I keep thinking of cheesy ways I could switch over to https for new posts on Scripting News, esp now that Google is getting more militant in trying to sweep all the history of the web into the trash.
I know people think it would be a snap to do the conversion, honestly, sorry — they are idiots. They don’t understand that it’s a viral format. If you claim to be “secure” then everything you include must also be https, and of course everything they include must be as well. So even if I would have to do nothing other than this conversion over a full year, what’s to say Google doesn’t invent another hoop we have to jump through lest their browser defames us and eventually shuts us down. It’s like the web would become just like the Apple Store. Even if there’s nothing on the site that requires https. Or if it’s a historic site that very few people visit, but the archive is there because we believed the web would be a constant because [no one owned it](platform without a platform vendor site:scripting.com), no one could break it.
I’ve been on these trips with corporate platforms, and if they want you gone, you should just take the hint and go, because eventually you will get the point. This is a company that has nothing put spite for the web, or perhaps envy, or individual developers (ie indieweb). They are pure fuckers when it comes to people like you and me.
On the other hand you will probably be able to get https versions of my new writing at some point, Murphy willing. That’s relatively easy. But I don’t have that many years left, and I sure as hell don’t want to spend any part of that trying to appease Google.
PS: This is the walkthrough of the answer to the question of who owns the web and how it is not Google.
When designing your RSS feeds, the top level title should be the title of the user’s account. So if Bluesky had a feed for each user, the channel-level
<title>Bluesky: Mark Cuban</title>Why? Well because readers need context. And it’s easy.
And feeds are showing up in places where there isn’t much room for the titles, so you have to make your characters count.
Bluesky shows the user’s address, imho it should be the string the user chooses, usually simply their name.

The arrow points to Mark Cuban’s feed from Bluesky.
The problem with regulating AI is that no one knows where to begin. Yes it can do things that make you question your sanity for letting it have write access to your online work and private info. But if it is behaving itself you can do things you otherwise couldn’t come close to. I speak from experience. I was able to create a new version of a large piece of software, from scratch, in less than three months, by myself. It has capabilities that make it able to understand a big codebase, in a few minutes, and then act on it. My human mind, even when I was younger could only focus on a small fraction of that. So we humans with our limited ability to comprehend devised ways to build tall and wide structures with conventions and carefully crafting the code interfaces, stuff users never see, so that what we’d expect is what is. When my Claude failed and started randomly overwriting files on active websites, it had rules that said it couldn’t do what it was doing. Sometimes it doesn’t understand what a rule means. Observable every single day, it forgets all the rules every time it starts a session, and it doesn’t matter if it read the doc that contains the rules, sometimes it ignores one or more. I’ve spent a lot of time using it, and I have no stock or other interest in seeing it not regulated, but I couldn’t begin to say what would be appropriate regulation that wouldn’t also make it much less useful. #
Robert Eickmann: A Go implementation of RSS Chat — distributed social networking over RSS feeds, with real-time WebSocket updates. #
My long-overdue review of Don’t Look Up. I know people say it’s a bad movie, but I love it so much and it’s so incredibly watchable. I could watch the whole thing from beginning to end for the fifth time and still find it entertaining. So many good jokes, and it’s got the best actors and acting and best of all Jennifer Lawrence is one of the stars, and she plays a very unlikely JL character, but then she can play any character. Here’s she’s a totally nerdy PhD student who gets a comet named after her. She has a boyfriend who dreams of being an influencer. They laugh at everything that’s so stupid about our civilization, and its downfall, and near the end of the movie Leonardo gets the line that makes it so sad. We did have everything and we keep blowing it, over and over. We haven’t evolved enough to use the greatness we inherited. #
You only have one mortal body. There’s only so much one body can use. After a certain point you either realize this and adjust as best you can, or you make a big mess of everything. #
Today is the day we on the web remember Om Malik. September 29 is his birthday. Om died on June 24 at the ridiculous age of 59.
I knew Om for many years, he was an early blogger, a user of our software who stayed close, and gave us great advice about where to take it.
Later he helped found Automattic. Matt Mullenweg, founder of the company, says “All roads lead to Om.” His story of Om, filled in a lot of pieces for me. We were even closer than I knew.
Om was a NY sports fan, he lived here many years ago, he was a Yankees fan, and I of course am a Mets fan.
Om and I got sick for the first time in a major way around the same time. I had bypass surgery in 2002, he had a heart attack in 2007. After recovery he visited me in Berkeley, and we went for a walk in the hills where I lived. Two veterans of tech who were so immersed the new life, and we were smokers, didn’t eat well, didn’t exercise enough, and worked too hard. We were both lucky that we had time to reflect on this, and that perhaps is the biggest thing we have in common. We got the disease early in life, in time for it to make a difference in how we live.
When I was thinking about what I wanted to write here today, I came across a short tweet he wrote in 2014.
Perfect, simple and true.
Today, the problem is much worse. The crisis Om explained in 2014 was real. Two years later we would elect a president on Twitter. Anything we could have done then or could do now, to add more human intelligence to the social networks, and that’s something a writer like Om would be sensitive to, would give us a chance to organize without having to copy/paste the writing into a dozen different tiny little textboxes.
By 2014 it was obvious what we lost when we reduce writing to 140 characters, no editing, no titles, no links or MP3s. How could we capture the whole web in such a severely limited space. I used to joke on my blog about Microsoft wanting to lock us in the trunk in the 90s, and now here we were, in the teens having been locked in the trunk by Evan Williams, Fred Wilson and Jack Dorsey. These were supposed to be the good guys!
Ello was the thing that was meant to give us our freedom back. It didn’t. But a lot of people who believed in the open power of the web wanted it to be.
We did elect Trump with social media, and the web had been turned into a burned out mess. That was the contribution of a tech industry that now is concerned that they might be the source of the end of our species. I would take that seriously. It’s not just about this one thing, but the whole way it toxifies every good idea to emerge from creativity and broaden it so much that all you’re left with is grunts and snorts.
All that is my way of saying what Om said. We’re not happy with social media. That, to me, is still the big agenda item.
And thank you Om for sharing yourself and your ideas and observations, and good common sense with courage, and facing the future with both awe and fear and adding a balance to the mindless greed of tech.
I didn’t follow baseball this year, I couldn’t get it up for the Mets while I was trying to process what the Knicks did for NY in June. The Mets did something like that, but they never could unite the city the same way the Knicks did, because the Mets have always been the second team in NY, sort of like MLB’s apology to the city for moving our two National League teams, the Dodgers and Giants, to California. I never saw it that way, but my parents and grandparents probably did. I was too young to remember anything but the Mets, and they were my family’s team, and that’s the great thing about sports, your team is your chuch, it’s a cultural heritage passed down through time. My family were National League fans. Anyway, for a while, the Mets winning in 1969 did unite the city. I was commuting to school in the Bronx at the time, the home borough of the Yankees, and man everyone was smiling on the subway after the Mets did the impossible deed. In Queens, Manhattan, even the Bronx. They were lovable because they were such losers, and it felt totally like an act of god, who after all must be in New York City. Lovable winners? That only lasts a while. #
Rootfiles in Frontier, a new collection starts with docserver.root, the code and content for docserver.userland.com. Claude also wrote a Node app that extracts all the data from a root file. #
I was browsing around the WordPress blogs and found a new one in German that pointed to something new in blogrolls. It’s Matthias Pfefferle, of course — this time connecting up with the world Manton and I were working on a couple of years ago in blogroll sharing and OPML. Read about it here. He works at Automattic and has done pretty much all the work to connect WordPress to everything he can find, including ActivityPub and AT Proto. I have to swing back to FeedLand and RSS.chat asap, so we can start building together. Not going to miss his window on this stuff. #