I was reading yet another article that says my contribution to podcasting was adding the enclosure element to RSS. These people are beyond stupid. Why don't they take a minute to think about how you develop a new medium. Is it done by adding a few sentences to a spec? I don't think so. You get an idea, in this case it came from Adam Curry (thanks) and start figuring out how it will work. Then you make the software for both publishing and listening, and then publish Grateful Dead music, thinking all the people will now figure it out but they don't. So you try something else and another thing, and you give up for a while. Then you meet an NPR guy and ask him if he wants to try this idea out. For some reason he says yes, when everyone else said no or didn't listen. So you get that going, and it's great and for sure you figure now everyone will get it, but they don't. So a year later in frustration you decide to put out your own show, and do it again and again, and leave the freaking mistakes in, and because of that people get the idea that Hey if that schmuck can do it, I bet I can too, and 20 or 30 people start doing it, and it's fun, and from there, it builds and after four years you have the start of a new medium. And no that idiot journalist did not give this new medium its name. Only a total idiot would think that, which is something I get to say out loud on
Journalism is Stupid Day. 😄#
But
everyone already knows journalism is stupid, so why make a big deal about it today. Because the value of Bluesky has nothing to do with moderation. You can see how dull and lifeless and
disneyfied a perfectly moderated social network is. Look at that new bullshit thing Facebook just came out with. It's really Instagram, that's how they got all their users so fast by just getting them to
jump through another hoop. You can stop reporting that it set records. They just came up with a new design and name for Instagram and said it was setting records, knowing that the reporters were bored of hating Zuckerberg, and now were ready to say he's cool again because he is trying to embarrass the
Asshole Du Jour for journalists everywhere, Elon Musk. The thing you should say about Bluesky is that it's freaking nice that these people made a nice UI and backend for the social web and give it away for nothing. Yay Bluesky for believing in all of us. And come on if you think moderation is so great and you think it can be done for free, why don't you volunteer to do it. Yeah I didn't think so.
#
I'm gradually figuring out how to manage my work on two systems. 1. My desktop monster machine and several smaller machines with huge disks. One system, the one my work is organized around, never moves and the other, 2. a 2015 MacBook running High Sierra, with a 500GB internal drive and a 2TB external, moves with me. By the time this construction project is done, I'll be able to work anywhere, and not have a huge reconciliation job to do when I get home. Or maybe I'll travel with a Mac Mini and a nice big monitor? Or maybe I'll (someday) get everything running on Linux so I don't have to deal with all the
deprecation that Apple has inflicted on my ancient lab. So far I am still able to use
Frontier. If it were to somehow stop running, every year that goes by, it gets less likely that I'd continue. You want to make me happy, port it to Linux and don't break my code. That would make me very happy.
😄#I wish I had more interesting things to write about, but that's about it for this Tuesday.
#
Good morning sports fans!
#
Not many updates coming probably in the next few days as I try to work in two different locations due to real-world construction noise. I have a big roof repair job going on, and, as you probably know it's
raining almost every day and quite a lot, which makes the job take longer and makes the work riskier, but it has to happen now. I have to work this out. And not lose any work, and not break anything. A real high wire act.
#
The web is pretty amazing, it’s all one big namespace.
#
Man the weather in the Catskills is dismal. Raining all the time. The rivers and ponds are full. So what comes next? Well if it stops raining, summer, which is usually the best time of year here, and pretty much anywhere. It's why I live here. But this summer. Well the only thing that could be worse imho is if we had this much precipitation in winter. Well, I know that isn't actually true. The heat wave in the west sounds pretty awful. Oh we really did it, the planet is on its way to being uninhabitable by humans? Whee here we go.
😄#I don't love writing, I
said to Elizabeth Spiers on Bluesky. I'm more driven to write. I’m a
natural born blogger or NBB. We write because that’s what we do. The first impulse is to write. First thing I want to do when I sit down to work is write and when I’m thinking about more things to do, I’m usually writing about it.
#
Bluesky is in a jam because there's only one instance. They have an architecture for more instances, but now that we've gotten a look at what federation is like in practice with Mastodon and ActivityPub, I don't look forward to the same idea around Bluesky. Which is where the bind is, because that means that Bluesky, like Twitter and Facebook, would have to take on moderation and will get a lot of grief if they don't do it to people's liking. I
wrote: "I don't think they or anyone else can afford to stand against abuse on the web, it's diseconomic. People don't pay for the service, and there's an infinite supply of abuse. You know how when they add a new lane to a freeway thinking it'll ease traffic but doesn't? imho it's the same kind of thing. I do think there's hope for small social nets with dozens or maybe hundreds of users, and let Facebook have the monster social nets, they more or less have found a way to make moderation pay. I've written about this idea a lot, filed under the phrase
fractional horsepower."
#FeedLand tweak, there's a new row in the Feed Info page. Should make the flow of navigation a bit smoother.
#
Over the last couple of days I moved
this.how to an HTTPS server. It was fairly painless, but it did break some pages. If you have an
img element in the HTML or use the
image attribute in OPML, and the url of the image is on HTTP, the browser will refuse to load it, and at least on Chrome it'll look like it's still loading for a long time, possibly forever. For most of these, I'll never get around to fixing them, it just is what it is. So HTTPS despite the hype, no matter whether you convert or not, still breaks the web, and Google must know all about this and doesn't care. If a platform vendor really cared about the web as a platform, they'd look at the risk in reading an img over http and say wtf, let it go. They're like the
Soup Nazi, they have you by the balls, you know it and they know it.
#This bit of arcania has also crept into
my RSS feed. As you may know
FeedLand is now on HTTPS, it has to be because it's managing identity for itself, and if a feed item has an image only accessible over HTTP, the browser won't load it. I guess all feed readers have this problem, and I guess images from
Scripting News have always been broken? But this isn't how I remember it. Hmmm. Maybe they're doing something special, like accessing the image through a proxy running outside of Chrome's control. Haha if so
holy shit. Either it's a security problem or it isn't. I really don't think images need to be protected, but what do I know. In any case, from this point on, my images will be HTTPS too.
#
- Someday tweets will allow you to link from words to any web page on the internet.#
- You will be able to give a tweet a title.#
- You can already style text bold or italic. They kind of snuck that in there quietly? #
- I'd like to see them support Markdown.#
- You can edit your tweets for up to an hour. That's pretty good imho.#
- Twitter is basically checking off the boxes on the Textcasting vision.#
- I wonder if their competitors are noticing.#
- Also a nice RSS feed coming out of Twitter?#
- And let me enclose an MP3 for a podcast.#
It seems to me that AIs are already more intelligent than humans. When I ask ChatGPT a question, it answers it, doesn't try to turn it around, play
whatabout, or take it personally. It most definitely not a
narcissist. I don't think there's very much actual listening going on between humans, but the AIs are really good at it. Right now they're useful tools. Could they take over the world? If so, could they possibly do it worse than we do? Maybe AI rule is exactly what we need. Yes I have seen
The Matrix. Love it. Best movie.
#
A simple
Node app periodically checks if a feed still validates with the W3C service. You can modify it to check feeds you care about.
#
- When you're viewing a feed list, like this, when a feed updates, instead of inserting it at the top and forcing everything down, it displays a button. Click the button to see the new stuff. #
View updated feeds button.
#- We already had a similar feature on timeline pages.#
When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.#- That's why I say if they really want to prove their love for the open web, if they aren't just trying to lull us to sleep while they steal yet another market from the open web, they should do something that helps the web more than it helps them. #
- I know how The Mind of Facebook works. There are people at the company who believe in the open web (or at least there were at one time) and some of them have the ability to launch projects to be part of the open web, but by the time the project has to get approval from one of the top execs, it dies -- because Zuck et al have hearts of stone, and think they can have anything that isn't nailed down, and think anyone who believes in being fair to users and competitors is a chump -- a Mother Teresa type, someone to laugh at not work with.#
- There are very few people in the world as greedy and mean as Zuckerberg. Never underestimate how cold his heart is. And never believe he will do anything that benefits anyone but him.#
- I wish we had a group of tech industry veterans who could explain how to interpret moves like the ones the company that used to be known as Facebook is making wrt ActivityPub.#
- They're running a standard Embrace and Extend strategy of a giant company entering a market that's "dominated" by a small competitor that's hoping for the best. I put dominated in quotes because it's obvious that the market defined by the startup is going to be huge. But it's better if the new area is dominated by a mega corp, that is for the established billionaires. For the rest of us, it sucks. #
- It all depends on what users do. #
- Amazingly with podcasting, we were able to confuse the bigco's enough for long enough that the users learned they were entitled to choice and they suspected any effort to lock them in. That, and some grace from Steve Jobs to not try to dominate podcasting when Apple had the chance to.#
- I'm not able this time to get the message out. I'm here, I am typing into my blog, but not enough people are hearing it. Don't believe Facebook has good intentions. If they did, they would hook the main Facebook product up to the open web, not the new one. #
- Maybe it's time from some other names of the open web generation to step up and help. Facebook is going to run over the nascent federated social web the same way Google ran over RSS. That cost us a decade or more of open growth. #
- But we can put a roadblock in Facebook's way. #
- Remember how the founders of AI spoke up. #
- Well the founders of the open web could have a word too. If you're so inclined, now is the time.#
- PS: If you know a founder of the open web, please send them a link to this post. It's the web-like thing to do. 😄#
Facebook hasn't done anything to support the open web. All they've done is put it in a press release and post an email to a mail list. It's a long road from there to being on the open web. More likely they're going to use the open web and leave it a
toxic waste site after they leave.
#If Facebook really loved the open web they'd hook Facebook itself up to it. Support RSS feeds in and out. Let users have rich text and links. Basically support
Textcasting proposal.
#
When I was a grad student, in the
middle of the last century, there were two kinds of terminals in the computer lab, ones that could only display uppercase characters, and the coveted
Hazeltine terminals that could do also do lowercase. A real luxury item. I feel the same way as we approach the middle of the next century when I get to use boldface text or a bit of italic in a tweet. I laughed out loud when some text I pasted from my blog went through with its boldness intact. We have a long way to go to
get back where we were.
#I've seen people use the term "social web" where previously they'd say "social media." I like this. Going in the right direction. Let's try to bring everything back to the web. I bet most people who use the web these days only have a vague idea of what it is.
#I was just filling out a form that asked for my social media addresses and noticed how I don't remember how to specify the addresses for Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn. I had no trouble with Twitter and Threads, though I have a lot of trouble remembering the name of Threads. I think Bluesky is headed in the right direction, by letting people specify a domain name. A service that made this a bit easier for non-technical users could help here.
#
If I were designing a social net, I would make replies only visible by default to the person who posted the message being replying to. There would be an option where the originator could make the reply visible to everyone, if they thought it added something and wasn't just spam, which, these days, so many replies are. The idea of social networks being conversational hasn't been true for a long time. Anyway these days the only tool you have is to block the spammer, which I generally do, esp if the person isn't following me, which imho is a strong indication they were just searching for posts to tag with their spam.
#A not entirely new concept:
deshitification. The antidote to enshitification. Congrats to
Cory Doctorow for coining a term that has so much lasting value. Everything turns to shit. Everything is enshitified. Is it time yet to
deshitify everything? Back in the day at
Living Videotext we used to say "We make shitty software, with bugs." It was true, and of course so does everyone else. We also said we will strive to make it less shitty. We didn't put that on t-shirts, but some grouches tagged the Wikipedia page for our products with that caveat. Warning Winer makes
shitty software. Quick get them some
smelling salts. Roll out the
fainting couch. Someone found a bug. Okay so maybe a good name for a tech company is
Deshitifiers. Why not.
#BTW, when
they say it was our slogan at Living Videotext, we actually had many slogans. This is just the one
Sam Ruby liked. Sam didn't like me, and made no secret of it.
😄#Twitter is so fucked. Every time I visit Twitter it's the same messages at the top of my timeline, from July 5. Is this how Twitter ends? Locked on July 5, 2023 forever. It was a good day but it wasn't
that good.
#I'm going through my
Alice Cooper phase. Again. When I was a teen I loved the band. I always felt kind of ashamed of it. I used to go to their concerts to see what he'd do this time. I must have seen him guillotined a dozen times. He knew what fascinated teenage boys. Anyway the song rolling around in my head today is the classic
Dead Babies. It's a really awful song, I guess that's why I like it so much.
💥#
- FeedLand now does a better job with posts without titles.#
- Here's a screen shot of two posts in a timeline, neither of which have titles, followed by one that does have a title, so you can see the difference. #
Two posts without titles.
#- The new thing is the bold text at the beginning of each untitled post, so you can more easily see the structure as you scroll through it. #
- Another new feature#
- There's also a max height to a post but if you click on the body it expands to reveal the full text. Click again and it goes back to compact size. It took a bunch of iteration to get to this, it's better than what Facebook and Twitter do, where you have to carefully position the mouse to see the rest, and after expanding, the place where you have to clock to collapse it moves. In this scheme, stay right where you are and click again to collapse. #
First post has been expanded, second not.
#
They say this is an
AI-generated trailer for Heidi. If true, wow. I suspect a human did this. And if so, wow. It's just freaking great.
#
The server running Drummer and FeedLand wasn't doing well, so I decided to double the memory, and add a second CPU, basically doubling the monthly cost, which still is so low it amazes me. Anyway, it's remarkable how much better the server is doing, so I did the same for the server running my newest apps, with the same result. I now monitor the CPU and disk usage graphs for both servers, and figured out that the servers were running out of memory and thrashing by swapping stuff to and from disk. You can
see it in the 14-day graphs. The things that look like spikes are actually minutes worth of flatlining where basically nothing is coming in or out until the situation resolves. Now apparently that never comes close to happening.
#I live in the mountains west of the Hudson River, where we're getting hammered with rain this summer. We needed it, we were in a drought. I have a feeling that's over now. This last storm seems have been the tipping point for the ability of the mountains to absorb the water, now there's huge runoff, the creeks are full, there are roads that will wash out if there's much more rain. It's very easy to get depressed in this weather, but writing about it helps.
#
On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon and I did the
first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running
podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence.
#Here's a
picture I took of Chris during the interview.
#All these years later, we who love podcasting owe Chris and Mary our thanks for their pioneering efforts and sticking with it for twenty freaking years.
#
I'll believe that Facebook's new social network is growing when I get the feeling "it's happening over there." So far that hasn't happened once. To think that's it's somehow dominant is ludicrous. As a developer, I want a platform that has curious creative people ready to try out new ideas. That's a niche Twitter has now given up, probably forever, and I doubt if Facebook wants developers for Threads.
#
- Fred Wilson is excited about Threads, for the right reason, but I don't think it's going to play out the way he thinks. I replied on Threads, hunting and pecking on my tiny iPhone keyboard (I have huge hands btw). I'll expand on it here... #
- He repeats the folklore that Twitter "killed off" its app ecosystem in 2010. Certainly not at a technical level, the problem with Twitter's developer situation was that they didn't do anything to help products get the attention of users, esp important when we were filling gaps in the user experience that users desperately wanted filled. If a corporate platform wants developers they have to do this. #
- Even open source platforms need someone to spread the news of reliable and useful additions to the platform. #
- Users aren't on their own that adventurous. They like to use what everyone else is using, which makes the bootstrap hard. But the platform vendor can provide the magic that gets it going. #
- However, like Fred, I am excited. Because somewhere in this chaos (a good thing) there is at least the possibility of a developer ecosystem. That hasn't been true for a long time. I don't think that will happen in ActivityPub, for technical reasons. It needs a small amount of centralization to make the hurdle for developers surmountable.#
There’s hope for a
bootstrap pairing of the open web and social nets to create a pretty good writing platform that doesn’t lock users into one platform or another.
#
Podcast: Thoughts re the Threads rollout. And respect for Elon Musk in a limited way, reminds me of Philippe Kahn. 20 minutes.
#
Twitter isn't going away. What we should hope for is they start adding stuff to Twitter that users really like. And that'll force Facebook to do it too. As a result technology moves forward. One-party systems stagnate as we've seen.
#The discussion about Threads is happening on Twitter. In a sense nothing has happened until links to Threads posts show up here. It's an almost zero-interop system at this point.
#Actually you can embed posts in HTML pages (
example), but that's about it.
You can't even link to individual posts or threads. Or if you can, I haven't seen any. You can also link to individual posts,
example.
#
- Chip Bayers, my editor in the good old days at Wired, says they shipped too soon. I've said the same. #
- One thing they reallllly need is a browser interface, so it can exist on the same plane as the other social nets. I can't paste links back and forth between their network and others. even at that primitive level of interop, it doesn't exist. #
- On Twitter I'm able to write fluidly esp now that the character limit is just a speed bump. I've never felt in any way like writing on a phone was writing. #
- The big picture is no one gets that these tools are writing environments. so they design them to have features writers can use. #
- Earlier, I started to write about how boring, sad, depressing and unnecessary Threads is. How pathetic Zuck is. How I visualize the process that led to this product as being a combination of the TV series Succession and Silicon Valley. Facebook is desperately trying to become anything but Facebook. I like Facebook as a community. I have friends there who I would never talk with if it weren't for Facebook. I hope they keep running it. But I wish the company behind it would stop demanding attention because they are so completely unattractive. And btw, I can't get into writing on an iPhone. I write at a desk, or maybe occasionally a tablet. Everything about this product pushes me away. Maybe that'll change, maybe the people who are trying to get ahead on Threads will think up some new use for social networks that will justify using it. #
- Some of my friends think that Threads is enough, and once they fill in some missing features it will suck the life out of Twitter.#
- They might be right. Hard to argue. #
- All I want is a playground with an open API and enough creative users to try out new ideas from developers.#
- I want to go back to the pace of innovation we had going in the 90s and 00s. The big platforms snuffed all that out, corralled it and kept it in some too-restrictive bounds. Did what BillG failed to, locked us in the trunk and cut off the air supply. #
- That some of these people were the most fervent advocates for open platforms says that maybe those beliefs ran pretty thin, and the opportunity to cash it out for billions made it worthwhile.#
- Maybe we'll just be hobbyists. I'm okay with that. Or maybe people are will to pay good money to sustain creative development.#
- I don't expect that to be possible on Facebook's new network. #
Has anyone found any indication of an API as part of Threads?
#I've been developing a new thread-authoring and publishing tool for Bluesky. Looking for people who are good at reporting bugs to try it, report on the experience. Looking for deal-stoppers, important things that don't work. If you have time today to try it, please send email. Thanks!
#Maybe the inflation was caused by disruptions in the supply system due to Covid. Maybe all we had to do was wait for the system to come back online,
modulo the greed of businesses to increase profits with the air cover of "oh it's the inflation you know."
#Does Facebook with their new "threads" social network plan to fill the API Gap left by Twitter kicking the devs under the bus? Will Facebook love devs more?
#
- No web browser interface?#
- Tons of bugs! Surprising they shipped in this shape.#
- Bait and switch -- ActivityPub support real soon now. #
- I don't like Facebook the company. "Meta" is bullshit. #
- If they don't get a browser interface I doubt if I'm going to be a regular.#
- Yes I know the kids think browsers are for boomers. I don't care.#
- Here's my address on Threads.#
- Has anyone found any indication of an API as part of Threads?#
- I wonder what dogs think fireworks are.#
- I tell you what I think -- I think they're boring and stupid, and when the climate crisis is in full swing we'll look back and wonder how we came up with the idea of adding more smoke to the air as entertainment. #
- I went to the fireworks in NY harbor in 1976, the 200th birthday of America. It was supposed to be this amazing thing. I thought meh. What. Why? Bullshit!#
- The answer is of course before tv, radio, videogames, social networks, air travel, space travel, fireworks were exciting technology displays.#
- Today? No.#
Every Fourth of July the song of the day is the
US Blues, the hippie anthem of love for the USA. Wave that flag, wave it high and wide!
#Journalism should care about Google breaking the open web as much as they care about Musk breaking Twitter because, in capitalism, Musk has the right to break Twitter, he owns it, but
Google doesn’t own the web. I think the reason journalism will report on Musk breaking Twitter and not Google breaking the web is that they need a person to report on, and Google has never really had a personality. The two founders are quiet, and I don't think I've ever heard the current CEO speak a word. So they're unreportable?
#I was
wondering if
the W3C feed validator has an API. I'd like to submit my feed to it periodically to keep track of changes.
#Frum's
take on Twitter sounds right. "Twitter itself may eke out a ghostly existence for a long time, like the thing that calls itself 'Newsweek.'"
#Poll: Will you create an account on Facebook's new Twitter clone?
#
This
graph illustrates perfectly why it was time to upgrade the server FeedLand and Drummer run on.
#
- We now know that Facebook's new social network, Threads, will be available to the public on Thursday. The day after tomorrow. #
- There's lots of discourse on the net about What's To Be Done about this big event. Based on decades of experience with such launches, here's what I say.#
- No matter what we do right now it'll probably have no effect on the Facebook rollout. #
- It's better to listen, study and learn, size up the product. We don't know what it is. Wait till we find out. #
- Call them Facebook, not Meta. They're trying to run away from their legacy, but it's very relevant. People should know it's coming from Facebook not "Meta." When I see Meta my mind reads "Mets."#
- After the dust has settled, what if anything should be done may be more apparent.#
- Remember, Bigco's launch with big thunder but the products often flop. Don't get sucked into the hype. #
- Whatever you say or do now, viewed from a few weeks from now, will seem silly and over-reactive. Keep on truckin. #
- Let's study the product, discover what can be done with its APIs (assuming it has some) and keep an open mind. It's possible that some good can come from this. #
- Don't depend on journalists to study it. They tend to report on the press releases, and amp up the fear. #
- First and foremost -- don't panic. 😄#
I wonder if now what I've been trying to do with RSS, blogging and podcasting, get underneath the bigco's and live on a plane that doesn't require any one of them, makes a bit more sense now. I'm at least a generation older than most of the other techies who cohabit this space. What you're seeing now for the second or third time, I've seen five or six times. The more times you see it the more predictable it gets, and the more confidence you have in your understanding. That's why, when
Google tries to take control of the web I won't do it. All my freedom as a developer comes from the integrity of the web. Once it's gone you can't get it back. I feel the pull. I could convert completely to HTTPS, it would make my life a bit easier to do so. But I won't as long as Google is the one forcing it. If they back off and commit to not blocking the non-HTTPS web, then maybe I have more flexibility.
#
I like Bluesky/Masto because -- they promise independence from bigco silos run by megalomaniac billionaires hell-bent on conquering everything. I just want to play with my friends. I'm into working together not world domination. Been there, done that, found it boring and lonely.
#If you're a
Little Outliner user, and you can still access your files, you should download them asap. Use the
command in the Tools menu. Then you should switch to
Drummer. It's a significantly better version of LO2 and
does not depend on Twitter for identity. I think the reason it still works for some people is that we cache the login information on the server, and as long as the server doesn't restart, you can continue to use it. But the server will eventually restart, and that'll be the end of LO2. It's had a good run and Drummer has been out there for a couple of years now.
#Of course Harvard is using ChatGPT in their comp sci classes. I can't believe how snotty
journalists can be. If you were a doctor and a new treatment for cancer appeared, no matter how flawed, you'd want your students to be up on it. Maybe they'll figure out how to fix the flaws. Journalists act as if they're the only ones who know the outcome and everyone else is either corrupt or stupid. That's who covers news for us.
#
- Where did Still diggin! come from? #
- I use this phrase to end posts about stuff I'm working on that's now ready to use. A new feature, fix or workaround. #
- Here's the idea. As a developer, I started off a long time ago by digging a hole. Then I dug another, filling the first hole with the dirt from the second. Then a third and fourth and so on. The holes get a little better over time, deeper, new features, etc. But they're still holes. #
- At the end, when I've dug my last hole, what will be left is a hole and a bunch of piles of dirt. Over time, the piles erode and maybe someone else fills in the last hole and another group of humans do it all again. #
- So when I say I'm still diggin that means I'm still alive, digging holes and filling them in. 😄#
- BTW, there's another theory about where Still Diggin! came from. Back in my youth, when the NYC power utility Con Ed dug up a street they posted a sign saying "Dig we must for a greater New York!" That stuck with me. And if you think about it, it's just another instance of the use in the first explanation. #
I'm starting to think about writing a validator for the W3C's feed validator. A validator-validator. I'd submit my feed to it via a web service (not sure if they have an API), and if that feed doesn't validate with the W3C validator, and we believe it is valid per the RSS 2.0 spec, we would open an issue on their repo. Maybe if they want to be really cooperative, they could run the test feeds against their validator whenever they make an update as part of the validation process, and never release a version where those feeds didn't validate. This would
allay my concern about them breaking RSS because they don't respect or understand the
RSS 2.0 roadmap. I'd start with the Scripting News RSS feed, which
does validate at
this time. BTW, their warnings are bogus imho. They should recognize the
Source namespace not warn me about it. A copyright statement can and should be able to have a © character. Why not? The spec doesn't prohibit it, and it's part of the language we use for copyright. And this is not an Atom feed so that warning about Atom was a bad move. The authors of the original validator were promoting Atom at the expense of RSS. Why not put that to bed, it's not exactly an ethical thing for a validator to do imho.
#
New FeedLand gesture. It was a complicated gesture to see all the text of a too-long-to-fit item in FeedLand. Then it hit me, just click on the freaking text to make it bigger and then click again to make it small again. Much easier to do, and what else would a click mean?? Here's a quick
video demo. ;-)
#To say there will be no programmers in 5 years is as ludicrous as saying there will be no email users in 5 years, because an AI chatbot can write email.
#Over on Masto and Blueski you hear a lot of people rooting for Twitter's demise. I am not one of them.Twitter is deeply installed in our society. It would take a long time to rebuild something like Twitter, and I don't think it's even possible. I don't like Musk's politics, an understatement, but I see that problem as possible to overcome.
#
This is a test. I realized something, ever since
FeedLand moved to email identity and therefore had to use HTTPS to protect the passwords, any time I include an image in the right margin of a blog post, it has to also be served by HTTPS or else the browser will refuse to load it when the item is viewed in FeedLand. It has probably also meant that the right-margin images weren't showing up in other RSS systems for much longer. So anyway, if you see the delicious
Love RSS icon in the right margin of this post in FeedLand that means I've found a workaround that
works. My writing life gets more complicated. I guess it's worth it?
#
Our challenge is to make sure the really interesting stuff happens on the open web, outside the silos. If that happens we can go on. Otherwise we go right back to where we were when Twitter and Facebook dominated. Not a good place. 17 years of stagnation.
#
As with most online services, there's a virtually impenetrable wall between users and the people who run Bluesky. Has to be that way. There are hundreds of thousands of us, maybe tens of them. They're having trouble keeping the system running. As I dig in more on Bluesky, not because I'm getting married to the platform, btw -- more friends reach out and ask for help getting an invite code. It isn't about Bluesky though, it's just that we got
the feeds up there first, so there's a way I can build. Ultimately my goal is to build a layer on top of all the social nets I can, so it doesn't matter which service you use, the stuff I create can make it to you and will. I used to write about "when a big tree falls it creates room for new growth." I wrote that about Jerry Garcia. And it's equally true about Twitter. As they vacate, and get smaller and more focused, I believe understandably, the places they vacate once again become interesting places to develop. I can't miss an opportunities like these.
#1995: "Like the big tree that fell last March, the death of a huge human being like Jerry Garcia frees up a huge amount of space. Once there was a tree, now there are seedlings. After the sadness, there will be huge creativity."
#
I found and
documented a problem with inline images from
Drummer as displayed in
FeedLand. I believe the problem has been there since we switched to email-based identity a few months back. As a result today's
post with an inline image works.
#If a bear tweets in the woods can anyone hear it?
#
- How the web should work:#
- To ChatGPT -- list ten great songs by The Who.#
- To ChatGPT -- send that list to Amazon Music.#
- To Amazon Music -- play the songs ChatGPT sent.#
- Not a technological problem, it's a standards problem. Easily solved by the elusive "working together."#
Smoke from Canadian fires is back. Not as bad as last month.
#
Here's a
new feed for Bluesky I put together in a couple of days. It's based on feeds on Twitter that were shut down in the great twitter app blackout that periodically spooled great art in the middle of all the hubub and todo of Twitter. I loved it. And missed it. So I brought it back.
💥#Re the
Harvard blogs, I contacted the Harvard people and the Automattic people are in the loop and they're going to work together to get the old Harvard blogs hosted on Automattic servers. I feel pretty good about how this is going.
😄#As a software developer and marketer, I really don't care what goes over the wire, as long as I know what to do and it doesn't break. The main arguments in RSS-land were whether or not to rip up the pavement and start over. I'm pretty much always against that. :-)
#Sometimes people throw bombs because they like to blow things up, not because things need to be blown up.
#
Today I get to work on eye candy, a little app that sends a beautiful work of art to Bluesky every so often, taken from the thousands of art images that used to be posted regularly on Twitter as an act of love by a group of volunteers. Apparently Musk's Twitter shut them down, what a stupid thing to do. Musk should be focusing on streams of content that have value in and of themselves. Art is like that. It's like putting curtains on your windows. Strictly speaking you don't need them. But they make the place look better. I think Bluesky is the place for that right now. Update:
First post with an
image. Now comes the fun stuff, spiffing up the format and getting it uploading random pics on a schedule. Then I move it to a server and just enjoy the art as it floats by.
#Another great ChatGPT use. I have a mental block with
regular expressions. I know when to use them, but I just can't construct them. I used to be able to do it, a long time ago. Anyway, now I describe the problem to ChatGPT and it
gives me back the expression. I don't even have to formulate the question very carefully, it figures it out. Now I can relax about it.
#It's very hard for me to type
blob, I keep typing
blog. #An outliner is a combination of a text editor and draw program. You have gestures to move objects that's similar to what you can do with objects in a draw program, but you also have the use of the keyboard to write and edit text. I just realized that as I was editing a complicated JSON structure, thinking the design of this is overblow, but I'm glad I am using an outliner to manipulate it, I'd be going crazy selecting stuff, cutting and pasting. All that is at a lower level, factored out of the user experience of the outliner.
#My first podcast was on
June 11, 2004. About the bright future of podcasting.
#I'm working my way through past seasons of
Succession. I'm in the middle of the last episode of Season 1. I know what's coming, of course, so I can just revel in the outstanding writing, acting, photography, scenery, the raw wonderful subtle emotions of the characters.
#A piece I wrote
about identi.ca, the precursor to ActivityPub, in 2008. I found it interesting to read with foresight what is coming true today, 15 years later. It's a myth that everything happens fast in tech. We waste so much time reinventing and breaking stuff, it's amazing anything ever gets done here.
💥 #I was working on some stuff in
Old School, the static site generator I use to build
Scripting News, and in the process broke the
RSS feed. Thanks to Richard Eriksson for the
report. It should be fixed now.
Still diggin! #
- This post will appear on scripting.wordpress.com, a site I started a long time ago as an "annex" to my blog, providing support for trackback and comments. In August 2008, I stopped posting there, explained in this post, which also appeared on the annex.#
- Now in 2023, I'm going to start cross-posting again, for different reasons. I want to show people how you can write for a powerful blogging platform like WordPress from an outliner running on the desktop. And for some writers this is going to be ideal, and for others maybe other approaches will be useful. The important point is that people should be able to decouple writing from hosting. The way the world works now it's like having to use a different word processor just because you bought a new printer! That would be terrible, but that's the world we've created on the web. I want to start creating more choices, by going first. #
- The great thing about Automattic is that they believe in user choice and open formats and protocols, it's in their DNA, and they've done an amazing job of keeping the APIs running all this time! I'm using the same API today that we used in 2000 to connect Pike to Manila! Now that is some kind of interop. Whoa. Above and beyond.#
- So over on the WordPress site it will feel like the microphone just came on again. Someone is speaking. That would be me. 😄#
#
If you write an editorial saying AI could drive the human species to extinction, please explain: 1. How this would happen. 2. Why this is worse than the human species driving itself to extinction. Lost jobs is not a good answer to #1, imho.
#
AppleTV is running the whole of the first episode of Silo
as a tweet. This is new, never seen this done before. I imagine that Apple is paying Twitter to do this, or maybe not. Maybe Twitter wants to establish itself as a medium for watching, not just participating, and Apple is helping. I think we'll see more and more of that. A diminution of individuals communicating and more corporations and political parties. People who think Musk is going to regret buying Twitter are imho probably wrong. They were just barely treading water, sitting on one of the most amazing communication systems ever built. A restructuring is for sure going to cause a dip, but once straightened out, it could turn into a strong business. It's not smart to bet against a company that's as installed as Twitter is.
#When you hear journalists talk about use of ChatGPT in education they talk about ways students can use it to cheat. They never mention the support functions it can play, like a perfectly tireless and free-of-charge tutor. That's how I often use it. If I'm not sure I've remembered something correctly, I just ask ChatGPT to remind me. It's a kind of drill that was never available before unless you were a rich kid with parents who spoil them.
#After a good night's sleep and some reflection, I bet the reason the Harvard blogs project is
shutting down is the same issue that's haunting all online service providers in 2023, moderation. Not exactly a business for a research center at Harvard to be involved in. Just a guess.
#
Doc's Harvard blog, a mainstay of the post-blog-boom blogosphere, is about to go away. I started the service that hosted Doc's blog. You know how they say in startups, will the last person to leave please turn the lights out? Well we both lived to see the end of the dream, Doc and I. Our blogging service was the first such service at an American university, possibly in the world. Of course the ideas seem obvious in hindsight, but they weren't obvious then. I went to Harvard hoping to bring intellectuals to blogging and vice versa, and as a bonus we got podcasting. It worked. Anyway, Doc wrote a
final post today, have a read, it's a typically beautiful Doc memoire. And here's the
archive.org listing for the original location of his blog, part of the original group of Harvard blogs, started in 2003.
#Here's the
announcement of the new Harvard blog server on March 23, 2003. You can see how we got there by reading the archive for the
whole month of March. I started out in Woodside, CA, having just sold my house and packed the car and drove cross-country. I got to work real quickly. By the end of the month I had given talks at the Kennedy School and to the user's group of system managers at Harvard. It was a real rollout. We had weekly meetups at Berkman, every Thursday. All the history was recorded on the blogs. Luckily I continued to tell the story on this blog too, and that archive will remain.
#
Manton Reece writes that we should welcome Facebook's new cage fighting platform, not block it. I'm neutral. I don't know what it is. I seriously doubt it'll be exciting. And I think they should stop calling themselves Meta, that's stupid and dishonest. They're Facebook. They need to own that, because it's their actual name.
#
I am celebrating the imminent arrival of Facebook's thing, whatever it is, by buying a
domain. It's what I do. Some people collect shoes. Other people classic cars or vinyl records.
#
- Doc is about to lose his Harvard blog, and he's stuck in California with too much to do and is afraid it will slip through is fingers if he has to prioritize his time so as not to be able to save it. I wrote him this email. #
- A perfect storm. #
- I had something smaller happen when I was moving out of my house in Berkeley in 2010.#
- My server was down, it was a serious system thing. But I had to turn over the house to the new owners and get in my car and start the trip back to NYC.#
- I got a call from someone deep in Amazon, their CTO who reads my blog had asked him to call to see if he could help, but I had no time. I had to leave. 1.35 million reasons.#
- After that, no one at Amazon will talk to me. They must have given me a zero in their rating system. I was offered Cadillac support and turned it down. #
- How dare me. #
- We suck Doc. We don't matter. I'm receiving confirmation of that every day, except from friends, who remind me that I do. #
- So I'm your friend -- even if your blog doesn't come with you, you're still my friend. #
Every company should train an AI chatbot with all current info about everything so people can get answers. Most company info if documented at all is scattered, depends on Google for search, and it increasingly sucks. I spent
years not finding a crucial piece of technical info about a company whose products I depend on, till I asked the question on my blog for the Nth time, and most people don’t have the ability to do that. And that's info the company
wants people to have, and it ’s well documented on their site. We were supposed to be creating an information rich world, but so far it hasn’t worked. Someone should step up and be the example, reap the competitive benefits.
#
The archive.org
puzzle appears to have been solved. There are at least two URLs you can use to access the RSS 2.0 spec on the Harvard website. When I looked up the one with the apparent problem, it was one they only started tracking in 2016? I don't know.
Kye Fox on Bluesky
found an archive of
the spec that is available on archive.org starting on July 22, 2003. Here's the
archive for this blog for
July 2003 (the actual page, not on archive.org). This is
the URL we were using at that time. It hadn't been moved to cyber.law.harvard.edu yet. So we have found a snapshot of the spec from 2003. And it was my mistake, not archive.org's. The
statement that it had been at the same address for all 20+ years was not true. I am sorry for my mistake, and thanks to archive.org for doing such a good job of maintaining the record of this document and all the rest that they do.
😄#
I wish help systems for online services could answer questions about my account, not give me instructions on how to find the answers. Why can't they do it for me? I've been spoiled by ChatGPT which actually parses the words I type, and gives me the answers I asked for. For example, I have a Google Workspace account, set up by someone else. I want to add new email addresses to my account. I can't find out how much I'm already paying for the email addresses that are already allocated. I do know the total amount, $26/month. It's way too much money for what it's doing, btw. Basically I'd like to give it instructions in my language. "I'm thinking of adding five new email addresses, how much will that add to my monthly bill?" Then if I decide to go ahead, I could just tell it, in my own language -- "add them please." Pretty simple, right? It's what I would say to a human being, and the human would get it. And so would ChatGPT. Why can't Google Workspace? See how much software now has to be redesigned to meet the expectations of people who expect the ease of use of ChatGPT?
#It's possible that Elon Musk is happy with his purchase of Twitter even if the market cap is down by a lot by some measures. It's still the place of record on the net. Nothing else comes close.
#Pretty sure there's no truth to any of the
news about Russia this weekend. It's a stage play probably orchestrated by Putin himself, or two or more stage plays written by some oligarchs, Putin and whoever.
#I'm seeing
this meme all over the place today. The fighting in Russia is thought to be the first big news event in the time of Twitter that Twitter (collectively) did not deliver the story. No one knows if it's a combination of bad algorithm or lack of participation by news sources.
#
- The net-net of the discussion this week with the W3C and their hosting or pointing to a modified RSS 2.0 spec is that at this time, before trusting any advice it gives based on RSS, you must be sure that it's covered by the original spec. #
- In the discussion we had with the W3C, the sysop of their website said clearly and I believe innocently that the modified "version" of the spec is what they're using to guide the validator.#
- But there are no versions of RSS 2.0. #
- It's frozen. It says it clearly in the roadmap, which explains why it's frozen, developers need stability. #
- All that happened over twenty years ago. And it worked. RSS is one of the most broadly supported formats on the web. It's the basis for podcasting. It's widely supported by news orgs and blogging software. All kinds of systems have been built around RSS. Twenty years of development.#
- In the W3C's defense, I gather they inherited the validator, and the people who wrote it originally were trying to steer people away from RSS to another format. They wanted their ideas in all our feeds, and used the validator to get their way. In the end their steering people to the other format didn't do any real damage that I could see, just added unnecessary confusion. #
- But I have to draw the line at the W3C. We respect them and it matters that they respect RSS, the roadmap first and foremost. I'm not trying to get them to fix the validator, just know that the spec they're citing is not playing by the rules. We need the W3C to support RSS, not undermine it. #
- To be clear, it's perfectly OK for any validator to offer advice based on an extension in the form of a namespace, or a profile, or based on a format not named 'RSS' (which can of course be anything you want) but you can't claim to be validating against RSS if you're citing a modified version of the spec. There are no modifications allowed, that's part of the spec. It's a rule, and a validator that breaks that rule is not validating RSS. #
- I believe I've explained this from every possible angle. 😄#
- Net-net, until it's fixed -- be careful with the W3C's advice re RSS. #
You're welcome to try 
