The reason I’m having so much fun with this mofo is that I have most of the features of textcasting now, and it’s all flowing out through Masto, and I’m not typing into a freaking tiny little text box!

Holy shit! We’re there. It happened. It worked! We won. Mama mia.

I’m typing into a nice size editing window. It’s medium height and full width. And it grows vertically as I type more text. You’ll see how it works soon enough. 

But for now you can judge the result. I can add links, styling, I can edit my posts, and there is no freaking character limit, or if there is I haven’t come close to hitting it yet. 

I always said WordPress should be part of the social web. And now that it is, I can see how correct that idea was. It’s like all of a sudden I can breathe. I don’t feel like I’m selling myself out as a writer just to participate in the social web. I am more excited about the web than I have been in a lonnnnng time. 

PS: This post has a title. You can see it in the WordPress view, but not (yet) in the Mastodon view. But I’m told by my friends at Automattic that the title will show up in the post where it belongs soon.

I got a lot of shit when FeedLand first came out because it used Twitter for identity. I had been doing that for about eight years, because it was convenient. Almost everyone had a Twitter account, and their developer support was really good, it was easy to create a new app, they didn’t care what you did with it, and their API was fine. 

But then Elon Musk bought it and people were angry with me — me — because I used Twitter this way. So I had to do a very quick corner-turn, even so it took a few months, and during that time I was the victim of a lot of hate mail (ask Leo Laporte why he hates me, for example). I worked as fast as I could. The Twitter identity stuff was deeply integrated, and it wasn’t a matter if just swapping out one set of functions and replacing it with another. 

So I switched to WordPress for identity, because I was working with Automattic on a project, and I felt even stronger that it was a safe choice, the company had been around for 20 years and as far as I knew had never been controversial. And it worked for a while. Except now they are controversial. Oh my god. Geez Louise. I am not a lawyer. My mother loves me. Etc. 

I also added email identity to FeedLand at the time, as a backup, so I wouldn’t have to deal with this again. But I realllllly hope WordPress settles down and resumes its quiet profile, so it’s safe to build on their systems, which remain strong, liberal, with good performance and reliability.

I’m going to start using this wordpress/mastodon site to write some blog posts. Why not?

Here’s an idea. Let’s re-assemble the 1990s blogosphere here in the Mastoverse? 

Just occurred to me when one of my old blogger friends from the 90s followed me on Threads. Why do we need Facebook to get us together, and will we ever be satisfied with how they manage our new world? Come on. We know better than that.

Also, we need a shorter way of saying wordpress/mastodon — nothing really jumps out at me. But this really has potential imho. 

Love, Dave

I’m going to fix a problem in loading the user’s list of blogs on wordpress.com.

Now it loads the sitelist at start, regardless of what’s in wordpressMemory.sitelist.

It takes about a second to run on my setup, but we don’t wait for it to complete before continuing the initialization. 

If you don’t do this, how do you know when to reload the site list? If you don’t reload it, your changes will never show up, and you won’t be able to create posts on new sites. 

It should now work properly now. (heh)

I had put down the wordland project, and was working on some new features for my blog, when it seemed it was time to try to push this out there.

it always takes a bit of time to swap one project out and swap another one in. find the server app, remember how everything works. making a change, fixing a bug or adding a feature is a good way to dive in. 

so i made a major change. since there are no users other than me at the time i don’t have to worry about breaking anyone. so when they say you should rush to ship, i’ve been appreciating for the last few years how nice it is to wait a really long time before shipping, if you never do, you can always try out a new idea without worrying about the users because i am the only one.

which reminds me, the real hurdle i have to get over in the is app is not in fixing bugs or getting everything exactly where i want it — i already did that. i think it’s a beautiful little app, and it shows a lot of thought went into how it works. the big thing i had to prove is that i want to use it for writing. this is always a problem because i’ve been writing in my outliner for a very very long time. so it’s not going to fit as well for me as that app does. i just have to get into a flow. and before anyone gets too tired of this app, i’ll have an outliner working in this land too. won’t be hard to do and it’ll probably be possible to use the outliner or flat text editor to work on the same content. that’s my goal in everything — to have file format standards so that lots of tools can be developed for different modes of writing. 

anyway it’s time for davey to take a break! 🙂

Bing bong bing bong.

I want to see what it’s like to store the drafts of the text of a post in markdown instead of html. 

Not sure why I didn’t do it this way to start.

So you will see me update this during the day, and maybe beyond, and the changes are happening on my server, not on Mastodon or WordPress. 

My server keeps drafts of your stories, so you can write and write as long as you like, without anything being made public. But I am now going to click the paper airplane icon to publish this.

A link to this post on Mastodon. 

Okay — we’re now saving this in markdown to see what that breaks.

And we’re correctly converting back to HTML when we load the text for editing. 

I expect there will also be some server-side changes needed. My guess is that the markdown text is now showing up in the wordpress version. It quite possibly works in the Mastodon version because it (iirc) has some markdown support.

Okay — i must be forgetting something about the server, because the WordPress version has the Markdown text correctly rendered as HTML. How about that! I’m going to have to go look for the code that’s doing the conversion and how the frack it knows to do this. 

But before doing that I want to see how lists come through. Here are three places whose names begin with R.

1. Rhode Island
2. Rwanda
3. Rodeo Drive

Let’s see! 🙂

I figured out why it appears the server is converting the markdown to html — it’s because we pull the text straight from the editing buffer when publishing, and when you’re editing it, it is in HTML. The thing is we should save the text into the database record as markdown text there too and we aren’t. But it might actually work with that bug left in. Going to test.

So here’s the deal on what markdown you can use and not use for now (until there’s a markdown icon in the UI) — when you’re writing in wizzy mode, you can use the markdown elements that are accessible through the UI — ie the popup menu and the sidebar menu (which currently doesn’t have any formatting commands but probably could and should).

Good morning architecture astronauts!

I’m reporting from the Verse of Dave, where the Mets rule and the Phillies fans are sad. In NY we love the Phillies by the way. Some people say we hate the Red Sox but actually we love them too. The teams that let you win, we have nothing but kind words for them.

Okay that was fun. Back to work! 😄

I have a fair amount of work to do on my little editor for the social web. I left some loose-ends there that I should fix before asking other people to use it. 

In a few seconds this post should show up here.

How interesting. Today the post did not show up in my corner of mastodon.social. Hmmm.

So it didn’t show up when I first posted it, but when I updated it did. 

Good morning architecture astronauts!

I’m reporting from the Verse of Dave, where the Mets rule and the Phillies fans are sad. 

In NY we love the Phillies by the way. Some people say we hate the Red Sox but actually we love them too. The teams that let you win, we have nothing but kind words for them.

Okay that was fun. Back to work! 😄

I have a fair amount of work to do on my little editor for the social web. I left some loose-ends there that I should fix before asking other people to use it. 

In a few seconds this post should show up here.

This is a test of the ActivityPub publishing system. I couldn’t believe this showed up in Mastodon. I wrote it up on my blog. Here are my notes:

• If I make a change to this post on WordPress, the changes flow through to Mastodon. 
• It just takes a bit of time before they make it across all the servers. You will see this update in the post before very long. I’m going to time it. 
• Using the stopwatch function on my Apple Watch it takes approx 13 seconds before the update shows up on Mastodon, after I updated the post on the WordPress server. It’s perfectly acceptable and honestly I was surprised it worked. 

BTW, if you’re coming to this through WordPress, this is where you can see it on Mastodon.