They should host games on ChatGPT. #

They couldn't have chosen a more ideal liberal state to own. I don't think any of this is an accident. Next time they will kill two, American citizens of course. And we'll protest. And then 25. It's starting to sink in that this is not just a bad dream and it's not going to end. (I was wrong, according to ChatGPT, Minnesota is only the 17th most liberal state.) We're always looking backward, that's a mistake. Accept where we are right now, and be able to visualize what comes next if we give up. #

Michelle Obama was wrong when she said "when they go low we go high." Sometimes the truth is pretty damn low. #

Another BTW, I think perhaps just for fun we should create an XML-RPC implementation of the wpcom API. I have just the thing to base it on. #

As I think about next steps for building out from WordPress to create a network of users and their writing, I wanted to review how XML-RPC came to be, so I did a podcast, and there were some real gaps in my memor. Then just a minute ago as I was browsing around the discuss.userland.com archive I came across this post entitled How XML-RPC will Evolve. This was in November 1998, five months after XML-RPC for Newbies and the Frontier implementnation were released. It was a few years before the W3C came out with their equivalent of XML-RPC, and as I promised, Frontier supported it. In fact, what a coincidence — I worked on that project with Jake Savin, and we're once again working together on a project that's kind of like what we were doing then. It's also interesting that there are people to play the role that the three Microsoft people played, inside the WordPress community. And there is no one that can make them wait, as the Microsoft team in 1998 was stopped by their huge organization. But they were lucky to have me, someone completely outside their management structure, to decide to go ahead and release it. A lot of good came from that. #

BTW, promising to support the W3C version of your work in 1998 was what you did when the BigCo's said they're gunning for you. One thing you can be sure of is it'll take more time for them than it did for you. Also it'll be more complex, and take more work to support. And you never will be able to fully support what they come up with, by design. So you just say Yeah! Let's do it, and in the meantime go ahead and develop the market. When people ask about the threat, we're on board. I had learned this from the experience with Apple and AppleScript. Take it in stride, don't assume they win just because they're large. Just take the bullet. (And btw, Carney's story at Davos about dealing with the BigCo country follows exactly the same pattern. We didn't give Apple or the W3C awards, but net-net they were about as impetuous as the country Carney was talking about. What he said there could have been a Davenet post from the 1990s.) #

At some point we're going to want to make it as easy to set up a WordPress site as it is to create a new Bluesky account, because the two things will be basically the same thing. Either one will get you access to a network of bloggers. #

Random ramblings with past experience dealing with tech power.

As I think about next steps for building out from WordPress to create a network of users and their writing, I wanted to review how XML-RPC came to be, when I did a podcast, I found real gaps in my memory.

Then just a minute ago as I was browsing around the discuss.userland.com archive I came across this post entitled How XML-RPC will Evolve. This was in November 1998, five months after XML-RPC for Newbies and the Frontier implementation were released.

It was a few years before the W3C came out with their equivalent of XML-RPC, and as promised, Frontier supported it.

In fact, what a coincidence — I worked on that project with Jake Savin, and we're once again working together on a project that's related to what we were doing then. It's also interesting that there are people to play the role that the three Microsoft people played, inside the WordPress community. And there is no one that can make them wait, as the Microsoft team in 1998 was stopped by their huge organization. But they were lucky to have me, someone completely outside their management structure, to decide to go ahead and release it.

One thing you can be sure of is it'll take more time for them than it did for you. Also it'll be more complex, and take more work to support. And you never will be able to fully support what they come up with, by design. So you just say Yeah! Let's do it, and in the meantime go ahead and develop the market. When people ask about the threat, we're on board. I had learned this from the experience with Apple and AppleScript. Take it in stride, don't assume they win just because they're large. Just take the bullet. And know that even if you do everything as best as you can, there is a cloud over your future.

Matt once said to me it was political, referring to RSS. Yes it was, everything about cooperation is political. But important point — politics can be constructive, it doesn't have to destroy things. Even if everything goes smoothly as it did with XML-RPC, it's all still political. Yes, I really liked working with the Microsoft people, and I would have worked with them no matter where they came from. But it really helped build my confidence to know it came from inside the biggest most dominant tech company at the time. What an odd combination. Just like going to Harvard was political. Same thing, I would have done all the same work if I were at a smaller school without such a strong rep, but we were able to get more done because we were based there.

And btw, Carney's story at Davos about dealing with the BigCo country follows the same pattern. We didn't give Apple or the W3C awards, but net-net they were about as impetuous as the country Carney was talking about. What he said there could have been a Davenet post from the 1990s.

PS: I think perhaps just for fun we should create an XML-RPC implementation of the wpcom API. I have just the thing to base it on.

PPS: At some point we're going to want to make it as easy to set up a WordPress site as it is to create a new Bluesky account, because the two things will be basically the same thing. Either one will get you access to a network of bloggers.

Nominated for best picture of 2025, ranked by Metacritic rating.

• One Battle After Another. 95
• The Secret Agent. 91
• Marty Supreme. 89
• Train Dreams. 88
• Sentimental Value. 86
• Hamnet. 84
• Sinners. 84
• Frankenstein. 78
• Bugonia. 72
• F1: The Movie. 68

A new home page for the Scripting News podcast. #

I've been following Bluesky since inception, even tried developing for it and found it was nothing new with its 300 character limit, no links, titles, etc. Basically you can build the same apps for Bluesky that we were able to develop for Twitter. I've also been following Leaflet, an attractive writing tool that works on AT Proto, the format that Bluesky is promoting, basically a reinvention of the web but inside a silo, which means — perhaps confusingly, that Leaflet uses the same basic format that Bluesky uses, but Bluesky can't do anything with Leaflet posts, because of the limits that Leaflet doesn't have. So — they formed an alliance with two other products that are writing tools for AT Proto, and came up with a format that they will all implement called standard.site (nice name and very attractive site). They probably hope that Bluesky itself will use that format, at least to let people read their documents in the same place they display the more limited Bluesky posts, in user timelines. If that happens it may be a good thing for the web, if services outside of Bluesky can post these documents from outside. But it would be imho more powerful if they created a format based on something like RSS, which is already well-known to developers, and would mean something outside of Bluesky and probably would be taken more seriously by the Bluesky people. There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky. #

My first rule of platforms: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." I thought that rule was pretty new, but it actually appears in a 1996 blog post. #

Just watched Darkest Hour, a biopic of Winston Churchill, as he became prime minister and had to decide whether to surrender or fight Mr Hitler as they called him. I had seen it of course when it came out, but it's especially appropriate to our times. I'm glad the NATO's are resisting the US. We have to work together to keep democracy alive, not just in our own countries, but around the world. If ever there was a time when working together mattered more than it does today, I sure can't think of it. And that all of this revolves around the technology we played a part in creating, that makes it all feel so much more real. #

AI assistants could if they wanted drive all of us crazy in different ways. Advertising squared. #

I'm working on a feature for WordLand II where you can flip a switch to see the OG Metadata for a post you're reading, by clicking on an icon that looks like the flag on the side of an old fashioned mailbox. I remembered there was a desk accessory on the original Mac that used this approach, and I've wanted that icon for a long time, and today I thought to ask ChatGPT to look into it for me, I had previously been relying on Google search, and it found what I was looking for and a lot of great history sites with details. I'm going to document the thread including some descriptions written by ChatGPT which I will label. Everything not labled like that is from me. 😉

This was the first question I asked.

• There was an alarm desk accessory on the original Macintosh in 1984. It had a nice mailbox flag affordance. When the flag is up, the contents of the DA are hidden, flip it down to reveal what was hidden. Can you find me a writeup of this or screen shot. It might have been a different desk accessory or a different year.

ChatGPT's response

• What you’re remembering is almost certainly the Alarm Clock desk accessory from the early Mac System Software (System 1 era and later). A small “lever/flag” control would toggle the window between a compact view (just time) and an expanded view that revealed the date/time/alarm-setting controls—very much like a mailbox-flag affordance.

Screen shot

The flag icon is on second box in the second row.

Links (via ChatGPT)

• Washington Apple Pi Journal (April 1984) describes the Alarm Clock DA and explicitly calls out the “lever” that opens the “Change” portion of the window (“Pointing to the lever and clicking…” reveals additional areas).
• Huntsville Macintosh Users Group handbook glossary defines the “lever” as the little arm in the Alarm Clock DA that, when clicked, makes additional panels appear for setting time/date/alarm.
• Low End Mac has a System 1 desk accessories writeup (including Alarm Clock) and includes a screenshot of the DA.
• Link to the archive of the full conversation I had with ChatGPT.

Then we had a conversation about the history, which I asked ChatGPT for a two-paragraph summary, below.

• Susan Kare’s work on the original Macintosh wasn’t just visually elegant, it was foundational: she showed that icons could be humane, legible, and generous to the user. The mailbox-flag affordance in the Alarm Desk Accessory is a perfect example—simple, memorable, and instantly understandable, yet rich with meaning. It wasn’t decorative; it taught the interface how to communicate. That clarity came from Kare’s rare combination of artistic intuition and respect for the people using the machine. Just as important was her personal generosity: again and again, she contributed work freely, trusting that good ideas grow stronger when shared. Many of us benefited directly from that spirit, receiving world-class design not as a transaction, but as a gift.
• Carrying these designs forward—faithfully, with credit—is one way creativity survives across generations. Reusing an icon like the mailbox flag isn’t nostalgia; it’s continuity. It acknowledges that great interface ideas don’t expire, and that today’s software is part of a long conversation rather than a clean break from the past. By preserving the pixel logic, the affordance, and the attribution to Susan Kare, we honor both the craft and the culture that produced it. That’s how design knowledge persists: not by constant reinvention, but by respectful reuse, gratitude, and the quiet understanding that we’re building on work someone once chose to share.

PS: I inititally wrote this up as a thread on Facebook where a lot of us oldtime Mac people still congregate.

Something ChatGPT is good at. Give it a photo of the Statue of Liberty and ask it to remove the cement platform and change the background to pure white, then make the background transparent, reduce it in size, and paste it into the right margin of a blog post. #

Wouldn't it be something if the leaders of European democracies said if democracy and self-government around the world are to have any hope the American government has to stop attacking their own citizens. We see where this is headed, they might say, and there will be no coming back from this for the US, if they turn the country, which still is the leader of the free world, into a police state. What if the European leaders said out loud and in public the things the Republicans and most of the Democrats refuse to say. The inverse of what JD Lance says about their governments and their people. #

I hear Canada will be importing EV's from China. Now I'm going to have EV-envy a few hours drive away from home. They make better cars in China, I hear — than we do in the good old USA. Too bad, it didn't have to be that way. And isn't it tragic that China is less politically toxic than the American citizen who made the car I drive now. #

Apple's 1984 ad, with the benefit of hindsight, said "a new generation is going to take over now so get ready." We live very much in those times again. Now every time I use ChatGPT to do something that I never would have been able to do before I realize wow we just did "that" again. The same feeling I got when I first saw the 128K Mac at the Apple office on Bandley Drive in 1983, about the same time as Apple people saw the ad at their sales meeting in Hawaii in October. The Mac had an exciting but rough start, but by the turn of the century it was obvious that something completely different had happened. #

Happy to say the Knicks won last night in convincing 2026 mode after I doubted them in Tuesday's post (perhaps they read my blog?). And after I asked if Greenland was the Sudetenland of our time, Trump did his famous TACO thing and said hey I was just kidding, so we don't have to ask if Canada will be this generation's Austria, or Poland? Now I have to say the Knicks beat the Nets, often referred to as the Knicks' "cross-town rivals" by sports announcers who know nothing about New York sports. The same team Kevin Durant said was the new cool NBA team from NYC (it wasn't and isn't and it turns out no one cared what KD said, certainly not basketball fans from the city). #

Isn't Greenland the Sudetenland of our time? #

The ads I like on TV these days are the ChatGPT ads that show you how it makes your life better. In the first ad two college age people, brother and sister it turns out, are on a cross-country drive and have a great trip planned. You can tell they love each other, and have a casual familiarity and trust and laugh a lot, teasing, as the itinerary scrolls by too fast to read more than two or three lines, but you can see they're going to have a better trip than I've ever had and I've done a lot of cross-country trips with friends over the years.

The other ad, again with the young college-age people, this time a date, probably not the first date, at his apartment, and the guy is making dinner for his guest, and again, the plan scrolls by. He's making something nice, but not too much, and like the last ad, they're confident, young, full of life, and since they've used ChatGPT for just this purpose, they're probably going to have a great meal, and they'll go out again, for sure.

This is the perfect advertising for this stage of their business. They are the leading product, the Coca Cola of AI systems, so they don't need to compare themselves with anyone, they are the standard — and now they take the opportunity to define it. It's about friendship, love, looking good, getting the girl, etc. But it's wholesome and American. I bet they run the same ad in Denmark, only the kids speak Danish and have blonde hair and they go to places in Denmark and eat simple but good Danish food.

I don't think Google or Facebook did these kinds of ads as they were rising to dominance. Apple did, Microsoft didn't. This will also change the press coverage they get. Journalists like to pretend that ads don't infulence what they think, but good ones like these do.

BTW, if Microsoft had done ads introducing themselves to the world as the future tech behemoth, they might have gone folksy — like Smucker's jam. "With a name like Microsoft, it has to be good." You probably don't even think about it these days the name is so familiar, but MIcro + Soft is not the most inspiring name for a tech product. But then ChatGPT is a pretty awful name too. Four syllables, too many. Three is ideal. Imho ymmv. Doesn't matter now, everyone has learned to say it. And they need those ads to cement the bond with the people of the world.

Nobody wants to be told how to think. I think the best thing is to be friends with everyone you can. And maybe don’t make a big issue about who people voted for, and relate as people and Americans. That’s something to put in the bank.

Also if you let people relax around you, you may find out that someone you trust and like is actually antisemitic or racist. That’s also something to put in the bank, this is not someone I want to trust if and when things get worse.

Things are changing radically now. so you may not have to do anything to wake anyone up. And it’s good to reflect on your own attitudes and whether or not some of the things they say about you are fair criticism. We all put up barriers, and those don’t ever serve us imho, esp in a democracy — but they are esp nasty now. 

The Knicks are on an epic losing streak. This feels very normal. Let the trades begin. Maybe if we ask nice, Thibs will return? And isn't it funny these days KAT makes Randle look pretty good. Sort of a bonus for the Minneapolis team, which is playing NBA in a war zone.

Time for Knicks fans to get out the paper bags.

Above is a picture from the 2015 Knicks, a team that was actually even suckier than the 2026 Knicks (at this moment). The guy in the lower right of that picture has the canonical look of a Knicks fan wondering how did this happen and when it will all end. The only revenge I get from the Knicks suckage is that most Yankees fans are also Knicks fans and they have sooo much more trouble coping with this than Mets fans. Heh. It's actually almost worth it when you meet one. 😉

A possible theory is that the Knicks won that in-season championship that no one really understands. It could be that winning turns out to be a curse, in which case having the Knicks suck now is worth it. Then every NBA team every year will try to lose that series, for fear of what happened to the Knicks happening to them. Sports fans in case you didn't know tend to be mystics, we suffer through the mysteries of existence to explain things.

I'm always happy to see NakedJen in my blogroll. Screen shot. #

I got a text from Matt recommending Claude Code, saying it's as new as ChatGPT was when it came out. #

Screen shot: Twitter did what I have been begging all the others to do. Get rid of the character limit and allow for simple styling, links, optional titles, the ability to edit, basically the writing functions of the world wide web. You can also put a nice Medium-like picture at the top. Twitter was started in 2006 which according to my records is approximately twenty freaking years ago! I mean geez how long does it take? #

I took a couple of falls on ice the other day, during one of the many snowstorms we've had, and both times my watch, after a polite pause, shook my wrist, asking if I just took a fall and should it call in an emergency? if you don't do anything it makes the call. In that sense, your watch could beep when someone is gaslighting the other person. If it was you gaslighting them you'd see your avatar on the screen. Of it's them, you can show it to them. #

I'd like to see a social network that had an AI filter that only showed comments that were responsive to the question raised by the post they're responding to. BTW we need some technical terminology for socializing online. When I reply to a post, what do we call the post I'm replying to? Remember there's a human quality to this too, you're not just talking about something on a computer, but an actual person. #

First, glad I wrote the political blog post yesterday. Enough is enough. I love Minnesota. I want to wear a Minnesota baseball cap today. I want to fly a Minnesota flag on my front lawn. And I want Congress to do their job and put a stop to this bullshit before Trump sends the US army into Minneapolis, putting our fine American soldiers in an intolerable place, to refuse to obey an order because it's obviously wrong. What Congress can do is make it an illegal order. Take the burden off the miltary.

Did you know I can speak in an uff-da accent? Brought to you by three wonderful years in Wisconsin at the UW in Madison. Fuck em Bucky!

Now, I've been on a project to get my eating habits down for more weight loss and better health. I have Facebook reels to thank for that. I've been listening to all the science and advice about keeping your bloodstream sugar from spiking while still eating well. And the more I listen to the advice, the more advice I get.

I love eating a bowl of oatmeal in the morning with some crushed walnuts, butter, raisins, and after it's cooked for five minutes in the microwave, some fresh berries mixed in. But I figured this isn't good. I've been taught that a savory breakfast is better. So I had a two-egg omelet with melted cheese and half an english muffin with butter. I couldn't even finish the muffin. I feel full. And I'm drinking my coffee made with my Kuerig.

It was a rough night last night. I'm so exhausted with feeling the whole world crumbling around us. Trump wants to take us back to the Robber Baron America of the 19th century. I hear that sucked. We have to get together and say out loud everywhere this is not cool. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, we elected you to check this kind of bullshit. If you don't do your jobs, Senators and Representatives — we're going to vote you out next chance we get, I don't care if you're a Democrat.

The Democrats have a great opportunity now, I hear, to put an end to ICE. Do it, or else you're history, politically. You can't have a career going forward if you're on the wrong side of this one.

And btw, proof that life goes on — I am so sick of snow. It had to come on a holiday weekend when there's no point trying to go skiing because the lift lines and crowds on the slope take all the fun out of it. And this is great skiing snow, light and fluffy. I hope some of it is still around later in the week.

Why now? Because there are probably still enough in the military who believe in the rule of law and will obey an act of Congress. #

I've been trying to stay out of politics here lately (did you notice), but I don't get how Americans, no matter who they voted for, can watch what's happening in Minneapolis and not feel like we have to protect the people there from the thugs who are attacking them. And of course that's exactly how we're supposed to feel. I watched a video of a woman, a disabled army veteran, being dragged from her car by the ICEs, and hearing cop car sirens in the background, imagining, hoping — they were coming to stop the attack. We never did find out. How can you stand for this if you're an American. Forget about Democrats or Republicans, what about you? Where did you learn to ignore the feelings you must have when you see people, fellow human beings, attacked with such cruelty? Snap out of it, if you have any empathy left, or any love for our country. Tell your representatives to step in and stop this, and no excuses, Democrat or Republican, I don't care. #

In 2019, I did an overhaul of XML-RPC, and created a reference implementation in JavaScript, both client and server (Node.js).

The missing links from yesterday's podcast.

• XML-RPC website.
• XML-RPC GitHub repo.
• JavaScript reference implementation.
• New JSON encoding.
• The original website was preserved.

A brief podcast with the fascinating story of how XML-RPC came together in 1998. #

Is there any circumstance where "Sorry for the inconvenience" isn't the wrong thing to say? Maybe I didn't even notice, or if I did, maybe I didn't care. And what if the results were more than inconvenient? What if someone died! Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll say. I like still diggin the best. It says yes we suck, and we know it, but we're trying to suck less. #

Last night's email didn't go out at the appointed hour, and I didn't get a chance to look until early evening. So last night's mail went out at about 6PM Eastern. Hopefully today's email will go out at roughly midnight tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. Still diggin! #

If you don't have one of these Keurig things, you're really missing out. #

This is a continuation of a piece I wrote in August 2025.

Yesterday I wrote a this.how doc about getting WordLand to run on sites that don't run on WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed. What this means is that their sites are accessible through the fantastic wpcom API, and with that API I have been able to build a very nice writers' workspace for WordPress sites. I call the ones that are left out the WordPress.org sites, though I know that's not an entirely accurate way of describing it, but neither is "self-hosted sites" because you could have a hosting service that doesn't install Jetpack. WordPress could be used for things that are quite different from the way it's used today. Important point.

I sent links to that post to two people, and encouraged them to pass it along, as a way of starting a discussion — how are we going to get WordLand running on those "other" sites. And we need names for lots of things, but first we have to get the software working the way we want it to, then the naming will be more obvious.

Jeremy Herve has already written a response (as I asked him to). As always, very helpful. But I want to push back on the way he frames the project — as if it's up to me to do this work, and that I dispute. It think it's up to us. WordLand isn't just a product, it's a challenge.

• To make WordPress a fantastic platform for developers who want to build on its ability to write and read and link together writing and reading on the freaking web. That's why it's so important to understand what the web is and what it's capabilities are. We've been missing some of the big stuff since the big silos took over. I want, before I hang up my hat, to fix that.

I'm going to outline here how we start, so it's documented so more people will see it too.

• I have written a package, MIT-licensed, with an awkward name for historic reasons called wpIdentity. It started off as just a simple way to use WordPress identity with FeedLand because it made sense to do it a couple of years ago because Twitter was destroying the utility of their API, and we needed a new way to do identity. So I stopped everything and implemented both email identity and WordPress identity, or more specifically, wordpress.com identity. This leaves out all the wordpress sites that you can't log onto this way. Not a good situation, I don't like it because I want WordPress to be one large happy family of users and developers. So that's what I'm seeking to instigate here.
• Then wpIdentity grew and grew. At first it supported all the endpoints in the wpcom API, and made it possible to build WordLand, which itself only communicates to WordPress via wpIdentity. And later when I needed user-specific storage that is not part of the WordPress API, I built a very nice little storage system, it's efficient, highly scalable, and (I think) well debugged. If you read my initial Think Different piece you'll see it gets a mention in this part. Storage, we will find out, is the big missing piece in the web, has always been the missing piece, the thing that keeps us from having a real developer community of web apps. How do I know? Because I'm a freaking developer. I don't work at a company that can insulate me from this need. That's why I see this need and so many others don't.
• Now here's something else that's cool. I didn't stop with wpIdentity, I made a JavaScript function that simplifies the wpcom interface for people writing browser-based JavaScript apps. It radically simplifies it. I didn't invent this way of doing it, someone at Facebook did, as far as I'm concerned. We may not like Facebook the company or the boss man, but they have employed some brilliant programmers over the years. I think this idea came from the developers of FriendFeed, but I could be wrong. What they did was take the interface code every app developer has to do, and made that the API. I remember when I first saw it in 2013, it blew me away. It took me a full month to build support for Twitter in my app, but it only two days to do it in Facebook. I did one of those for WordPress. It's part of wpIdentity. Here it is. Please if you're a contributor to wordpress.org — study that thing, because we're going to be working on that code — together. This is where the "we" part of it starts. But there's more.
• You don't have to read the code of api2.js to understand how it works, there's an even easier way to do it — wpEditorDemo. It's a simple browser-based editor that does what WordLand does, without all the flourish. Bare bones. Also MIT-licensed. Nothing but what's required. You can try it out if you have one or more qualifying sites (either on wordpress.com or having Jetpack installed). The project we need to do is this — make wpEditDemo work on any WordPress site, no matter where it's hosted. And that's going to be done by extending api2.js. That's where the differences will be encapsulated, and above that level, in wpEditDemo and WordLand and all its competitors, nothing changes. This project may be complicated or simple, or somewhere inbetween, but imho this has to be done. And this is the first place I want to join the open source community for WordPress. After talking with Jon, I became optimistic about this happening sooner than later.
• I zoomed through all this and more with Jonathan on Tuesday. This is what I want to talk about at WordCamp Europe later this year (I have submitted an application). I wanted to show Jon and a few other people I met in Ottawa in October how the pieces fit together. But zooming is the right word, Jon was ahead of me at every step, he just understood what I was showing him. I was blown away — because this had never happened before with the architecture I had built. Not because it's so complex, it isn't — it's all about simplifying things, with lots of factoring, finding a repeating pattern and then locking it down in code, so no one has to ever worry about the complexity again. I think it was hard for people to see because they aren't expecting it.

That's where I'm going to leave it for now. I suggest if you have a response or comment, please put it on your blog and send me a link. We're going to create new ways to link blog posts together, but for now we'll do it by hand.

PS: Hat-tip to Matt Mullenweg for building WordPress, and for having the idea that Tumblr could be rebuilt on top of WordPress. When he announced they were going to do that I knew I was on the right track. We were thinking about WordPress the same way.

PPS: If people have a hard time understanding how I could do this — remember: 1. I've had a lot of time. 2. I understand WordPress at a deep level. 3. I'm good at building and selling APIs, I've been fairly successful at it. And even better, the WordPress community has been a very good caretaker of this work. They support a remarkable amount of it, and it all still works, and they often wonder why the rest of the world doesn't love it like they do. I feel the same damn way. 😉

PPPS: And thanks to Steve Jobs for thinking differently.

PPPPS: And to VW for thinking small.

I've been watching Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS. Jake worked at UserLand, but never at the kernel level, which is exactly where he and his (virtual) AI buddies are working. He knew Frontier well, he was a developer at MacWorld, where they used it as the CMS to manage their website. Then he came to work at UserLand where he worked on the CMS itself, and over time became a full contributor to the work we were doing in RSS, XML-RPC, feed reading and podcasting. He's a musician too and the nicest guy to work with. He just got the REPL for Frontier running. I'm so proud of his accomplishments, and totally looking forward using the new Frontier for server programming, which is all Linux for me these days. And I also look forward to having Manila and Radio UserLand running on modern hardware, esp so I can demo these apps for my friends in the WordPress community. There's a lot of stuff happening here these days, glad to say I'm working with some incredible people and totally excited about what comes next. #

Demo: rssCloud makes feeds as fast as the internet. #

It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well — it doesn't have one. The web was like the Declaration of Independence, but like a democracy it takes care and a bit of sacrifice to keep it going. It's always been possible to rebuild the web, to take back our freedom to create new webs out of the web that TBL discovered. It just takes determination and dedication to working together, a higher cause than piling up billions of dollars that the billionaires have absolutely no idea what to do with. I think the world order based on democracy depends on us digging out of the hole we're in, in the technology. Think about it. #

BTW, I haven't posted a screen shot of where I write Scripting News in quite some time. Nothing has changed, but a whole other writing enviroment, targeted at WordPress instead of Old School, and it has a different feature set, look and feel. #

I had a fantastic meeting today with Jonathan Desrosiers. I gave him a tour of all the software that makes up WordLand and FeedLand. It was the first time I had done that with anyone from the WordPress community. It started off with a simple story about how I knew I was on the right track when Matt announced they were porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress as an OS. Which is exactly what I'm doing with my collection of software. Every bit of writing should be a WordPress post, and they should be linked together in arbitrary graphs. It was nice to review that with a serious developer, Jonathan is one of the core committers of the open source WordPress. It helped me see all the different things we can do, and now hope we will do. I feel I understand this community, as a time-traveler from the past I think I understand what we should do next. #

I'm working on a feature for WordLand II where you can flip a switch to see the OG Metadata for a post you're reading, by clicking on an icon that looks like the flag on the side of an old fashioned mailbox. I remembered there was a desk accessory on the original Mac that used this approach, and I've wanted that icon for a long time, and today I thought to ask ChatGPT to look into it for me, I had previously been relying on Google search, and it found what I was looking for and a lot of great history sites with details. I'm going to document the thread including some descriptions written by ChatGPT which I will label. Everything not labled like that is from me. 😉

This was the first question I asked.

• There was an alarm desk accessory on the original Macintosh in 1984. It had a nice mailbox flag affordance. When the flag is up, the contents of the DA are hidden, flip it down to reveal what was hidden. Can you find me a writeup of this or screen shot. It might have been a different desk accessory or a different year.

ChatGPT's response

• What you’re remembering is almost certainly the Alarm Clock desk accessory from the early Mac System Software (System 1 era and later). A small “lever/flag” control would toggle the window between a compact view (just time) and an expanded view that revealed the date/time/alarm-setting controls—very much like a mailbox-flag affordance.

Screen shot

The flag icon is on second box in the second row.

Links (via ChatGPT)

• Washington Apple Pi Journal (April 1984) describes the Alarm Clock DA and explicitly calls out the “lever” that opens the “Change” portion of the window (“Pointing to the lever and clicking…” reveals additional areas).
• Huntsville Macintosh Users Group handbook glossary defines the “lever” as the little arm in the Alarm Clock DA that, when clicked, makes additional panels appear for setting time/date/alarm.
• Low End Mac has a System 1 desk accessories writeup (including Alarm Clock) and includes a screenshot of the DA.
• Link to the archive of the full conversation I had with ChatGPT.

Then we had a conversation about the history, which I asked ChatGPT for a two-paragraph summary, below.

• Susan Kare’s work on the original Macintosh wasn’t just visually elegant, it was foundational: she showed that icons could be humane, legible, and generous to the user. The mailbox-flag affordance in the Alarm Desk Accessory is a perfect example—simple, memorable, and instantly understandable, yet rich with meaning. It wasn’t decorative; it taught the interface how to communicate. That clarity came from Kare’s rare combination of artistic intuition and respect for the people using the machine. Just as important was her personal generosity: again and again, she contributed work freely, trusting that good ideas grow stronger when shared. Many of us benefited directly from that spirit, receiving world-class design not as a transaction, but as a gift.
• Carrying these designs forward—faithfully, with credit—is one way creativity survives across generations. Reusing an icon like the mailbox flag isn’t nostalgia; it’s continuity. It acknowledges that great interface ideas don’t expire, and that today’s software is part of a long conversation rather than a clean break from the past. By preserving the pixel logic, the affordance, and the attribution to Susan Kare, we honor both the craft and the culture that produced it. That’s how design knowledge persists: not by constant reinvention, but by respectful reuse, gratitude, and the quiet understanding that we’re building on work someone once chose to share.

PS: I inititally wrote this up as a thread on Facebook where a lot of us oldtime Mac people still congregate.

Today's song: He's Gone.

We've barely had a chance to process the passing of Bob Weir, but now I realize that for the core of the Grateful Dead are now gone too.

So I chose a song of the day that, to me, says goodbye to Ron McKernen, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Robert Hunter and now Bob Weir. The heart of the heart of gold band.

They were more than great live performers, culture hackers, they also represented a philosophy that's remarkably versatile. It applies to software and the web as well as the Dead lifestyle. Look for ways that entertain yourself and share it freely with everyone, see what happens. Kick back and let nature take it's course. We'll write and perform songs, and sooner than later, we'll be gone. But they told us not to mourn them, as they chose the name of their band.

There may be more to write, there certainly was in the days after Jerry's passing. But for now we'll just keep on truckin.

I had to do some work with Concord today, the open source JavaScript outliner Kyle Shank wrote for me in 2013. I used ChatGPT to help. It knew all about Concord. Amazing. If only through ChatGPT etc, my work will survive. That means a lot to me. I take the opposite view that some artists take. I like that it's learning about what we did with our lives. Bob Weir died yesterday. That didn't go unnoticed here. #

I just posted something new on Scripting News, and thought — that should appear on the new WordLand I'm working on, even though it's not a WordPress site. It did appear. Screen shot. The beauty of RSS. It's supported everywhere, so we might as well depend on that. #

I wonder sometimes if we’re the last generation of humanoids on this planet for a variety of reasons. The future imagined by The Matrix is looking more likely than ever. #

BTW, look at all the links in my writing. Shouldn't every platform that says they're part of the web let users add links to their writing? Of course they should. #

If I were making a Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other. Comment here. #

Textcasting: Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text. #

If you run a FeedLand instance, we have a new recommended index for your database. It's also part of all new installs. The code will still work without the index, but it might make it a lot faster. #

As I listened to the mayor of Minneapolis speak I thought he was going say "get the fuck out of Minneapolis" but of course he couldn't say that and then he said it. #

Today's song: Playing in the Band. #

Bob Weir is gone. #

What’s happening with ICE is like January 6 four years later with billions of dollars behind it and many months of planning and studying history for prior art. #

John Johnston, a longtime friend of UserLand and my newer products, asks how WordLand connects with FeedLand. Two ways. 1. FeedLand has an API, still working on it, but it will be public. 2. FeedLand has an outbound websockets interface, which is already public, so any can use it as their feed reader, and get notice of new items and updates to existing items as soon as FeedLand has the info. And if the site uses rssCloud, as WordPress does and has since 2009, the notices are instantaneous. So to the extent people thought RSS is a slow protocol, it's not. It runs at the speed of the internet. And FeedLand is all about RSS, as you know. #

I'm doing little demos of stuff I'm working on in WordLand, here's a narrated demo that shows how instant updates are going. As often the recording level is too low, so turn up the volume if you want to hear the comments. A productive Saturday session. #

Trump is president the same way people who do vibe coding are developers. I always thought he'd be much happier playing president on TV instead of actually being president. And people would think about this stuff more rationally if it were a TV show like Pluribus or Severance. Why did they really do what they did? Or the way we talk about the Mets or the Knicks and their various foibles. It's funny people have a clarity about fictional stuff that they don't have for real-world things like war, health insurance, the cost of eggs and gestapo tactics. #

A little fix that would make social web a lot more useful and less hate-filled and abusive… Make replies visible only to the person being replied to. If they feel the reply should be public, they can RT it. #

I get ideas when I go for a walk or drive somewhere in my car. This was one of those times, but it was not a comforting idea. I live in the mountains on the west side of the Hudson River near Kingston. On my drive to town yesterday I went through the small town of Woodstock, and I was thinking about how ICE is occupying Minneapolis, and wondered why wasn't I more concerned about it personally. The answer — it's far away from here, and Woodstock, while it is a famous place, is on absolutely no one's radar. But then I remembered the astounding amount of money we allocated for ICE, far more than could be used for border enforcement, so obviously this all is a prelude for an American secret police and here's where the disquieting idea came up. Of course ICE will operate in every city and town in the US no matter how remote or small. But first they have to perfect their act, this is a form of training to teach the skinheads of America how to be part of an SS. Experiment first in a few cities before deploying, gradually, everywhere. We're all going to have to submit to loyalty oaths, and we will all be forced to denounce our neighbors as illustrated in Lives of Others, which if you haven't watched it yet, now is the time when you have to, to get an idea what it was like in East Germany before the wall came down, and where we're headed. It still may not be too late yet, but it's getting close. #

When there's breaking news these days I check Fox News in addition to CNN, MSNOW, BBC, PBS. The best are the last two. But last night night when everyone was fixated on the story of Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was killed in cold blood, on video, by a masked ICE thug, I wondered what Fox was saying. They were showing the actual video over and over like the other networks. Their words were what Trump was saying, but they didn't hide what actually happened, at least as long as it's news.

Then I wondered how much this was pre-calculated. It clearly doesn't hurt ICE to signal that they're killing US citizens in the US with impunity. Next time will be soon, and it will be more than one dead, and maybe they'll be kids. What makes me think this was not planned by the higher-ups is that they killed a middle-aged white woman, mother of 3,, who writes poetry. Not a very likely cartel leader or narco-terrorist. There were dolls in the glove compartment of the car.

Every indication is that she was just afraid and trying to get out of there as quickly as possible.

We also remember that in the aftermath of Jan 6, private texts from the top people at Fox indicated they were scared and appalled like most other relatively sane Americans. What had happened then was unthinkable. Well, what happened yesterday was just as unthinkable. Shocking. Makes you wonder what's next. Get ready, we're going to see a lot of ugliness now, hard to comprehend, hard to accept. We still have a skeletal democracy, and ICE isn't fully staffed yet (they have new billions of dollars to spend).

On Facebook, Dan Conover said: "This is what the collapse of the rules-based order looks like."

I responded: "Or it's a test of it. The guy wasn't very well disguised, I think he will be identified if he hasn't already been identified. Will he be arrested and tried? If yes, then we just validated the rule-based order. If no, we're fucked.

"Or even better the state of Minnesota could go to court and sue ICE to get their officers to wear identifying information, and no masks. For just this reason. And then here's an arrest warrant for the guy who fired his gun 3 times at the head of a 37-year old mom who writes poetry and drives an SUV with teddy bears in the glove compartment. In other words I'm not sure this was intentional (on behalf of ICE), and I think they may have to turn this guy over, otherwise someone is getting impeached. The video is too compelling."

Another incredible use-case for ChatGPT. When it first came out Font Awesome was a total godsend. It took something every developer of graphic apps had to struggle with, and said basically "I can do that." They had a growing set of standard icons, it got better with every version. But some special icons haven't appeared in Font Awesome. There was a great icon on the original Mac, for a desk accessory, I don't remember which one. It was a flag, like the flag on a mailbox. If you put a piece of mail in the box you raise the flag, that way the postman knows to stop. When they pick up the mail they flip the flag down. On the early Mac it took an app that was wide and short, and made it wide and tall, revealing the ideas and data it kept for you. You can still have the icon, using ChatGPT. Have it generate your own icon using SVG. You get something every bit as good as a Font Awesome icon. So you can be creative in a new way. Whether this is art or not (of course it is) is beside the point. It's progress, evolution — a way for users to make perfectly specified feature requests. #

Remember when OG metadata was new? 16 years ago. It's one of those things that's widely forgotten, but still widely in use. I just wrote a post on Bluesky that demonstrates. That could be a new feature in WordPress, or the decision whether or not to display it could be up to the reader app (in this case Bluesky). If it were up to the reader we might need a way to signal that to the reader from the CMS. In the new WordLand, we use the image as an icon. It's completely wrong to use it as an OG Metadata image in Bluesky — realllly embarrassing (screen shot). #

The way twitter-like services deal with OG metadata could use a re-think. #

Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! 🙂 #

Assume I'm working on a twitter-like user interface. Your text can include elements. When the user clicks on one of these, should I open it in a new tab? Prior art? There is none, because in the old school twitter-like apps don't allow links. #

Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the slurry-making machines. #

Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto — watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing. #

I considered my Blogger of the Year award for 2025 very carefully, and yesterday did a podcast about my choice, David Frum, who is doing an outstanding job of adapting his work to the podcast medium, as it was intended to work. What finally made my decision easy was his last episode of the year, where along with fellow Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Warzel, they considered how podcasting works, and what if anything they should do to conform. The answer is — don't conform. It isn't up to any single contributor to turn the tide, instead their only job is to be true to themselves, and learn from others and share what they've learned. Be a human-size blogger. I thought perhaps this represented my opportunity to speak to them, and help understand that there are tech people who want to work with them and enhance their freedom, rather than consume it. But we need their help to do it. They've settled on Substack, without realizing they're just hooking up with the same people who screwed them before (ie Twitter, then all the techies who have dinner with Trump). As they say — doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is not particularly smart, and Frum is smart. I don't care if he roots for the Red Sox (I'm a Mets fan), right now we're on the same side. We love the United States, and what it has done for us, and for the world, and we are falling apart. It's not time to stay within our communities, it's time to do whatever we can to save the country we love so much, working together. #

BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004. #

Must-watch narrated bodycam video from Jan 6 Capitol riot. Maybe the saddest moment in American history, so far. #

Just heard an ad on WNYC-FM saying we should share news with them. That's a milestone. First time I've ever heard NPR say our purpose was anything other than giving them money. They could go even further — support blogs and podcasts that cover the NYC area. #

Podcast: Blogger of the Year. #

I never was very good with PhotoShop and other bitmap image apps. Now I use ChatGPT, I just tell it what I want, like remove this bit and that bit, and it just freaking does it. This is how computers were meant to work. That's how I did the Peet's logo in the image in the previous post. And btw the people who are down on ChatGPT being used for graphics and videos are full of shit about it not having value. Some of us don't have the skill yet still would like to illustrate our ideas with images and videos. For those of us, the AI apps are a godsend. They're also pretty good I hear at providing medical advice. I've been using it for that pretty extensively. At my age health is not something you can ignore, and it helps to be informed. And with the healthcare system these days in the US being so limited, you don't really get to have a relationship with your doctor as we did in the past, so guess what, I bet ChatGPT is saving some lives. So if you don't like being seriously wrong about new tech, you should start seeing the advantages, not just the belief that it cancels freedom. If it does, and so far I don't see it, there's a lot of good that that compensates. There are always tradeoffs in evolution. #

I did a long video demo yesterday with a narrative about where WordLand is going. The audio quality sucks. And at the beginning I said I wasn't going to narrate, but I couldn't help myself. Turn the volume way up. WordLand has become a new kind of feed reader, it's totally building off FeedLand, I love the idea of apps building on other apps. It's exactly the kind of software we predicted, long before MCP's, with Frontier back in the 80s, 90s and 00s. #

I've tried a lot of different kinds of Keurig pods, but the best — with the richest taste is Peet's. Just ordered a whole bunch more to try out. And btw, when I looked up Peet's on Google I found that it had been bought by Dr Pepper for (sit down please) $18 billion. I hope you didn't pass out. I always thought of Peet's as a hometown favorite, the underdog, but my lord so much money. No wonder the coffee is so good. #

Follow political news on my FeedLand news site. #

Do you feel powerless to communicate online unless it serves the interests of the people who own the networks you post to? Why not own your own means of distribution, managed as a co-op, and only responsible to you, as a member and customer. No VC, no billionaire, no government control. #

Bush at the start of the Iraq war when MSNBC called him a visionary.

He looked pretty lost at the time, I remember — and we all hoped that wasn't true, we hoped he knew what he was doing.

We've been here before.

On Bluesky: I can't tell you how tired I am of copying and pasting the same text into five different silos. When will this ridiculous system that claims to be the web, get its shit together and start acting like the web (ie interop). #

The war in Iraq started in March 2003. That was also the month I arrived in Cambridge after driving cross-country from Woodside, CA. Because I did most of my blogging on scripting.com, I still have a good archive of how I experienced both those things. It's also the month we got the Harvard weblogs going, but they have not stood up so well. I wouldn't have predicted then that my personal blog would survive the system we started at one of America's great universities. #

Today feels like the day the war in Iraq began. Wars are easy to start, hard to end. They actually called Bush a "visionary" on MSNBC, they were so in awe of his courage, but that would end soon. And this time, no doubt Trump started the war with the approval of China and Russia, which will be left alone by the US in their conquest of Taiwan and Ukraine. Leaders of smaller countries must be wondering where they can hide from this. A very depressing moment. I've lived through two voluntary wars by the US, first Vietnam, then the post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now this war. #

BTW, I used to have a tradition in the early days of this blog to write new stuff about an important idea on January 1 each year. At some point I stopped doing that. Now I realized that unintentionally I have just written such a piece, below. There's a lot of good stuff in that piece and in the places it links to. See the web is still useful. You won't hear these ideas on CNN or MS.NOW or in the NYT, WP, or from any billionaires either. I'm not saying I'm right, I've definitely been wrong before. But I think I'm mostly right. 😉 #

This is one of those times when you pay the price for working past your timeout, like a pitcher pitching too many pitches in one game. There's an item on your checklist, and you'd love to take it off before you start the next session. You copy paste something, get it to work, and close out your session for the day.

While you're preparing to get up you decide to share a linkblog item, and when it boots up there's something severely broken. It has nothing to do with anything on your list! You roll it up for the day anyway, figuring it'll be easy to find when you start the next session. No sir. You have to work through complicated code you haven't touched in months! Where the fuck is this, and how the fuck did it happen. Drink more coffee. Keep stepping through the code to identify when things went bad. It happens in the most impossible place. You keep digging in. Even more impossible. Unfathomable. But you keep going in, making sure every bit of code does something you think it should and then boom! You left a copy in some DOM code in something you cribbed so now there are two of this thing you hadn't touched or even looked at in months. Delete the mistake, rebuild, click off all the breakpoints. And yup that was it.

I started work at approx 9AM and it's 11:41AM — wasted the best part of the day, all to learn the lesson that no more "one more feature" before I get up bullshit. If you're tired you make mistakes, and you can't not pay for them.

No doubt I will continue to learn this and other lessons all through what remains of my career. Some things you never learn, like "I can always roll back" — but where should I roll back to? When did I break this mofo? Oy. I'm never willing to go back that way.

I still use Google. And I like the AI response they put at the top of the page, even though I get that it's bad for the web. Maybe there's a position for a web-only search engine. One where my writing has a chance of being seen by interested parties, rather than being converted to slurry to be fed to consumers as one would get a tasty hot dog from a NYC street vendor. Another level of processing. If I recall correctly one of the browsers is saying they're not using AI at all. But this would be different, it would be for search, not the browser.

But Google, if you want to be fair about it, there should be a permalink for the AI-generated answers. This is something none of the AI vendors seem to be able to do. If so, I wonder why?

I just tried looking up "Regular Medicare" on Google, I was looking for an official page and ended up using the Medicare.gov one. But I could have decided the Google synopsis was the best. No way that I can see to use that as a link.

Maybe we should all start thinking about how we would like the new post-AI web to work?

I am trying to reach the well-known political pundits to tell them we don't have to accept the web the billionaires give us. The costs are very low, their money doesn't help them as much as you might think, because they have different concerns from the ones you (writer) and I (developer) have. I don't care about revenue (disclaimer that doesn't mean everything will be free and there won't be a business model, it just isn't the reason I'm doing the work). This is my way of giving back, the area I have the greatest leverage. I always argued that Bill Gates who kept saying in the 90s he was going to be a scrappy competitor now and give away his wealth when he retired. He is doing that btw, but I thought man you're never going to have the leverage you have now. Your money as a way to end famine or fight the climate crisis is nothing compared to the power you had when you had the dominant operating system in a time of great transition. You could, I argued, make the web a breakthrough for self-government, so we could systematically solve those problems with the resources of the United States, not just the resources of the world's richest man. That possibility really was within reach, I believed then and still do now.

I made the choice Bill didn't and it worked. We were able to build something amazing, only to see it broken down into that slurry I mentioned at the top of the page.

I love AI, I don't want to go back. But I also have big plans for human thinkers and developers — writers, using the technology we never got a chance to develop while we were busy being dominated by Larry and Sergey, Zuckerberg, the Twitter founders, et al.

As I said on Bluesky today, we're going to insist this time that the political punditry get involved, assuming they are serious about saving what's left of our democracy.

This year I switched to Original Medicare for 2026 after being on super duper insurance industry enhanced Medicare for the first five years. I should've known that it's super duper for them but not so great for the insured person or the taxpayer, that is — me. They have set it up so they can scam it 18 different ways, Some of the "services" they offer are just ways for them to charge the government more for your care, in return for doing absolutely nothing.

So today I had my first Regular Medicare experience. I went to renew my prescriptions, and the vendor already knew my insurance info which was impressive use of computers. I was prepared to give it the new info. And in case you're confused, you still have to pay the insurance industry for Regular Medicare, even though that's actually a deal between me and my government. No way to deal them out, though I'm sure it would make total sense for us to do exactly that. Don't believe that when it comes to health care the US has been anything like a democracy.

Where the old plan each prescription cost $0, this time I actually have to pay out of pocket approx $100 for a 90 day supply of five different medications. On the other hand, I'm paying much less for this insurance. I haven't done the math yet, but it feels like I'm not getting ripped off. See how many qualifiers there are.

Oh the great old US of A where you can give your tax money and retirement funds to insurance companies who buy politicians etc and so on. Maybe the only thing to appreciate is that we get some health care for all our tax payments over our careers?

And one good thing is now I get to keep most of my Social Security payments instead of it all going to United Healthcare. 😉

Liked The Staircase on Netflix. I had watched it before but had forgotten all the different conflicting stories. It is a bit irritating, but I think that's an important part of the story. #

Loving my Keurig-style coffee maker. I've been stocking up on all kinds of pods. Favorite so far is hazelnut — flavored, not real — but really tasty. I never thought I'd want to try out all these different kinds of coffee. I wonder if I'm getting an espresso machine next. #

All the Scripting News OPML's for 2025 in one GitHub folder. An example of user-owned storage. The protocol that connects our services won't know or care how we're storing stuff behind the API. A great prototype is imho the WordPress wpcom API. #

A note to Josh Marshall, David Frum, Jay Rosen and Heather Cox Richardson, just a few of the political pundits I read. Now you all have seen up close the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley, also known as DOGE. They do this with investors' money. This was a preview of how they will govern, after Trump, when Silicon Valley is fully running the world. We need to get some tech background in your writing. The history of tech is very much the history of politics as we go forward. We had a merger, and you can and should incorporate our history in your understanding of US history. #

Wishing you many happy latkes in 2026 too. 😄

Welcome 2026. Seriously. 😄 #

I'm enjoying the break between years, always get a lot of thinking and writing done in this period. Not much more to say but that's all for 2025. Bring on the next year. #

If you've had trouble unsubscribing from the nightly email, I fixed a big problem there this morning, so please try again. If the problem persists, here's a place to report. #

Manton Reece explains why Micro.blog uses Markdown. I use Markdown because Manton does. It's for interop. #

2016: Your human-size life. #

If I had billions of dollars I'd divest. And if my country did a good job of investing in education, health, voting rights, stuff like that, I'd just give most of it back to the country. Thanks for the education, and saving my life with medicine not just once but twice. Thanks for being such a cool country. If only we lived up to the promise, but now we'd certainly need to come up with another way of distributing the benefits to the country and its people. #

No one got any sleep in these parts last night, was like a non-stop tornado, but I did watch a couple of artsy movies that were really good. And this morning power was out and internet, and I thought for sure some trees had to be down, but only one was, a huge one, and I had to walk to the post office to use their phone to call a friend with a big saw and truck, and I wondered how he'd get rid of the tree, and this is how. First he chopped it up into bits with a saw, and then used the same plow he uses to get rid of the snow to push the tree parts off to the side of the road. And when I got home the internet was back on and I'm going to spend most of the rest of the day sleeping, maybe or drinking a load of coffee and trying to stay on a normal schedule., #

I'm doing some really excellent work on WordLand II, which is almost starting to get useful. We should be doing a lot more than writing posts next year. It's helping that a few of us are using Instant Outlines in Drummer to coordinate work. I work so much better this way, but it's not something you can do on your own. #

"I don't have time for this." That might be the name of a podcast. I just ended one with that exact phrase, and it totally fits the way I feel about these rambling diatribes by the time I'm about to sign off. #

When you're buying a house, the most important thing to check is the roof. Get two inspections. Get three. A house with a good roof will keep you dry. A house with a shitty roof isn't really a house is it? #

I rated Common Side Effects as Loved, the second highest rating on Bingeworthy. #

The biggest contribution ChatGPT et al could make to software development, beyond what it has already done, which is enormous — is help us come up with a new general purpose programming language which is a lot easier for human programmers to work with, esp over time. I work in one of the most complex environments imaginable — browser apps talking to server apps in JavaScript. We could do so much better. And now we have a partner that knows all about all our languages, unlike any human being. Instead of having a lot of disconnected bubbles, it would be great if programmers could come together on a new language that make it easier for us to manage lots of software projects. #

We love Pluribus because it has the features we find irresistible.

1. AppleTV.
2. The makers of two previous huge hits.
3. An unsung and much loved star in the last hit.
4. An intriguing sci-fi plot.
5. It’s pretty good adventure type thriller in the first episodes then settles into a slower sexy love story, where the lead character takes us through the mind of someone falling in love and trying to figure out if the other person is worth it.
6. A clever final scene in the final episode.
7. A typical long wait for the next season that we knew was coming.

But all this is incidental, what really matters is that we’re all involved, have opinions, and thank goodness it doesn’t actually matter like the other stuff we debate.

This came up on Kottke. I'm going to try commenting on other old school blogs more here on my blog. Want to see if we can reboot the original sphere as a way of priming a new one.

Sarah Kendzior is a political writer who I greatly admire. Her frustration sounds a lot like mine. I wrote in 2017 that the bankers in tech should watch out because Twitter had just elected a president, and its market capitalization was so low that it was bound to get bought by someone who saw that you could buy the presidency of the United States for a few billion dollars. Was it worth that? Absolutely, as we're learning. All I got were pats on the head, stories about PE ratios, which of course I understand. What it did show is they didn't understand that the presidency could and would be monetized.

Yesterday Kendzior posted a tweet about how frustrating it was that all the "new" details of the Epstein scandal were known in 2020, and published in her book Hiding in Plain Sight. Sounds like what I've been saying about how tech and news works, we just come at it from different perspectives.

I don't know if there's a way around the ownership of news in the US, if there's still a way to route around it, but I'm sure that publishing on Substack, which is owned by the same people she doesn't trust with other journalism, is not the answer.

In order for news to have a chance of working we need to be using only the web, commodity services that are completely replaceable, and we keep our own writing, and route it to everyone who's interested via the open protocols of the web. That's the only way people with important ideas and info can get it out there.

I think in order for this to work we have to have people like Kendzior, and Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, publishing via the web, not via Substack. It should be fine for Substack to continue to publish their stuff, no problem with that, but they shouldn't be the only place their stuff is published. That gives them near-total control of the writers.

Our bigger problem is news distribution that works, and not depending on system we have. It may be too late to fix it, but we have to try.

PS: The story Kendzior was writing about was not covered yesterday on CNN or MSNOW, as far as I can tell. It got dumped on Christmas Day, I guess — and that's probably the best day in the US to dump a story you want to get lost in the haze.

PPS: The title of this piece recalls a great documentary, The Fog of War, about America at war in Vietnam.

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. #