promotion. 🙂 #

IOne of the nice things about the new AI Amazon Alexa is you can say “Alexa, play that funky music white boy” and it will do it.f Bluesky and Mastodon were "on the web" they would already interop because friends that's what the freaking web does. They behave like closed off silos, and until that changes, they can't claim to be on the web. Don't sell out the web so cheap. It really means something to be on the web. #

The news gets everything wrong about the nouns of our political system. They talk about Repubs and Dems, but the real power is with the people. Something that Heather Cox Richardson said so eloquently in this week's podcast with Nicolle Wallace. I know I recommended it yesterday, but please do listen to this and don't forget it. When you're watching MSNOW you're getting the wrong nouns. I think this problem could be solved by moving every show on MSNOW to a different American city. The people on the panels should come to work in Detroit, St Louis, Phonenix, Denver, Charleston, Cleveland, Seattle, places like that. Get out of NY and DC. Really connect yourself to the whole country. That would rock a lot of boats. #

I love the domain for MSNOW. Just before it came out, Jeff Jarvis wondered on all the social networks why it wasn't msnow.com. Well, because they found an even better domain. #

Highly recommend this week's conversation between Nicolle Wallace and Heather Cox Richardson. The contrast of their points of view is dramatic, the election wasn't a win for the Dems, it was a victory for the people. #

A feed that Aaron Swartz put up early in RSS times was a feed of Paul Graham essays. The feed items have no guid or pubDate. The way FeedLand is coded right now for detecting changes, it sees all these items as updating every time we read the feed. Okay we have to make it a little bit smarter. Done. #

I'm preparing FeedLand to reliably do things we haven't had it do yet, at least not at scale. It has one important feature most other feed management systems don't have, dynamic OPML lists that I keep touting here. I have a product that can both generate them and use them on behalf of users. But it's a lot more fun if there are other products that can do the same. It means we can build networks of feed sharing apps, no kidding — it's going to do new things for us the same way RSS did new things for us 22 years ago. Now it can be fun when there are more FeedLand instances out there. It'd be more fun if they were products like Overcast or Pocket Casts. Sometimes companies like Apple or Microsoft show up in these little projects, it has happened (Apple supported XML-RPC, for example. Microsoft supported Frontier in MSIE on the Mac.). #

I'm looking into the problems in feedlanddatabase I mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about, screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI. #

I'm chasing down what appears to be a bug in feedlanddatabase. Items that haven't updated are being reported as having updated. Fairly sure there is a problem here. Next up, will add debugging code so I can see if my theory is correct. #

The Lever podcast does have an RSS feed. A good way to find the feed when the usual hacks don't work is to post it here, where it's a matter of pride for the braintrust to dig it up. Thanks as always. 😄 #

Over the weekend I flipped the switch on a new app that makes my blog available on WordPress. It seems to work really well. The WordPress site is Daveverse. And because it's on WordPress it is also available on ActivityPub, at @scripting@daveverse.org, which means you can read it on Mastodon. It doesn't feel weird at all to be reading a blog post on a social network. I posted on Bluesky that we would love to have the same connection with their social network. It might happen sooner than you think. There are people developing writing tools for ATProto, but they're kind of stuck since Bluesky has all those limits that exclude the writer's web. It's so complicated, but out the other end, I hope will come a consensus that the social web should use more of the text features of the web. Further, the distributed nature of the web itself can form the backbone of distribution for the social web, that is if you think RSS is part of the web. When it's all said and done, we will realize that TBL got it right when he designed text with titles, subheads, styling, links, editing, no character limits, etc. He probably didn't even have to think about it much, considering he was basically replicating the standard document features from word processing apps of the 70s and 80s, without the printing. That's how evolution works, and the last 19 years of distortion by Twitter and those that followed them, will be seen as a weird transcription error (I hope). #

An old quote falsely attributed to Gandhi. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” #

Follow this on Mastodon at @scripting@daveverse.org. #

Here's a screen shot of what the Daveverse home page looks like. It's got all the stuff from scripting.com. It's not a perfect rendering of my Old School blog, I have more features, but it's pretty good. I'll be testing this out and thinking about it now, as we go forward. But here's the milestone: I have a WordPress place to hook into now that has pretty much everything I write outside the tiny little text boxes. What I write in WordLand or Drummer, the two places I write for real. The rest of it is throw away nonsense, a waste of time. No one reads anything, everyone fighting for attention. #

I was going to tell you how much I like the Lever podcast, and wanted to recommend it, but they make it impossible to find the RSS url for the feed. The usual hacks don't seem to work. Since I'm subscribed to it on Pocket Casts, I thought I might be able to find the URL on their web interface, and it's possible I might have found it that way. Nope. It just points to the web page for the podcast, which did not have the RSS feed. I know they must have one. I was looking for a way to download my OPML file, would be nice if you could do it from the desktop. #

We ought to be thinking about a filtering system for feed readers based on instructions written by users, and shared on the web, to be parsed by our AI. Design your personal algorithm with an AI engine. Share the good ones with your friends, and have it work on the web, in any feed reader. There are ways to do that. If you're working on such a project, let's hook it up to FeedLand. It does a lot of feed reading, and has a nice API for downstream feed readers. It's a good place for an AI-based filter. #

I wrote this as a comment on Doc's blog.

Doc, I’m working on a discourse system that works better than comments, imho. One thing it does is lets me use the full fidelity of the web instead of forcing me to type in yet another Inadequate Text Box (ITB) with none of the features of my blog editor.

I’m working on a Unified Text Theory (UTT) for the web. Instead of scattering Stupid Little Text Boxes (SLTBs) all over creation, let’s come up with a nice text router, that means our writing can be in one place, but through the magic of pointers, can appear to be in many places. (Actually there's nothing magical about it, pointers are very basic computer technology, when I learned to program on a PDP-11 in 1977 it very much had pointers.)

It’s mostly a matter of GOST (an acronym for Getting Our Shit Together).

All this is a preamble to say that my comment on your post can be read here.

https://daveverse.org/2025/11/16/3096/

It’s also on scripting.com.

See how that works. You can’t really tell where it is, but if I make a change to it, somehow the change appears everywhere.

And I’m using my favorite editor to write. Not the dinky one provided by the web browser.

And of course this should be on my blog too. Damn. I’m still doing it.

Spoilers follow. Like Doc, I have trouble getting into TV series, but not Pluribus, probably because it came from the showrunner of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two series that I have watched from beginning to end at least three times.

The star of Pluribus, Rhea Seahorn, was my favorite in Better Call Saul, as Kim Wexler. So I expected a continuation of those shows, and in some sense Pluribus is much like them, but the main character Carol, is nothing like Kim — who is by far the coolest character in any of the shows, and that's saying a lot.

That's okay because the sweetest character yet in a Vince Gilligan comedy (all these shows are comedies btw, even though the plots are super heavy), is Carol's sidekick, Zosia, played by Karolina Wydra. She's basically the voice of the Others, but the illusion is so alluring, one character in the show has already (understandably) fallen in love with her. And we know that Carol has formed an attachment too, despite her best efforts to hate her. 😉

BTW, this post is the first one that's cross-posted to the daveverse site. There still are some things to fix, but this is a nice piece of software. Basically implements what I've been calling Inbound RSS, not for a social web app, rather for WordPress (which in my mind is becoming more of a social web system every day).

This is a test post for the new docs I'm writing about source:markdown. 

It includes instructions showing how to test it by creating a WordLand post. 

I'm making use of markdown in this test, of course, because that's what this is about.

Of course I'm watching Pluribus. I could never not watch a Vince Gilligan show starring Rhea Seehorn. You can see little touches of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul in the way it's put together, but it's really not the same thing. The main character played by Seehorn is dangerously emotional and not making many friends in the new order. It's science fiction, at least so far, and without spoiling anything, I'm not entirely sure I wouldn't go for the new program. I'm always saying the one thing we need to do better and more of is Working Together, and so far that seems to be the theme of the new order. It'll be interesting to see if this theory holds up through the first season. Also I wasn't aware that they screened the second episode too, so that was a nice little surprise, a whole other episode I didn't know was there. Not sure that scifi is really Gilligan's thing. It's getting great ratings but so far I don't think it's as great as his previous two hits. But still, a must-see imho.

I don’t like it when reviewers get seven episodes of a new series and the regular folk, like me, are stuck with the first episode only. I won’t read their reviews because they’re writing about something that I don’t know anything about and they try to avoid the spoilers and all I can think about is why can’t I see all of the episodes at once. 

That’s the effect of Pluribus, which is a highly anticipated show by Vince Gilligan the show runner of better call Saul and breaking bad. I know that if I go to Pirates Bay, I can probably get all of the seven episodes but I think what I’ll do instead it’s just wait for the series to end and then binge watch the whole thing in one shot or it as many shots as I feel, I want to any point in time 

These shows that portion out the episodes in very small bits or throwbacks to the way TV used to work and it’s too controlling. I like the ability to program my entertainment rather than have a program for me. That’s all I can think about when I read their reviews and I think about what comes next. Well, I would like to know and I don’t wanna wait until next Friday. 

Another show that got this treatment is Ken Burns upcoming story of the American Revolution. He did a huge press tour and they had all seen the entire series and that’s what they were talking about. It’s so obscene, the first moment I heard that the first reviewer doing the interview had watched the whole damn series I turned it off and I realized I don’t like any of these people. I don’t like the reviewers. I don’t like the people to do the shows. I don’t like the fact that they think there’s a line and they belong on one side and I belong on the other side

Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote.

Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal info. That's how awful this thing is. 

It reeks of desperation.

I drove down to NYC to see a fireside chat with Matt Mullenweg and John Borthwick of Betaworks. I know both these guys, did a project with Borthwick that became Bit.ly, had higher hopes for it, but it didn't happen . Had a chance to get my picture taken with Matt and it was good to get a short chat in there. And I've known Matt since he was a 17-year-old boy wonder of Silicon Valley. He and I mostly see eye to eye on what the web is. And now that they're starting we'll find out for sure what their idea of the web in 2025 is. 

From the intro it sounds like the focus will be on AI.

Ben Werdmuller is sitting next to me. 

The audio is terrible. We can make out what Matt is saying, but Borthwick is hard to figure out what he's saying.

Acoustics of this room not great, and there are a lot of people who are having a cocktail party because the room is so big. There might be some useful tech, like having it live streamed so people can listen on headphones. 

ChatGPT is simulated intelligence. It's designed to fooling you into thinking it's thinking but it's not. When you really try to solve problems with your intelligence that's when you learn it's not even close to thinking.

Matt's on a 41 day blogging streak. I don't even know how long its been since I didn't post anything on my blog. Honestly I'm not sure my nightly email app would handle no posts on my blog. That probably means I haven't missed a day since May 2017.

​AI changed the basic capabilities of computers. Some technologies will do fine in the new world, like SQL databases. But the stuff we do — that's going to change radically. Will anything be left? No one knows, imho. Best thing we can do is keep going on the path we were on, and look for ways to involve AI tech in a way that will bring the power of AI to writers.

To people who do WordPress plug-ins — have a look at the feedlandSocket repo. It sends notifications of news items to any subscriber, via websockets. 

News items are simple JSON, and contain information in the feed item, and system info like id and when it was received. 

This makes it easy to stream news to a plug-in running in a WordPress site, that can then do anything with the news they like. It's incredibly simple to use, and we provide all the JavaScript code you need to embed in a browser-based app. 

Here's a place where you can ask questions.

I went grocery shopping and it looks like the prices have gone up a lot just in the last week. A cart of groceries that is usually about $70 is now $100. I also voted, the price has stayed the same, $0, and you get a nice sticker, and can chat with the lady poll keepers.

I just added a feature that gives you a constant readout of what's in the current "draft" record.

We have a way to view it in WordLand, but this is different, it's always visible.

Turns out this is a great aid in seeing how the software functions as you do things. Wish I had had this when I was initially debugging the WordLand editor.

I need a way to set the title. Right now there is no UI for that.

The plan here is to make a bare-bones editor, just to show how to hook up any editor to wpIdentity.

I never got the heartbreak part of baseball, probably because my team began as a joke, which I think is a healthy way to feel about a baseball team. That was in 1962, when players made a few thousand dollars a year to play a game we’d all be happy to play for free. 

When the Mets made the World Series in 2015 I was thrilled. I knew we wouldn’t win from the first pitch of game 1 of the World Series with the Kansas City Royals. An inside-the-park home run, the rarest thing in sport. What that said was this run is over. Enjoy the mystery. Yours truly, God.

The Royals. What a stupid name for a baseball team. Named that way so that no one who is beaten by them fails to see the humor in the hand of god who deigned this f’d up farce of a fiasco.

This last week I've been working on a bare-bones demo app for developers that shows them how to adapt any editor to work alongside WordLand. My hope this is the last time this level of glue is built. It's boring stuff, what you build on top is what's exciting, and what's even more interesting is the interop we will build! The fact that all our editors will work on the exact same data for the users. This is something we've never been able to do on the web, amazingly.

I'm 99% sure that wpIdentity can run on the VIP network, so it can scale. We can be in business with this quickly.

I'm writing this post in that bare-bones editor. Let's see if it works. 🙃

I wanted to show Jake Savin, an old school UserLand dev, how I edit my JavaScript code projects in "Frontier". This is the source.opml file for the feedlanddatabase package, viewed in my outliner, Drummer. #