I hit a snag implementing cmd-return in LO2. It worked fine as long as there was no HTML markup in the text. I explain in this video, to the best of my ability, why that seems like it should be utterly simple, but isn't. (This feature isn't released yet.) #

Joe Trippi: "We lost the digital advantage Dems once had."#

A bit of advice to Joe Biden, trying to satisfy the press with pushback against Trump slurs. "Remember folks, Trump is the Birther dude." Come back at Trump with the truth, take the spotlight off you. Give the press all they need to stop dragging your family through the dirt. #

Today is the first of two Q&A days in The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Here's the question I'd ask of the president's defenders. Trump did something bad. If we don't remove him, he'll do more of that. And so will future presidents. We could throw out the Constitution. The presidency would be a for-profit enterprise, with the president selling favors to foreign leaders in return for favors and money. Could he do similar deals with the head of the FBI and DOJ? Why not? The Constitution no longer has any force. Congress no longer serves as an oversight on the executive. You say we should acquit Trump. So this new form of government is okay with you? And if it's not (we hope) what should we do? #

Read this thread by Tom Nichols, a Never Trumper. Lots of good advice.#

Loser 2 flies to Moscow to meet with Loser 3, after his party with Loser 1 at the White House.#

Lots of great TV. The last episodes of the great Bojack Horseman on Netflix on Friday. Meanwhile the best episodes of The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump are on today and tomorrow. And the Super Bowl and its commercials air on Sunday. Go Niners!#

If you have a paywall, do it the way Bloomberg does. Give me enough to know what’s in the article. I might pass on the link anyway.#

Ben Smith, current editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed News is a good choice to be the new media columnist at the NYT. He has more of a bloggers perspective imho. I like that when he got his hands on the famous Steele dossier he shared it with the world. He got in hot water with other professional news people, but why would a reporter feel compelled to keep such a hot news item private? Isn't their job to make important information public? I came to like him listening to this podcast with David Remnick of the New Yorker. #

Scroll is now open to the public. What do you think? #

Joni Ernst has lost her mind. #

Braintrust query: Is there an icon like this: in the current version of Font-Awesome? I'd like to upgrade to the latest, but without this or something very close to it, I can't. #

In a recent version of Electron, they grabbed the Cmd-` keystroke to do something in the system. I was using it in an app that I depend on, use all day every day, I'm using it right now as I write this. Now Cmd-` doesn't work. The command is still in a menu, but it's way more work. Every time I have to do that work I project evil thoughts at the person who did this. I understand there's supposed to be a way around it, a way to grab the keystroke back from Electron, but I spent a half-day not getting it to work. I don't have that many half-days to throw away. Now I'm seeing the same thing happen in Chrome. Cmd-` -- they must think there are no SPAs that use it, or they don't care. Now I wonder what the groundrules are. Are all my keystrokes up for grabs by the system vendor? I so vastly preferred the web when the bigco's didn't throw their weight around. When they were trying to coalesce to a standard (which they did) instead of shatter the platform into bits (which seems to be happening now). #

The silver lining from all this michegas is that millions more Americans will have a realistic appreciation for how our government works. I know I'm learning at an incredible clip. And don't overlook that many more millions around the world will too.#

An example of for-the-record writing that shouldn't be on a private network with no commitment to host. What Susan Collins says at this point is something that must be available to historians. She's a government official, responsible to the citizens of Maine. #

When SNL said the devil invented podcasting. #

Video demo of a new LO2 feature Doc asked for. Put the cursor in the middle of a paragraph. Press cmd-return to split the paragraph at the cursor position, creating two headlines. Simple, I do this manually all the time, with copy-paste which is more tedious and error-prone. Also going to do the inverse, cmd-backspace to merge two headlines.#

Continue to be impressed with Brian Lehrer's Impeachment podcast. Highly recommend this episode with Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare. I was going to ask Lehrer to do a show on what the US will be like after a Trump acquittal. This episode is a good start. Before watching another hour of CNN or MSNBC, listen to this. You'll learn a lot more. #

Amy Klobuchar is like a homemade chicken pot pie on a cold winter's day. I think after all the rock and roll the flyover folk would like a little peace and quiet. That's what I want. Not to have to worry about the US govt blowing the world up. #

I never saw this SNL parody of a 2016 HRC commercial. #

Journalism is partisan now. Can’t help it. Just being ethical and educated is now a partisan position. We weren’t raised to believe that, but it’s the new reality.#

The credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump: "Donald Trump's the smart one, y'all elitists are dummmmb." There's more. This is the new mode for CNN. Laugh at the credulous boomer snowflakes that are wrecking the world. #

Video of Trump dinner where he orders Lev and friends to "take out" the Ukrainian ambassador. #

Republican senators should watch this scene from Game of Thrones. You see that guy Joffrey, the guy talking about "putting a son" in the attractive woman -- he's a lot like your leader (except he has nice hair). Wait for the punchline. You're going to love it!#

The Dems should embrace the Repubs-with-heads-on-spike meme. They would be doing the Repubs a favor actually because even if they deny it, we know that some of their heads will be on spikes before long. Let's debate that on CNN.#

Here's what my day's been like so far. Woke up at 9:30AM. Made some breakfast, turned on WNYC on my Alexa. Listened to their summary of the previous days' impeachment speeches, no mention of Pikes and how angry Republican senators were (thanks for that), then at 10AM they started broadcasting the speech by the White House counsel (who, I thought was supposed to represent the office of the president, not the president in person, but what of it) and he started into the lying and deception. I couldn't handle it. Told Alexa to stop. Finished my orange juice and skipped the coffee and went upstairs and back to bed. Woke up at about 1PM. Guess I needed the sleep. Would you believe it's raining in January. I moved my car out of the carport and into the rain, it could use a wash, totally mud-covered. I feel depressed. I think we're over the edge again, about to free-fall into another worst thing in the world. God please help America. Your devoted servant, Admiral Davey.#

My mother was a beauty. Always I had the most beautiful mother in school. The other kids said that. I was proud. She married a man, my father, who was not beautiful. I found myself wishing the other day that she had married a beautiful man, then I would be as beautiful as she was. But then I thought, then, I would not be me. Or would I? I have no idea. I'm going to try to get some work done now. #

I just learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect. #

My least favorite thing is people explaining why they unsub from your feed. I don't care. I have a motto. "Don't slam the door on the way out." That way you know you really are going in peace, vs the passive-aggressive control freakery you're actually practicing. Now suppose for the sake of argument, I try to make you happy and dump every political idea I have. Great. You're happy. You feel powerful. But then someone else wants me to stop writing about tech ideas that come to me, because it makes them feel inferior because last week I posted one they didn't understand. Keep going, eventually there's nothing left here. So, I've been doing this for over 25 years. By now I've heard from every control freak on the planet. Heh probably not, but it feels that way. #

Here's a great Bloomberg ad about Trump and the military. If the Dems had run ads like this in 2016, Trump would be a Fox News analyst today, like Sarah Palin. #

I got a couple of reports from people who use the Mail app on iPhones to read the nightly email. The contents of the mail only fills a portion of the window horizontally. I am able to reproduce the problem here. Apparently previously it filled the space. I've started a thread to gather info about this. I don't know how to debug this, but I will try. #

Yesterday, I included the video of Dale Bumpers' speech at the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999, but it wasn't displayed by some of the email clients. Here's a link to the video on C-SPAN. #

So far people seem to like the RSS version of the nightly email. I don't like the way it looks in readers, and I want more features, but if that's where some people want to read my stuff, of course I'm happy. The important thing is that you read, listen and watch (and think of course). #

An idea for a recurring sketch on a comedy show. Two actors, one plays a Trump supporter. Someone who speaks like an actual Trumper, who says things that echo what's said on Fox. Vary the gender, where they're from, etc. Each time, they discuss current events with an actor who is not a Trump supporter, serious, plays it straight. Now here's where it gets interesting. The Trump supporter realizes how wrong it was to support Trump. They do something to demonstrate that they see the light. Remember, they're actors. It's scripted. So the outcome is always the same. I would love to watch this, just for the release. Also it would really piss off Trump supporters, which is an extra bonus. Worth trying maybe on SNL or the Daily Show.#

I am watching the trial, hoping for a moment like this. #

A Trump unencumbered by the Constitution could make this happen very quickly imho.#

I keep hearing that the outcome of The Trial of Trump is either acquit or remove, but there's a third possibility that we should prepare for. He might not be removed but is not acquitted either. Say the vote is 55 to convict vs 45 to acquit. He remains president, but a majority of the Senate voted to remove him. That's not a win. It shakes his tree. "Keep fucking with us and maybe lose some more support in the Senate and maybe next time we have enough votes to put you out." Before you say that's not going to happen, it might. The Repubs are at least as savvy as we are (heh, we're babes in the woods compared to McConnell), and know that some of their senators come from purple states like Maine, Colorado and Arizona. And there may be other senators who may want to vote to convict because they're more independent, like Romney, Murkowski and Alexander, for example. The Repubs have room to help some of those senators without giving up ten more months of stacking the courts with unqualified Republicans. They might want to send a signal to El Presidenté that the US isn't quite his banana republic yet. It's not an impossible outcome. It's all negotiable in politics. #

Hacker News thread on re-thinking RSS. Here's my comment. #

BTW, to Wikipedia's mistaken claim that a columnist gave podcasting its name, look at this Google Trends graph. See where the graph starts to climb? That's Sept 2004, when we gave what we were doing the name podcasting.#

Opening presentation at Trump's trial by Adam Schiff. #

I just did a transition on instantoutliner.com. Complete rewrite of the server from top to bottom. I want to do a bunch of development work here, so I had to have a clean foundation. The previous version was last updated in 2016, so it was using the old technology. If you published an outline in the last few days, I might have lost the link to it. It shouldn't have happened but it did. And thanks again to Doc Searls for helping be the other side of users and developers party together. It's the formula that works.#

I hear that some Republican senators actually listened to the evidence against the president yesterday. #

A third version of For No One, this time in the studio. #

Getting back on track podcast-wise after our brief brush with politics. I explain in this 25-minute cast what I'm doing here and why I value the connection with Doc. It's all about creating a groove with smart people so we can keep innovating. We used to call it (as I'm sure Doc remembers) "users and developers party together." I thrive off collaboration with people such as Doc. I provide examples of other times I've benefited from the insights of others to create new uses for networks. #

Doc's mission is Customer Commons. #

The nightly email is available as an RSS feed. However I'm sure it's going to look pretty awful because, unlike email, RSS readers don't allow us to include styles. I could of course add the style definitions to the source namespace, where I've put my customizations. If you're an RSS user, give it a try and let me know. #

I was spooked last night by how much Jeffries conveys "Obama." The 8th Congressional District of New York. #

Brilliant. Kids are swapping AirPods in class then using text to speech to talk without talking.#

This is amazing. I read a story at the NY Post saying Fairway is filing for Chapter 7. It's a much-loved grocery chain in NYC. I posted a link on Facebook, because I know a few people who go there and got a link to a Twitter post from the company saying they're fine, no plans to shut down. Can't wait to find out what happened here. #

Last night's emails went out late. Sorry. A glitch in the system. This time it was my software, not detecting an error and re-trying. It may be time for a revision to the mail-sending software. #

Doc's oddcast on what comes after the Repubs acquit. I will respond forthwith. Doc did the outline. #

And my retort to Doc. I cover a lot of ground, tying together all the threads on Scripting News. We're headed to a China/Soviet Union type government in the US. Tech will make it so much easier. Doc was right there will be a lot of angst about all this. But forget the election, and forget Congress. It's over. He not only will be able to ignore the Constitution, he also has Barr, who is infinitely more useful to Trump than Sessions. But unlike everyone else, I don't take it as a given that the Repubs will acquit. They must see the danger. What if a majority vote to convict, but not enough to remove him. That's a third outcome no one seems to consider. #

Just tuned into a discussion on NPR that failed to take into account that the president was caught trying to steal the election. If you don't consider that, of course waiting for the election sounds more reasonable.#

Re posting a nightly digest in the RSS feed. Been down that road in other contexts. Feed readers are so inconsistent, the result would be garbage for many if not most people. The platform is good at doing what it does, and that's it. The developers aren't listening. Also it wasn't easy to find an email format that works well enough across email clients, and it still looks mangled for some people. Email has only been an approximation of what works.#

A Beatles song. Prototype. Finished product. #

Look I have a huge dildo. #

Play it out. The Repubs acquit Trump tomorrow. What then?#

The Dershowitz Defense is the only thing between Trump and eviction. Is it enough of a fig leaf for Romney, Collins and the other so-called Republican moderates?#

In the voting booth we can be true to ourselves even if we can't speak up in public. You have to be careful about creating resentment in your campaign. You might not be able to hear it until it's too late.#

What voters want is incredibly simple. They want to know you hear them. How to show? Say what they say the way they say it. Do that well and you've got the vote. #

When Republicans say the Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump from the beginning, the truth is that the American voters elected a Democratic Congress specifically so they would impeach Trump. BTW, Trump lost the last election, in 2018, despite having a huge advantage due to gerrymandering. #

There's a folder on scripting.com called rssArchive. It has a lot of files in it going back to 2000. They all appear to be RSS files. I have no recollection how these files were created. But it might be interesting to have a look to see how my RSS support may have changed at times. #

If you've ever been to dinner with me, you know that I almost always ask What's The Song? Well, I have an answer for that. #

Imagine if these guys weren't white.#

We are at a terrible moment. Until Trump was impeached and the articles delivered to the Senate, there was always something more to do. But this is the end. Trump, post-acquittal, will be the monarch, in control of a hugely powerful military, economy and lest we forget it, the people who make up all this power, Americans. With new tricks the Chinese are working on, and no doubt Silicon Valley is as well, quietly, an American monarch will be all-powerful, able to reach into personal relationships in ways the Soviet Union couldn't dream of. If by some miracle the Senate votes to turn back, then we will have just barely dodged a bullet. But it seems more likely we're going straight into the fire without even trying to hit the brakes. #

A couple of worthwhile podcasts. Brian Lehrer's Impeachment podcast is the adult version of what you hear on cable news. It still focuses on process and horse races but it goes into more detail, Lehrer has a sharp mind, and is a great interviewer, so you learn more. And Planet Money, always good, has a piece on privacy and billboards. I kept wanting to show them their own story about social credit in China. No longer are the concerns about privacy theoretical and narrow. It's definitely coming to the US. #

I was corrected yesterday when I used the word exonerate in a tweet. People felt acquit was the correct term for what happens if Trump is absolved (heh another verb) by the Senate. The thesaurus thinks they're synonyms btw. Another verb would be annointed, because no doubt a decree will follow from King Trump I (his new title, no sarcasm) requiring everyone to say nice things about him, or their charge cards won't work to buy groceries. See also social credit an innovation of the Chinese. #

They're still arguing on Twitter about which word is correct. This is one of the saddest comments about what Americans were thinking about as our Reichstag was burning. Is the correct verb burning? I think enflamed was closer. #

How to defend against phishing. Stop and think if you’re granting access to your Google account, for example, and ask yourself how did I get here? If it wasn’t an operation you initiated, if you clicked on a link to get there, you probably don’t want to grant access.#

Maybe the solution to the paywall model is daily subscriptions. I pay $1 to read Vanity Fair for today only. Tomorrow it's the New Yorker. Use my browser wallet to pay.#

You'll know we're totally over the line when congressional Democrats are arrested and tried for impeaching the Trump. #

Trump nearly started World War III. Clearly his motives, as with Ukraine, were entirely personal. #

Today's song: Anything goes. #

There was a great New Yorker article in September 2016 that laid out what a Trump presidency would be like. We need to do that again. We're staring at the next level. What if Trump succeeds at fully taking over the government? What if he's acquitted? What will that be like?#

Now that I've said it, RSS really is not a good way to read my blog. The right way is to wait until the day is over and read all of it from top to bottom. That's the way I put it together. It's a daily cycle thing. For now subscribe to the email. We may need a new kind of reader that doesn't have the limits of email (I'm well aware of them, having written my own email distribution software) and RSS (ditto). #

I've heard a dozen reports about the mystery of how Parnas's friend knew the ambassador's movements and no one has said it could be because someone hacked her Google account via phishing. You don't have to infiltrate the embassy to do that.#

Plot for a scifi book. An alien race from a faraway galaxy visits earth. We know they're coming and where they'll land. When they show up, they walk by the humans and greet the dogs. Turns out dogs are the master species of earth. And of course the aliens are canines as well.#

People are cackling over the design of the Space Force uniform. Why do they need camouflage in space? Obviously it's not really a priority. I'm a big believer in prior art, and there's an obvious choice here. License the design of the Star Trek uniforms from whoever owns them. It has the advantage of looking vaguely futuristic, and it makes Star Trek downright prescient. That is if the Space Force ever amounts to anything. #

Doc's podcast for the day. This time he has a public outline with notes. I'm going to do some work on the outline reader. Creating a groove. I updated the outline reader software to hot-up his links, to make it a bit more readable on a big screen, and a lot more readable on mobile devices. It's been a long time since I touched that code, I actually had a hard time finding it. 😄#

Doc has been outlining his podcast, so I started outlining mine. I have not recorded it yet.#

The best way to experience my blog these days is via email, not RSS. That's not the last word, but right now that's where we're at. That goes for my podcasts too believe it or not. #

If I ask you to post something you wrote on Facebook on your blog, so I can point to it, it's because I thought you said something interesting, and I'd like to share it through my blog and feed, but I can't share Facebook posts outside of Facebook. I have a rule about that, and I rarely break the rule. Lots of reasons for it. #

I really liked Jojo Rabbit, even though it got mixed reviews. You start out wondering what the hell they're doing, but in the end it's a good simple little story that has a lot of meaning. A sort of lite version of Handmaid's Tale. I really liked that Rebel Wilson was in it, a good fit, as was the chief Gestapo guy, and Jojo's best friend. What's not to like? #

Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”#

My great-uncle, Arno Schmidt, a German author, died in 1979. #

Dan MacTough answers yesterday's query. Add disown -a after the nohup call. I'm testing it and so far it works.#

Who ever thought that titles, or the lack thereof, would be the end of blogging? As they say god works in mysterious ways. Also, it's even worse than it appears. 💥#

I must've done something terribly wrong because there's a symposium in NYC in February about how to keep the silos from taking ownership of podcasting, and I don't know any of the speakers. How are we ever going to get anywhere if we don't work together? Oy.#

Neat new trick in my blog. When I generate links to titled posts, I put the title in the link, after the question mark in the URL. Example. The browser ignores it, as does the JavaScript code in the page. It's there to provide a human-readable title for the post. You might ask, why not just make the title the link? We did that, for many years, but then you couldn't change the title, or the URL would get out of sync with the title. It's more honest imho to just give each post a URL that is not a function of the title. But it's still nice to have the title present. So there you go, a neat solution and an honorable tradeoff. #

Now is the time for me to respond via podcast to Doc. 28 minutes which seems to be the default length of one of these voicemailcasts. I don't mind vacuous platitudes. Wilt Chamberlain. My first winter in the country. There was no 3-point play when WC was playing. Here's the epic James Harden 3-pointer. If you shove the microphone into someone's face they don't have time to get nervous. Maps. I loved maps when I was a kid, and miss them terribly because of iPhones. Hillary's Emails and how the know-how of literally millions of people didn't influence journalism. Any one of these people could have helped, but journalism somehow didn't figure it out. Why can't universities do things? University is a 7-by-24 conference center. Fargo. Alex Jones and Shorenstein. The speaker whose name I couldn't remember was Bruce Sterling. Sorry man. More about creating a groove. First you become a habit, then you become an example, and that's a groove. #

BTW no one or anything is going to "awaken" the Trump base. That's not how it works. When friends are in a bad marriage, one day you hear they're breaking up, you saw it coming but if you had tried to "awaken" them, they would have kicked your ass for butting in.#

There ought to be a TV show entitled What's The Scam!? Contestants compete to design a scam that explains mysterious Trump behavior. For example, Mnuchin gets to loot the Secret Service in return for not disclosing Trump's travel expenses. #

Braintrust query: I thought that if I run an app detached using nohup, that if I quit the terminal window, or my desktop system powers off, the app would continue to run. It doesn't. #

I should do a this.how piece on how to use my RSS feeds.#

I finished watching all three seasons of the Fargo TV series. I can't recommend it highly enough. I started to talk about it in the podcast coming out later today, but didn't finish the analogy. The hottest place in the US is always Death Valley. Every day. So when they report the highest temperature on weather reports, they're telling you the place with the second highest temperature because it would just get boring to always say Death Valley. I think that may be how it works for TV series. Fargo is the best, hands down, nothing compares. It's incredibly funny the way Quentin Taratino movies are, or Itchy and Scratchy, it's filled with Easter eggs, and until you watch it twice (at least) you won't see the connections between the characters. For example, in Season 1, two of the main characters were also in Season 2, but it took place 25 years earlier. And there are echoes of the Fargo movie. So I often say The Wire is the best. What I really mean is it's second best. Fargo is, until further notice, the best thing on TV.#

Every once in a while I put out a tweet that gets forwarded a lot. This might be one of them. Trump has always reminded me of famous Jewish comedians. He borrows bits from Joan Rivers, Don Rickles and this clip reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield, with his self-deprecating humor. He talks about his hair as being magnificent. Everyone in the room must realize his hair is bizarre and ugly. He'd look a lot better if he just got a normal haircut for a bald 73-year-old guy. What does he see when he looks in the mirror? Does he still see the young Donald, or does he see the old fool the rest of us see. Of course the press helps sell his buffoonery. It's our way of laughing at ourselves. Look what the great USA has been reduced to. We used to see ourselves as Uncle Sam, now we look in the mirror and see Bozo the Clown. #

Doc's next cast. The quote he was looking for is "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." Maybe I don't get what you're trying to do Doc. But I actually think we're talking about the same thing. So glad Doc is using LO2. Esquire's Doubious Achievement Awards. Yes! Doc is going to watch Fargo. If this were in Iowa it would be a state park. (His house in Santa Barbara.) You can see 25 million people from the top of Mt Wilson. #

One more thing for Doc re LO2. If your outline is something you want to share with me and the other people listening to your podcasts, it's pretty easy. In the File menu choose Get public link. It will confirm that you want to make the outline public. Then a dialog will appear with a link to a page on instantoutliner.com. Copy that link, view it in the browser, send it to whoever you want to share it with. If you send it to me, I'll post it on Scripting News. Now any changes you make in your outline will be reflected immediately for everyone who's watching it. #

I created my own show notes outline and shared it.#

My voicemailcast response to Doc's last. Doc, stay with the Voice Memo app on your iPhone. It's like using the iPhone as your default camera. It fits in your pocket. It's probably there when you have an idea. Here's the link to fat tweets. A pitch for Fargo the TV show. Doug Engelbart and the tech he carried with him. Shedding projects. David Bunnell's story. My grandmother. Creating a groove. #

There are 649 references today on Google for voicemailcast. #

The cutest video ever. I love you are you stupid man?#

On Twitter all partisanship is fake, until further notice.#

Poll: How much will Trump's presidency cost us?#

With all the michegas about Bernie and Warren, here's what I think. My friends, they're both perfectly awful choices for president. Bernie is still living in the 60s. He has no ideas about the world as it exists today. Ask him. Second, Warren is a Harvard professor. She's not of the people. She's more comfortable in the faculty lunchroom, making snide jokes about the little people. They're both incredibly terrible choices to run the country starting in 2021. Neither will get done what they say they will, that will require team-building skills which neither have, and compromise, which means you have to listen. Even Obama, a relatively young person, was totally unprepared to deal with foreign hacking of our election. There's a reason Bernie doesn't have any apps on his phone. I bet he doesn't know what an app is or what the capabilities of mobile devices are. If he did, I think he'd be screaming about it in the special way Bernie screams. 🚀#

If you look at it as if you were hiring someone to put the country back together after the Trump combination heart attack, stroke, colon cancer, head-on car crash, you'd want someone who has gotten shit done. Who would see the problems we have now as interesting challenges. Would know who wants what in exchange for the things we need to do. Someone with a rolodex of effective people. Neither Warren or Sanders have the ability to do any of that. Elect them and at best you get a Jimmy Carter. I don't mean weak, the way the Repubs do, I mean having no idea how to get things done in Washington, and therefore proceeding to get nothing done.#

On Sunday I wrote a piece about the walls journalism puts up to keep the rest of us only speaking in the aggregate, to all our detriment imho. There are experts all over the place, who can provide fresh perspectives on the news, to engage people's minds, and set examples for creative approaches. I lamented that even though there is a former outstanding blogger running Shorenstein, one of the leading university think tanks for journalism, the walls remain, and we're no closer to fulfilling the opportunities created in the early web. Nicco Mele, the blogger I was referring to, is no longer in charge of Shorenstein. I was so-advised by two former colleagues. I'm really out of the loop, that's for sure. Anyway, the new director is Nancy Gibbs. Best of luck and please let me know if there's any way I can help. 💥#

If you're working in Node.js and need to generate an RSS feed, you're welcome to use the package I wrote for use in all my apps. Follow the new example app to get an idea how it works. Just create two simple JavaScript objects, and call rss.buildRssFeed, and it creates a valid RSS 2.0 feed. It's really solid, burned in and tested in a wide variety of readers and aggregators. Variants of this code have been generating RSS feeds since (oy) 1999. #

I wonder if the new features being added to GitHub allow you to point to a specific function, and have the link continue to work through new versions of the code? Something that I've always missed in GitHub. #

I’ve known Lessig for decades and always found him to be a thoughtful, kind, generous person. I read his latest piece, and look forward to a similarly thoughtful response from the NY Times.#

DocCast 2.0. This is an interesting medium because unlike other podcasts I've listened to Doc on, in this mode he gets to talk as long as he wants and can pause, and say whatever you want. Anyway I've decided I'm going to build a basketball court so when you visit we can meditate over shooting hoops. Anyway. Focus is the thing. Creating a groove. And making each other more powerful. That's going to be my next chapter. I do want to hear about your experience with Medium. We all have our own stories. I also want to tell you a story about Dave Bunnell. And why walking is the best.#

Something you believe the president has done well?”#

A presidential candidate who has no apps on his phone is not qualified to be president in 2021 and beyond. Apps are a frontier we crossed ten years ago. Some people, including a columnist at the NYT are impressed. That tells you something about who writes editorials at the Times too.#

The next president should be creating a new social net for governance that involves all the voters who want to be involved. American citizens of voting age only. Doing real things to make America work better in every way, especially politically. I wrote this idea up in 2009 as Obama took office and didn't follow through on the promise (imho) of his campaign. Sanders is a nice guy for sure, but he can't do the organizing we need to do (see above). It's not something you can delegate. I think Bloomberg may get this, but I'm not sure. The politicians running for office are still very old school, and Sanders is the oldest of them.#

I tuned in a bit of CNN and NBC yesterday, they were obsessing about the president's offhand claim/lie that he thought there were four embassies being targeted by the assassinated Iranian general. By now they should know Trump-speak. When he says he "thinks" something that means he made it up. What's the point in wasting so much time on it, when everyone with a mind understands exactly what he was saying. #

BTW, of course they didn't brief the Gang of Eight on the imminent threat for the simple reason that there was nothing to brief them on. #

I'm having the best time writing my blog these days. What makes the difference? You. I play my blog the way a musician plays the piano or guitar. I can hear what I play, but I'm most interested in what you hear. I'm not running McDonalds or Starbucks, I've got a little coffee shop in town. I serve the drinks, tell stories, decorate the place, choose the music and lighting, bring in guests, all to pass the time in the most Dave-friendly way I can. I look for others doing their own things, so we can perform together. Our ideas influence, are tested and improved on. I'm back in the 90s and all of a sudden there's blue sky in every direction. All because, imho, in 2017, I decided to be myself again. 💥#

Andrew Shell opens a thread on Twitter for Overcast, an iOS podcast client, asking why he was unable to subscribe to Scripting News. Turns out Overcast doesn't like titleless posts. I don't use Overcast myself, so I can't offer specific advice, but it is not acceptable to use the file name as a title. That's not what the file name is for. I described the use-case in a tweet (of course without a title, tweets don't have titles). Vendors tend to ignore advice on these issues, and that's kept us from growing. I used to budge for them on this issue, but decided in 2017 to stop. All the compromises meant that my blog disappears. Bottom-line: I put podcasts on title-less posts. That's never going to change. #

I was hooked on Klobuchar when she stared down Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing. She doesn't rattle. I think Trump should be followed by a woman, one the Repubs have yet had a chance to work on. I don't think Americans will stand for him abusing her.#

I have a bunch of things on my mind ready to go this morning, including the next in a series of voicemailcasts with Doc Searls, a defense of XML when used as an object serializer, and the awful tendency of techies, esp those who work at Google, to have little respect for stuff that works, always wanting to reinvent without using their supposedly brilliant minds to evaluate their approach, and thereby burning decades of knowhow on a bonfire of geek vanity. Probably a few other things I'm not remembering at the moment. #

Okay first up is the 26-minute podcast that follows Doc's kickoff of our nascent series. You will feel like you're eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends, which is totally what it is. I remember the first time I met Doc, in Buck's restaurant in Woodside, CA. I also remember very clearly the day in 1999 I was at his house in Redwood City, helping him get going with his Manila blog, he was one of the very first, and understood blogging in an instant. Doc looks like Wilford Brimley. He got the name Doc because he was a radio personality in North Carolina in the 1970s. He has a radio voice. In this voicemail I talk about Fargo, the masterful FX series. I just watched season 2 and am now working my way through season 3. I talk about my development process for the last decade or so. Very different from the previous 30 years. That's just the beginning. It's a content-rich podcast. Hope you listen and enjoy. Looking forward to Doc's rebut.#

It's a fact that XML can be used to serialize complex objects from all kinds of programming languages. I know this because I do it. Have been since 1998. So when a geek says on Twitter that you can't, he or she could get pushback from me. Here's a thread that illustrates. Further, XML and JSON are equivalents as object serializers. I know because I generate both JSON and XML versions of the feed for my blog. And as an experiment, my new XML-RPC implementation can use JSON encoding everywhere, as an option. Of course there are not many servers that can understand this, so sticking with XML for now is the only practical option. I don't have any love for XML, but I do resent having to lose decades of progress for unrigorous technical thinking. I also don't like debating, anywhere, and especially not on Twitter. 🚀#

BTW, I recall now that there is an issue with how to represent dateTime.iso8601 and base64 types in JSON. #

A family story. My mother was a pure capitalist. She believed in hard work, being productive. She felt threatened by evidence of idleness. I drove her crazy. Even as a kid I would sometimes just sit in a chair in the living room of our apartment in Jackson Heights and think. Once she saw me sitting, lights off, no TV, no book, appearing to be doing nothing, and she lost her shit right there. Anyway, many years later, when I sold my company and then it went public, after years of begging me to get a job, her stock in the company was all of a sudden worth a lot of money. It was the only time I remember getting her unqualified approval. She boasted, even when I could hear, that I was profitable. In other words, the money and time she put into raising me made her money. ❤️#

Interesting tweet, says that it was 19 years ago today that the enclosure element was added to RSS, by yours truly, in an effort to add payloads to RSS. I looked it up, and they are right. And through the rest of January 2001, Adam and I were trying out neat hacks that could move large (for the day) audio and video files back and forth between our offices in California and Europe. Here's the piece I wrote that day explaining the idea. The site, twowayweb.com, is gone, but the article is preserved in many places, including archive.org. #

You want to know how bonded Doc and I are. That day in 1999 when we got his blog started, I saw he had a blue box in his office. I asked what it is. He didn't really know. I took it home with me, I didn't even ask permission. I realized even at the time this was nervy of me, but Doc was happy that I did. Turns out it was a Cobalt Qube, a revolutionary product, an idea that seemed like the future in 1999, but sadly its future has yet to arrive. Hopefully this decade it will. (On second thought maybe it was the precursor of the Raspberry Pi?)#

I've been wanting to bootstrap a podcast with Doc Searls for the longest time. When we get together, our conversations are fluid, and full of ideas and stories. In the last few years we've started to exchange voicemails using the iPhone voice memo app. A few days ago I said to Doc, in a voicemail of course, that we should try to do a podcast that was just a series of voicemails. Nothing more fancy than that. So here's Doc's first podcast, to kick things off. He talks about what I call future-safe archives. Ideas follow. I think we should retire domains the way sports teams retire numbers. We should have a plan for how to preserve the web, not a photograph of the web (that's what archive.org does). BTW, since this podcast is part of scripting.com, it is backed up every night. The original is on Amazon S3, which I think it is the most stable and affordable publicly available storage system. If it didn't exist, I'd be begging them to create it. #

An interesting idea in Doc's voicemailcast, apparently Google doesn't crawl the web these days, they use the addresses of pages that Chrome users visit. Makes total sense. It's why his pages don't show up in Google search until he goes there. Hadn't thought of this. #

BTW, I thought the idea of a voicemailcast might be original, but alas the idea is described in a post in 2006.#

Reminder: I just did a new release of XML-RPC, first since the early 2000s. The new reference version is written in JavaScript. #

2016: "If they can kill something that's worth $100 to reap $1 of value from the corpse, they see that as good business. That's the approach that has got our species into the climate change corner we're in."#

Bloomberg will continue to fund his digital operation even if he is not the nominee. Of course. What a powerful idea. A campaign that's for the good of the people more than it is for a specific candidate. Brilliant. This is just what I wanted Obama to do when he won in 2008. Continue to run the digital operation after the election was settled. People underestimate Bloomberg. Think of him as a peer of Steve Jobs. Same depth of experience and success. A visceral understanding of tech and media.#

Followup on recent threads re Facebook and journalism. Too much attention has been paid to Facebook the company, it's time to learn about the hundreds of millions of people who use Facebook, and what they're doing with it. #

Let me tell you a little story. When I was 14, I went to high school in the Bronx and lived in Queens. It was a 1.5 hour trip each way. I had a few choices but they all magically took the same amount of time. One of the routes was to take the Q16 bus to Main Street, then the 7 train to Grand Central, and switch to the 4 train uptown. The Bedford Park Blvd station is two blocks from the school. One day on the train, I remember this really clearly, I was watching all the houses and apartment buildings we passed, first in Queens, then in the Bronx. Inside every window, I guessed, was a family, like my own, possibly. With their dramas and struggles, stories, victories, history, abuse, happiness, fear. I tried to imagine how each of them might live and realized in an overwhelming way that I could never begin to understand who they were. NYC, even then, was an ethnically and economically diverse place. Of course as we traveled through the city, the people on the train changed too. Very few of them were Bronx Science students. There were all kinds of people. Who knew what any of them were thinking. The point is this. The world is huge. To keep our sanity we have to simplify it, and to do that we have to ignore differences. The stories we tell ourselves little connection to reality. And so any general statement about a community as huge and diverse as Facebook is certain to miss the mark, widely. And most of what we read only focuses on the company, not the users. To have that appear as journalism is just wrong because journalism has a higher calling, to find out what's real, what's true, and then say that. #

Remarkable. Mike Lee, R-UT, says the Constitution requires he have a spine. Seems a little late to come to that conclusion. #

A diverse thread on Twitter about judging Facebook. For me, a re-hash of the piece I wrote on January 3, about the scale of Facebook, and how the the story you hear most in journalism ignores the billion or so people who use Facebook and focuses on how they feel about the company. I've yet to see an act of journalism that didn't flaunt their conflict of interest. In the thread, Facebook has been compared to a supermarket, NBC and Times Square. It is none of those things, it's much much bigger. It's a community of a billion or more users, and is as diverse as those people are. Most people in my experience have good intentions, and that's true on Facebook. Even the ones who aren't nice, are probably just struggling with something. I'd like to see a few journalists adopt the point of view that Facebook is not a simple place, can't be reduced to good or evil, isn't a product of one or two peoples' personalities, that it's made up of an incomprehensibly huge group of people, from everywhere. #

Search for Occam's News on scripting.com.#

Boeing, Iran and Ukraine. Sounds like Mission Impossible. #

I got curious about the current controversy over .org domains. So I asked on Twitter: What's the concern over .org being privatized? How would that affect the .org domains you and I have registered? I haven't really been following this, should I?#

Dan Callahan writes: "In addition to uncertainty around registration prices, there seems to be a whole lot of shady self-dealing, and no clear motive for the sale other than personally enriching ISOC and a private equity firm run by former ICANN executives."#

Good morning CSS <span>s! 💥#

In 1996, I wrote a story for Upside, a dream really. I dreamt I was the CEO of Apple. Before Steve came back. I would buy a song, and make a new computer and drop the rest, and focus on getting developers to ship new products. Not all that different from what Steve did when he came back, except the part about developers. 💥#

Doc Searls overheard: "The only question that matters in our time is how to have good effects that last longer than a tweet. Or a few seconds, whichever is longer." #

Yesterday when I posted the instructions for how to share one of my blog posts to Facebook, in addition to trying to help a friend, I wanted to see for myself what the instructions would look like, in writing, without too much detail and without any steps omitted. The moral of the story is this. Come on Facebook, re-join the open web. Let's make it easy for people to do their writing outside Facebook for sharing inside. Let's make the wall of your silo so permeable that it ceases to be a silo. On Twitter I was asked why I keep beating this drum when it seems so unlikely that Facebook cares. I do it because I want to create a historic record, this has always been a big part of my blogging. I want to remember what sharing across silo walls was like in 2020. Maybe we'll look back and marvel that it was once this convoluted. Or maybe we'll marvel that it could be done at all. No one knows. But part of the reason I blog is to create a record. That's why I care so much about bigco's trying to erase that record for selfish reasons. #

I appreciate the shout out yesterday from Evan Williams, a former competitor who has gone on to make billions as co-founder of Twitter. It's nice that he still reads my blog, even though I have said some critical things about Medium, but all in the spirit of trying to make the web work better. Hope they have been received that way. I learned from reading his post that he has moved to New York. I think that's a good move, from San Francisco, which as a born-and-bred NYer has always seemed really small to me. Of course I've now moved to a much much smaller place. Anyway Ev if you're reading this, thanks for the kind words. 🚀#

A lot of people I knew years ago who have gone on to great success are keeping their distance. I wish they wouldn't. I have had my own experience with success, having been part of a tech IPO in the 80s, and creating a bunch of the tech in the 90s and 00s that we take for granted today. Some people may think I'm poor. I am not. The stock and real estate markets have made it pretty easy to build on a modest nest egg. But our humanity is so much more important than the ways we measure success and influence. Ultimately, no matter how rich any of us are, we don't really attain the influence we feel we deserve. I've learned that from burying two parents, both of whom had very strong opinions. Today, years after they are gone, well, no one really cares about what they thought. I care about them as my parents, the people who raised and cared for me, and I care about their struggles and accomplishments insofar as it was central to who they were. But their influence now is nil, and sadly, it was probably pretty close to that when they were alive. That's reality. So if we enjoyed each others' company before, if we learned from each other in the past, your great success shouldn't matter, it shouldn't be a barrier to more fun. #

We live in an occupied country.#

Joan Walsh: "If Bolton says he'll comply with a Senate subpoena, on what grounds could he refuse a House subpoena?"#

If Bolton were a patriot, imho, he'd arrange to give testimony in the House asap.#

I write about my blog on Twitter. I write about Facebook on my blog. I refuse to give up on the open web. #

The thing that was so frustrating about the piece from Jason Linkins in the New Republic is that he is the kind of user we need on the open web. They see it as we deserted them, but as a developer who needs smart driven creative and friendly users, when you guys left, and decided to pour your brilliance into Twitter and Facebook instead, you helped drive the downward spiral. Users matter. That's the thing I've never been able to communicate to users. Stop being sheep. Choose. It may be a little harder, you may have to give up some features at first, but if you support a creative individual developer, you could be amazed at the new power they can and will create for you. Work with developers who make tools you like. Help them. #

Postscript on the email outage. Problem solved. The mails went out last night. A perfect programming job for a Sunday. Correctly sized up the problem, determined the solution, implemented and tested all within a couple of hours, in time to take a walk and then watch the Knicks lose to the Clippers, and started reading a new excellent science fiction novel chosen from a list I can't find now. Today, the first day back to work in the New Year, I have no idea what to work on next. I'm going to look for something small and self-contained. I also documented the previously undocumented package, so maybe someone else will benefit from the work. #

Sometimes on FB people say the kind of stuff you hear on CNN from opinioneers whose job it is to say something even when there isn't anything to say. You listen to these people, and it's just a word salad of non-sentences that have absolutely no meaning. Then the host that you somewhat admire (e.g. Tapper, Melber) says that's an excellent point, Pete or that gets you thinking Gloria, and you realize they're just filling time with words that really have no meaning, and you're just wasting your time, you could learn more watching a Law & Order rerun for the 18th time. At least they're getting paid to do it. But on FB, there's just no call for it.#

Iran has the kind of opportunity the US had after 9/11. We had the whole world behind us. Had we shown restraint, we could have cemented our "sole superpower" status. Instead of spending trillions on unwinnable wars, we could have put that money into infrastructure. Rebuilt our school system. By now those kids would be in the workforce, kicking ass competitively. We would be solving problems. Amazingly Iran is in a similar place now. The US is the bad guy, the terrorist, with an unprovoked attack of apparently similar scale as the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In addition to helping Iran, it would help the people of the United States to get our country off the insane path it's on. By not responding, you deprive Trump of an enemy, and win the support of the world, including in the US. This is how the world wins. #

This is so typical. Journalist says the “good internet” ended when Google shut down Reader. Millions of users figured out how to use RSS without Google. I wonder what else this guy misses because he’s not willing to do a bit of research. #

This song is going through my head like All Along the Watchtower was in Battlestar Galactica. I hadn't heard it in years, but there it was, going round and round. There must be some way out of here. #

Trump is like the Knicks, he makes everyone look good. It's like playing checkers with someone who has no idea there is a game or has any idea of what the rules are. Rules? He just does things. #