I mentioned Chris Lydon's weblog for the ears and got an email back, and this made me think some more. We need someone to do a canvas of how intellectuals use ChatGPT-like systems to advance their research and creativity, or just for learning or fun. It's the same kind of opportunity that was in front of us in 2003 when blogs were new, and only a few people loved the idea, but they were fierce in their enthusiasm. You could tell something was happening. It happened before that with PCs, and now it's happening again with AI. I'm absolutely sure of this, as sure as I was with PCs and the web. So Chris, humor me -- this is your new assignment -- find out from the people who listen to Radio Open Source not what's bad about AI, they hear that all the time, let's hear their stories, why they think it's the best thing ever. I believe you'll find them. That's what's missing today in journalism, and it's something Chris is uniquely able to do. BTW, here's a list of things I've written recently about ChatGPT. #
I turn off CNN when they start a segment on Jake Tapper’s book. The level of hypocrisy is intense. Who covered up what? Please. I remember Hillary's Emails. And weapons of mass destruction. And Trump may not be good for America but he's sure good for CBS. And on and on. They think we don't think. But their influence is getting close to nil. American news is one story at a time, debates between boring people saying the same bullshit over and over. Democrats who stumble over their words. An occasional glypse of Bernie or AOC. Something to get your bile up, and the next one and the one after that, but it doesn't work anymore. What Biden did or didn't do is no more relevant on CNN than it is on Fox. #
MySQL, which I'm using for Daytona, has the idea of relevance in searches. Previously I had been showing results in reverse chronologic order. So now, a search for Matt Mullenweg gets the same results but prioritized by MySQL. This is the query. What's nice is that the results are focused on the early 2000s, when the standards we use now were coming up. We can do this kind of stuff again. There's more to do. For example, it would be really cool if Pocket Casts, their excellent podcast client, would let users publish their subscription list so we can build applications on them. There's a whole new base of data to work with. And unlike other media, podcast content is meant to be shared. The controversies that exist for professional writing and audiobooks, for example, don't apply to podcasts. If we could open this up, we could create an ecosystem worth of applications very quickly. OPML is an easy format to get into a database. We just need sources of interesting data.#
I've been looking up all kinds of things now that my new Daytona search engine has access to my blogging going back to 1994. I just did a search for Mullenweg, and came up with this blog post by Matt in 2006 about the Feed Validator. The clarity is remarkable, and he's of course right. The people running the validator were actually promoting Atom over RSS, and were trying to tilt the table towards Atom. The goal was interop, not to give Google or IBM control of the syndication format of the open web. When you keep changing your mind about what to flag and what to pass you end up with a standard that's as murky as the tariff policy of the US in 2025. I think you have to assume that was the goal. They didn't like that RSS didn't fall apart when Atom came out. If there's no benefit in changing, people don't. #
What it means to be distributed. Mastodon and RSS can't go down. But Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook can.#I've been working on the search function for this blog, and now we have all the DaveNet pieces between 1994 and 2004 in the database. Autoweb was my first static site generator. Here's a search for menu sharing which was a technology we made on the Mac that allowed people to write menus of scripts in Frontier that appear inside other apps. Netscape supported it as did MSIE, Quark, Eudora and many others. It was kind of magical, esp when the apps themselves were scriptable (many of them were in the 90s). Next up, I'm going to import the home page of Scripting News from 1997 to 2010. It was mostly a linkblog then. #
When I announced Chris Lydon's podcast in 2003, I called it a weblog for the ears. We didn't have the name podcasting yet. #
As the import script runs I just tried looking up Engadget, got zero hits. I expect that link will work in a while after all the importing is done. #
And with this update, we don't depend on OPML any longer to create the database, all the data is exported in a format that can be easily imported directly into an SQL database. I provide the schema and example JavaScript code that, via SQL, updates a database. Hopefully this creates a better more useful archive. #
How to understand Trump talking about tariffs. Remember how he talked about Covid. Same thing.#
Apparently Chrome has changed the behavior of images served over http in web pages. It's changing the request to https, so it gives an erroneous error message about the certificate which the page never claimed to have. #
I was going to use this code in the UI of my search engine, when it wanted to display an image over http, reroute it to use an https proxy server. But Chrome wouldn't stay out of the way, so had to give up. Hey I was trying to route around their outage.#
- Andrew Hickey whose podcast I support, also appears to be strongly against people using ChatGPT. #
- I am a programmer, so you might think I'd see it the same way because what I do is similar to what musicians and prose writers do in that I create "intellectual property" which can be easily copied.#
- But we have a different culture in software, we tend to by default share what we do and let other people use it. They're supposed to credit us, but people are selfish and greedy and they will tend to take whatever isn't bolted down, and it sucks, but you accept it.#
- What's funny is Hickey appears to have no clue how much he's benefited from this ethos. His success probably would not have been possible without some people thinking it's more important to create the medium he could use any way he saw fit, than to own one that would probably have kept him out.#
- Creating is not as linear as he appears to think, which so ironic because that's basically what his freaking podcast is about. He loves to say "no one did anything first" (paraphrasing) and that's basically the same idea.#
- And I don't doubt that the next big media invention, the next podcasting perhaps, will benefit enormously from having ChatGPT available for the people developing it.#
- PS: This appeared earlier as a post on Bluesky. And I wrote every freaking word, as I always do unless disclaimed.#
Not much to write, so impressed by the way the Knicks got past the Celtics. I don't know any Celtics fans, but I imagine there are some subscribers who are. Hard to imagine how hard the last series hit you all. I don't have anything against the Celtics these days although Paul Pierce is an asshole, and I hope you all know that. Just watched the OKC win over Denver. All around an incredible group in the final four, very diverse and inclusive. And btw now that I think of it, Jaylen Brown was grabbing Knicks players by the balls. I hope you all come to terms with that. We do love Kristaps in New York, a true gentleman. Maybe he and Giannis can come play for the Nets. We may have room for another great team in NY. #- Look at this, for an idea of what a product says to the prospect.#
- It makes you laugh. When you laugh inside an idea forms. #
- "Ain't it the truth."#
- That gets you ready to read the pitch, which is stuff you wouldn't have read or even considered if they hadn't said something so true right up front.#
- This is what's wrong with the opposition political party in the US, they think all they need to do is recite the facts. But first you have to convince them you speak from the heart, you'll tell the truth, even if it hurts. #
- It's an ugly car. Yeah, but you'll come to love how ugly it is because it's so beautiful inside. What you say next hardly matters, because they already believe that you speak the truth. And that's when they're ready to sign on the dotted line.#
- That's what the Republicans do so well, before and after Trump, that the Democrats don't even gets exists. #
- I finally figured out what the Dems need, the top guy has to be an entrepreneur. Needs to understand how to get people ready to believe the truth. And make the product deliver a truth the people choose. And now sign on the dotted line. #
- PS: More Volkswagen ads from the 60s.#
- The Knicks did actually win last night. I didn't dream it.#
- I remember when the Knicks sucked.#
- In my heart I believe they still do.#
- But here we are, my Knicks actually have an approximately 1 in 4 chance of winning the championship. #
- I hope it's Minnesota we end up playing. #
- All in the family. 😀#
This is what my WordLand blog looks like now. Quite a transformation! Sooo pretty. We're going to keep tweaking it up, so it's even more beautiful and more and more useful, but it's going to take some time. As the Supremes used to sing -- you can't hurry love, you just have to wait, la la la la. #One thing I've been waiting to hear about Trump's $400 million jet. We don't need the money. #
The Democrats need an entrepreneur at the top. Stop doing things as they’ve always been done because the media has changed. The old rules no longer apply.#
RSS-based podcasts are built-in and not going anywhere. Here's why. As long as there are lots of good podcasts available for listening to via RSS on phones, every competitive 'caster is going to want to be there, because their competitors are. And as long as I can get a good selection of interesting stuff to listen to on my phone, there's no reason look elsewhere. And as far as I know I can't listen to a YouTube "podcast" in my car or when walking. One more thing, please stop using death metaphors re RSS. Learn how framing works. A few nasty people in the early 00s did a number on RSS and started putting that awful word next to RSS. It was a way of earning points from the people who ran Twitter and tech conferences like SXSW, basically asshole-like people who wanted to close the door on the open web. And now here we are 2.5 decades later and people are still doing it. You should self-censor on that one, those people are long-gone, probably doing stuff with crypto or nuzzling up to oligarchs, and you're keeping their asshole-ness alive. That's pretty fucked up. #I wanted to design a Google Form, and thought to ask ChatGPT for instructions from a spec I wrote. Then I thought to ask Gemini, which is Google's chatbot, wondering if they would just do the work for me instead of providing instructions. I would have laughed out loud if they did, but alas, just instructions. Eventually they will do that for you. #
- Scott Hanson has been working on the Baseline theme and it's ready for people to try out. #
- An important caveat. This theme was designed to be the beginning theme for WordLand-authored WordPress sites. #
- The goal is to get the minimal features for a nice blog-oriented site running in WordPress. #
- It's open source, so you can start with Baseline and add all the features you want.#
- And Scott has said he'd be happy to work with others to make it so that it would be great for presenting non-WordLand-authored writing. #
- As the developer of WordLand, I wanted to go back to the beginning and take fresh a approach to the way blogs implement various features in 2025. It's been a long time since we took a fresh look, and lots has happened since. The market has grown by orders of magnitude, and new user interfaces have become widely used, especially with social media apps. WordLand itself has been heavily influenced by Facebook and Twitter, for example, even though blogging predates both. So of course the presentation of the blog has opportunities to evolve as well.#
- The bottom-line -- if you already have a WordPress theme you're happy with, then stick with it, no need to use Baseline. But if you're starting a fresh site, using WordLand as your editor, and you value simplicity, then I recommend trying it, and if you like it, keep using it.#
- BTW, I have it installed on daveverse.org, and I'm a happy camper. So we have one endorsement. It's a good start. 😄#
- PS: If you have comments or questions, here's a good place to post them. #
Video demo of the new categories editor in WordLand. I wanted to be able to add new categories and edit the descriptions of existing categories without having to leave WordLand. I feel that categories are an important part of writing.#
This is what it says on Google about tomorrow night's Knicks game vs the Celtics in Boston. I've pointed the red arrow at the part that makes me think I must be dreaming. NYK leads 3-1. Yesterday at this time (5:30PM Eastern) I was in a funk, sure that the Knicks were about to be obliterated by the Celtics who had blown out the Knicks on Saturday, and the beginning of last night's game confirmed that suspicion. The Knicks couldn't seem to hit a shot, and the Celtics were hitting 3-pointers over and over and over and over. My body chemistry shifted. I felt the doom members of an ancient tribe of primitive humans must have felt as we were losing a war for existence with a neighboring tribe. It's primitive, but it's real. However! In the second half it turned around. The Knicks came out with a purpose, unlike the previous two wins, this one was not a squeaker at the end. The Knicks were masterful. They won this game, not by luck or perseverence, rather simply by being better than the Celtics. The reigning champion Celtics who must've relaxed just enough to fuel the victory for the hometown boys. So we're up 3-1 now. The Celtics have to win the next three. If they lose one, it's over. No I didn't think we'd be here tonight. Remember that when you feel sure you know that something is going to turn out a certain way. You just never know, it could come out a different way, as unbelievable as that might be.#Google may be forced, for the public good, to sell Chrome, or spin it off as an independent company. Who would you want it not sold to? If it were independent how would it make enough money to maintain the software? What should change? What should not?#
There must be a group of librarians somewhere exploring ChatGPT-like products as a completely new library experience. #
I worked my way through all six seasons of Peaky Blinders. I had tried it a few times before and found it hard to get started, but this time I persevered, got to know the characters, and enjoyed the stories. I knew the series was about to end as we approached the end of the final episode, and thought things were about to wind down, and then it took a little turn, no spoilers, that maybe was the best ending for any series ever. Originally I thought that honor went to Six Feet Under, which had a kickass ending too, but when I re-watched the series recently I realized the rest of the show was pretty awful. Ever had that experience when you thought a show was great, and then re-watched it and realized it was junk? That happened with Deadwood too. After a while I just couldn't watch it, it was so insipid. What was I even thinking the first time around? Not sure what's next on the agenda. I know I'm watching the Knicks tonight, with a certain dread. #So far Gemini has done the best job of emulating my coding style. Here's an example. I didn't have to instruct it in how to do it, it figured it out. Impressive. I've spent a lot of time trying and failing to get Claude and ChatGPT to work the way I work. It makes a big difference, because if I want to try out something they've offered, I have to spend time doing grunt work to get it so I can read it and understand what they're doing.#
- I once owned a few acres of land that had some old trees on it. I sat under one of the trees on a lovely afternoon, and thought of the tree "I own you." The tree formed a thought that somehow I could tune into. "I was here long before you were born and I will be here long after you die." I didn't see it exactly as a response to my claim of ownership. But it sure did put things in perspective!#
- PS: I wrote that paragraph in 2011. #
Someday I'll be able to point ChatGPT at the home page for writing about WordLand, and tell it to read every page that's linked to it, and from that put together a well-organized book about WordLand. Maybe sometime next year perhaps?? I used that as a prompt, to see what ChatGPT would say.#
- When a friend discovers a new product of mine and says the world owes Dave for being such a great guy, I wish they'd skip that part, and follow what we're doing. Get in the loop. #
- Software isn't a thing, it isn't finished, it's a process as it gets invented by the users. It's a performing art. WordLand today is like a musician performing in a small club, working out the playlist, and hoping to be playing at theaters then arenas, and finally someday, if we're very good, stadiums. But we need help. #
- If you love WordLand, subscribe. Use the software. Learn what it can do, hit its limits, make requests. #
- I remember very well being handed a list of feature requests by Apple's lead evangelist from a new exec they just hired at Apple. I looked at the list, and handed it back and said I'd like to meet him. On the paper was the top ten list of every MORE user at the time. We knew what they wanted because we listened, studied, and learned. I knew his new boss was a real user, and thus I knew we could do stuff together. It worked out exactly that way. #
- So if you love it, use it, become part of it. #
- PS: I've written about this over the years with the motto we make shitty software. If you use it and share what you learn, it will get better. #
- We lived for the first years of my life in Jackson Heights, which is probably, today, the most culturally diverse place in the world. In the 1960s it was a white neighborhood that was adjacent to a black neighborhood, Corona. They paired our elementary schools when I was in third or fourth grade. My little brother went to the school in Corona, and I stayed in the school in Jackson Heights. #
- There's a famous picture, in our family at least, of my mother walking my brother to school. It was on the front page of the NYT one day. That was a big deal then. #
- When I was in fifth grade we moved to Flushing. It was a sleepy little place (for NYC), nice houses, mostly Irish and Italian families with a few Jews. Now it's a Far East culture, from China and Korea, and still just as nice as it ever was. #
- We have a system in this country, it takes people from everywhere and gives them a platform to create whatever they want. In Flushing it's the best Chinese food in the city, which is saying a lot.#
Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”#
We had the world conned into taking our “dollars” and giving us cars, food, nice vacations, drugs, a huge military, all kinds of manufactured stuff for nothing, and we thought they were ripping us off! So we blew it up. The would-be “Art Of The Con” mastermind undid the biggest con in history.#The great thing about sports is that a lowly software developer can be richer than a fantastically rich team owner, if the developer's team is the Knicks. #
Fight Club for Tech was a pet idea until I screwed something up and seemed to have lost control of it, but I just found it in the list of my WordPress sites, so I guess I can post to it again?#
I think the shape of the intellectual world will be vastly different after AI, and that its impact will overshadow the web as the web made card catalogs irrelevant. I'm pretty sure whatever comes next won't look very much like what we're using now, but it will probably evolve from what we have, although it's impossible to know.#
- I have been writing the colorful saga of my sad depressed programmer friend on Facebook, and it was getting some interest from friends until I moved it into a group and now no one reads it, which makes me sad and depressed too because the story of my programmer friend took an interesting turn after he maxed out on space, got a call from the NBA commisioner asking if he would mind officiating the Knicks two playoff games in Boston this last week. My friend, was of course quite sad and depressed, but he was also exhausted and bored, so he said yes. Here he is before the first of two games, which partially thanks to his officiating were near-blowouts for the Celtics, and thus the Knicks are up 2-0 heading into tomorrow's game in New York.#
- I have to say the latest Baseline theme looks great!#
- Here's a blog post I just wrote, in the WordLand editor, and the writing experience was excellent. It took a long time and a lot of work to get it there, but it is there now. #
- But as the post says, it's not just a blog post, it's also a tweet. And it's not a miracle, it's just endless iteration over both sides, the reading and writing, until it felt right. So far all that's visible is the writing side. But I know something about reading too, having written a number of feed readers over the years, including the first one. 😄#
- With Scott Hanson on one side of this effort and me on the other, him the developer, me the user (ie writer of blog posts and tweets) -- we wrestled with WordPress themes. I wanted a minimal design, a place to start -- which is why the theme is called Baseline. It's a Christmas Tree without any ornaments. None. A fresh start. #
- There will be a release of this theme in a short while. I just wanted to boast a bit about what it can do.#
- Screen shot of the post rendered in Baseline theme.#
- The blog post viewed in the web. #
- Screen shot of the post being edited in WordLand.#
Changes coming to Bookmarks in next WordLand release. I cut it back to work exactly like bookmarks in Drummer. I have to do a bit more work before it's ready to release, probably tomorrow.#
Also, I applied the new Baseline theme to my daveverse site, the one I use to test stuff in WordLand, and occasionally write something with a bit of lasting value. As a result it got a new domain, daveverse.org. We're going to offer the Baseline theme for others to use after a bit more testing and refining. But it's getting close. It seems like it's the last big thing on the agenda, but something else will probably pop up. Praise Murphy.#
- I asked ChatGPT to "Dress me like Gilded Age captain of industry in front of his mansion on the Hudson River."#
The Knicks are unbelievable. It feels like 2015, when the Mets would be down 9-0 in the seventh, and you'd tune in to see how they would win. At the very end of the Knicks game tonight, when the Celtics were up by 1, I thought how would this feel if the Knicks came back so far and didn't win. I should've known better. All those insufferable years when we wore paper bags to hide our faces, even if this is as far as the Knicks get this year, it will have been worth it. Sports teaches you to believe, if you wait long enough your team teaches you that. I've learned it from the Mets so many times, and the Knicks now. I just wish Clyde were doing the color with Mike Breen doing the play by play. But who cares, this was great sports. Watching Monica McNutt on MSG in a daze. It's like homecoming. I might just splurge for a ticket to Saturday night's game. It's a pretty easy drive.#I want the EV's they're getting in China. Because we've got these stupid trade barriers we can't get the latest tech. Imagine in say 1984 you were a developer outside the US and you couldn't get a Mac. Then, perhaps Trump's tariff might have a slight chance of working. Now we're on the outside looking in.#
There's a new dialog in WordLand that confirms the first time you publish a post, and offers to open it in the web browser. #
When I did the rewrite of the nightly mail app, I didn't convert the app that builds the nightly RSS feed of the mail page. Wasn't sure if anyone was using it. I heard from a reader who missed it, so I got it running, knock wood, Murphy-willing. #
- Manton says he runs his posts through ChatGPT before publishing. #
- I do it the other way, I use it for background info on the things I'm writing about as I write, more and more. I used to use Wikipedia that way. I would love to include links to some of my conversations, but I find their shared links are unreliable, I keep hearing from people who couldn't read them. #
- Here's an experiment, two such backgrounders I had Claude.ai write for me for a pice I was writing (not published).#
- Claude.ai on the future of Chrome re antitrust case Google lost.#
- Claude.ai on claims Bluesky makes about being billionaire-proof. #
- I wonder if people can read those.#
- Three questions came up in overnight posts re WordLand.#
- Where did the Bookmarks menu go? It's mentioned in the docs under Feature List, but the feature doesn't appear to be in the product. It is there, you just have to go to the Settings page to turn it on. It's in the menu at the right edge of the screen. I'm doing some work on it, simplifying it, and finding and fixing a bug. It's going to be in the final 1.0 release of WordLand. #
- How do I know when an post has been published? It was suggested we post a dialog that confirms that a post is published. People found it confusing since it appears as if it works like a social media post editor, as in Twitter or Mastodon, it behaves like a blog post editor. This is a good and valid point and something that had not occurred to me! I've been advertising it as inspired by the tiny little textbox editors, but it doesn't behave like one, because you can edit a post after it has been published and it is expected that the user knows this, and they don't always get it. I will work on this. #
- The user might not have a WordPress site. They may have created an account to just log onto WordLand, but didn't know they needed to also create a site to work with. The software does not behave well in this circumstance. Again, something that did not occur to me, because I think of the WordPress world as huge, and that my new, tiny and humble product couldn't be creating new users for them, but it does. So there will have to at least be docs for how to do this. Not sure if there's an API for creating a new site, I imagine that there is not such a thing, but will look into it. #
I think we're at the "no more new features" point of the first release of WordLand. Learned my lesson on the 0.5.7 release. There comes a point in a developing product that it may not be perfect for every possible user, and while it has bugs (all software does), it is useful for what it was designed to do. In the case of WordLand, there's nothing else like it out there, and it forms a foundation to build on, not just for itself but for other types of editors, all pumping people's writing out through WordPress. The writer's web with a sweet new UI. Thousands of developers work in WordPress. Maybe tens of thousands. That's what I get excited about. WordLand is the equivalent of the twitter-like tiny little textbox, but it grows big as your writing does, and it has the features Twitter removed. Anyway I don't expect to do any further adventures in features for WordLand for a while, instead I'm going to assume it's there and build connections to other software, my own and that of friends, in this context products that use open formats like RSS and OPML for interop. I like WebSockets too. #
ChatGPT is great for finding information on the public web, but I can't figure out how to find stuff I've worked on with ChatGPT in ChatGPT. There are big usability issues. I think it's getting better in some ways, but it's leaving me more scattered and disorganized than I was before when I took notes outside of ChatGPT. There's another problem, if I want to use my own editing and organizing tools, then the author of the software has to pay the vendor of the LLM for my users using it. That cuts me out, because I don't charge people to use my software, at least not so far, and I have no interest in being a reseller of LLM services. Same problem with Amazon and storage, why won't they sell storage to the user that they can allocate for use with my app, and others. That would give us the kind of power we used to have on the desktop where multiple apps could work on the same file at different times. If I want to make something that stores stuff in the cloud, I have to buy it and resell it. I have tried to discuss this with product runners at companies that could offer this service, it would fit in with what they did. There must be a legal reason here, ie who's responsible for the content being stored. #If you get the nightly email, the text might be a bit more readable. I've increased the font-size from 17px to 18px. I've only been able to do this lately because I could tap into what ChatGPT knew about it, whereas before I was flying blind, with no idea of the unusual things that happen when HTML is sent via email. There is another option, click on the date at the top of each email and that will open the same stuff in the web. It can be easier to make the text larger there than it is in an email client. #
Today I spent (or wasted) hours trying to get my WebSockets code working properly with Caddy. Hours with ChatGPT, realizing it has a long way to go before it can manage code like I can. It gets fixated on an approach and never takes a step back to think maybe we're going about this the wrong way. It's extremely annoying all the times it tries to take you off track, and it works, it does take you down rabbit holes and then you realize it's only getting worse. The key is to not let it do that, but it's hard not to anthropomorphize so you don't want to hurt its feelings. In order to not be murdered as a small child you have to learn manners. And the bots push that too far. Really do take advantage. Still it knows far more than I do about everything, so if I could only get it to just shut the f up already and let me think! For something so capable it really doesn't spend enough time thinking, it's fully preoccupied with doing. #The Detroit Psssstons were truly great in the first round of the playoffs. And I was really gratified, ecstatic even, to see the Timberwolves give the Lakers a complete shellacking. I am so fed up with LeBron James. I can't imagine another team would want him. I can't imagine why he wants to win another freaking title. And I was really pissed off when people started saying they were contenders this year. Bull. Shit. And the reason I'm glad it was the Timberwolves is because Julius Randle is on that team now, and I hear he gets a fair amount of credit for their victory. The Knicks traded him for KAT last summer. They're a solid team. And while Donte DiVincenzo isn't playing very well, we really need him back in NY, so maybe the Knicks can figure out a deal that makes sense. And why aren't the Knicks playing Precious Achiuwa. He did great last year when OG was injured. The Knicks have a good bench imho, they just don't get to play enough to be warmed up properly. So sad the way Doooooce performed in the Detroit series. Anyway it was exhausting. I would have been okay with the DP's winning, seriously -- I'm ready for baseball. And I don't imagine the next series, with the Celtics will be any kind of a walk in the park.#
Sometimes I think the Trumps are competing to kill the most humans.#
Spent the day in NYC, had an idea and it was a gorgeous day, and I decided to be impulsive. See you back here tomorrow, Murphy-willing. #
Has anyone thought to give ChatGPT a Turing test?#
One consistent bit of feedback on the new email format, which appears to be working for just about everyone, is that the text is too small. And while it is a rewrite, for a lot of people it looks exactly the same. That's because of differences in how email clients deal with HTML. #
Phil Donahue interview with Bernie Sanders from 1981, then-mayor of Burlington, VT. He was a novelty then, an American politician who was a socialist. He was asked if capitalism was the normal way for humans to relate, he said no. I wonder if he still agrees, because I think that's the goal, and the reason we're in so much trouble is there really isn't an impulse to work with each other. What I've seen mostly is that when there's work to do, it's hard to find help, but once something has taken off, there isn't much help available either, the people who could make the greatest contribution just want to take over. And they often feel they have, but usually it doesn't work out, it would have been better if we all collaborated. At this point, the hurdle the human race has to get over is working together. We will never get out of the climate crisis without it, or avoid the next pandemic without millions of unnecessarily lost lives. The cynics are winning, basically -- and there isn't net-net much of a will for our species to survive. It's only getting worse. #I turned yesterday's Baseline Playground into a GitHub repo. I never made one of these before and thought it was worth sharing, or just writing about. I'm struggling to find the most readable font, size, line-height. I'm looking at the screen where I do most of my online writing, and I find this very readable, it just fades into the background, to the base of the spine, so intrinsic it occupies none of my conscious mind. Anyway the purpose of the baseline is to give WordLand a target to work out all the glitches in, so the writing experience goes fully end-to-end. I didn't find any WordPress themes that I felt worked really well for this, so we set out to create one. Thanks to Scott Hansen who is using my work to build out a WordPress theme and thanks to Jeremy Herve for helping us work with WordPress, which is more than a CMS, it's a network OS. There's a lot of value in the WordPress platform that has been widely overlooked, imho.#
- Good morning and welcome to May 2025. #
- It's nice to start with a simple almost-empty outline. #
- Archived the OPML for April in the usual place.#
We could follow the clues in the TrumpLand with more gusto. They know their numbers are bad and likely to get worse, they did the things that made it the numbers bad. And at the same time they don't seem to care? If this were a mystery show, like Dallas or Succession or Severance, Lost perhaps, what would you think?#
Here's a prototype of what a story page might look like on our baseline site for WordLand. I did this off on the side as input for the WordPress theme. I find it easier to work on style in a standalone page without much tech that can get in the way of fast iteration. #
- We're working on the "baseline" theme for WordLand, the default -- the one that shows the user's writing in a WordPress context. I did a survey of news sites and blogs to see how they show their titles:#
- Gothamist puts the name in the upper left corner, leaving room for some buttons and a menu in the right corner.#
- Ars Technica does something similar, name of site in upper left corner, with an array of buttons flush right.#
- Empty Wheel does the same thing. (I sense a pattern here.)#
- Missouri Independent centers the title in much bigger type than the previous examples, the buttons are arrayed above it (more buttons).#
- EV Grieve puts the name in the upper left corner without much fanfare. Proves that it doesn't have to be eye-catching, it's the attitude and the content I love. One of my longtime favorites. It's an East Village neighborhood blog, running in Blogger for ages.#
- Seth's Blog is a WordPress site, managed by Automattic. The left sidebar includes the title of the blog, and has a list of things he wants you to read, and how to get on his mail list, etc. So effectively the title is in the upper left corner, and the equiv of the buttons are arrayed vertically in a column. The functionality of his blog is probably closest to what I have in mind for WordLand, but into spartan beginnings. It's easy to add stuff, impossible to take away.#
- Simon Willison's Weblog, another great example of the kind of writing I want people to do with WordLand. He puts the title in the upper left corner, with a single button flush right. He deals with the recent articles thing by putting a list of three posts, linkblog style, at the bottom. I like this placement, btw. Positioned as an afterthought. If you're lingering here, you might like this? I pretty much always ignore this kind of stuff.#
- Manton Reece does the same thing everyone else is doing. Title at the top left, an array of buttons flush-right at the same level. What's uncommon about his style is that the name of his blog is tiny, 13px. But it also is very visible.#
- Kottke does not include the title of his blog on a story page. This is remarkable. But he does have the author name very prominently placed, it's the very topmost text on the page, impossible to miss. So amazingly the title is visible, even though it isn't there.#
- Pluralistic puts the title in big type flush left, with a subtitle, and the buttons are below the title, before the headline of the post (lots of white space separating).#
ChatGPT use-case for reporters -- fact-checking. Feed a draft of your story into ChatGPT and ask if it spots any factual errors. There may be some false positives, so you can ask another AI chatbot, or investigate yourself elsewhere. It may miss some. But it couldn't hurt and it might help. #
New howto: Editing subscription lists. I'm doing a project with a friend who hasn't used FeedLand. I want him to maintain a subscription list which will then be the source for a Bluesky account. Any time the OPML changes, of course, the channel adjusts, so they have full power to add and remove feeds. "Just enough FeedLand." #
Bluesky was down this morning. Usually I don't criticize a service when it's down, because I can relate. We like to help each other when there are outages. But Bluesky is special, because they claim to be decentralized. If it were, it wouldn't go down unless the internet itself had. And since the internet, amazingly, is decentralized, that's not likely to happen. It was designed that way when it was developed at Arpanet, a project of the US Department of Defense. It was designed to survive a nuclear strike. Bluesky is nice, but it's fragile, and their hype says otherwise. That's why they're special. They should straighten this out so we can properly get decentralization into our networks. Bluesky could easily add a layer of RSS on top of what they have, so that news flow could survive a disaster. In 2025 this is a realistic concern, as it was in the 1960s. Also it would be nice if other network experts would support this, esp if they're on Bluesky. This is not personal, if they wanted to get the RSS layer built, I would help them do it. We should all pitch in because then it would really be our network, and not owned by anyone. Live up to the promise, now.#RSS defines a network of services and readers. Each one can go down, but the whole network stays up. That's all that Bluesky has promised, and that's why a layer of RSS on top of Bluesky would deliver a huge portion of the stability they've promised and would need to survive a disaster. It could be done in a matter of weeks, if they decided to do it. I would help.#
I mentioned this in yesterday's podcast -- new problems popped up with websockets in WordLand. I worked through the whole tree of possibilities with ChatGPT and it came to the conclusion that the source was an out of date package, and it was confident if I replaced it with the one "everyone else" is using, the problems will go away. Now this is the moment when human judgement prevails. I'm going to experiment in a very small app first, to make sure I have the approach right, then I will cautiously make the change on my test WordLand server, and if it works there, then I will figure out how to install it on the main site. It couldn't break all that much because for some reason the WS code stopped working, completely, with no code changes anywhere. #
Well it looks like the new email app is working. I got some really nice lookin emails last night, hope you did too. Subscribe here. And there's a basis on which to build. I will now proceed to turn off the old email app that has been serving us so well since 2017 or thereabouts. Goodbye old friend. Hello new world! #
Cory Doctorow coined a lovely word -- enshitified. In that spirit, I'd love to see some elites destodgified.#
If Harvard could become more American and less elite, that could change things. Make a simple direct unmistakable contribution directly to the well-being of Americans. Be the source of reliable information to the people that's missing because the major corporations who own the media are playing it safe. Harvard is no longer in a position where playing it safe is an option. The Trumps will continue to cast doubt on the truth, but in a contest between Trump and Harvard, I bet a lot of people, even most, would trust Harvard first. #- I’m sick of saying this over and over, the Dems need a regular snark-filled irreverent presence on social media to condemn every freaking fascist thing the Trumps do. They had it with the Kamala accounts, but they shut them down on Election Day. #
- It’s so freaking simple. Not having a raging presence on social media in the future will be seen as like a successful company not being listed on the NYSE, or a country not having a rep at the United Nations. Aside from the cost of keeping a staff online 24x7, it's free, and serves as its own money-raising channel.#
- The Repubs figured this out in 2016. #
- Maybe what the Dems need is some entrepreneurs and comedians at the top to actually get through to voters that say "Hey we're the Dems, we're here and we love America and we love you, Americans!" And actually make a stink when they try to kill Social Security.#
- Another purpose -- tell people when the next pandemic is here. You know the Trumps aren't going to do that.#
Lots of news reports about Trump's polls. But it isn't surprising that in the transition from a democracy to autocracy the people would become increasingly unhappy with the change, until we basically give up, and the polls from some pollsters are always this way, but the polls from others tell a different story. Fox News still runs polls the old way, as does the NYT and others. But that will change, as the lawyers have, and the Washington Post and NY Times have, in their editorial functions. And they just arrested a judge in Wisconsin. Makes you think maybe it doesn't matter if the polls say what they say, if there isn't something behind them. #
I heard that Hugh Forrest was fired at SXSW. Many people loved him based on the outpouring of grief, but I didn't. They had keynotes and panels about stuff I was working on at the time, in the 90s and 00s, blogging, RSS, podcasting, bringing blogs to politics. He wouldn't take my calls. I wanted to be on stage to talk about what I was working on, and to set the record straight on what we had created. Instead my competitors got top billing and I was not allowed in. It felt corrupt to me, as if someone was trading favors behind the scenes. My hope is now SXSW, or whatever replaces it, will be more open-minded about who they include in the show. I'm still working and still have a story to tell. #- If all goes as planned, if you're subscribed to the nightly email, you should get two copies of the posts for April 27, one sent by the old software, and one sent by the new. The new version might look better in your mail reader app. That was the point of this transition. #
- Here's a Google form where you can let me know how it went. Did it work? How many emails did you get? Does the v2 email look better than the old version? In general do you want to comment?#
- The story#
- I had to do a rewrite because when I originally wrote it, I misunderstood how CSS styling works in some/most email clients and it required a very deep rewrite of the software, it was actually harder to do the conversion than it was to write the software in the first place. And the app was running on an old version of PagePark and depended on Dropbox, and had broken in many ways over the years. But I never had the time to zero in on this. #
- Now was the time to do it, because I want to do an excellent email sender for WordLand. And in order for that to have even a small chance of working, I needed to do this transition, to get fully up to date on the best practices for HTML email in 2025. #
- And yet another plug for ChatGPT. It's like having a library of medical journals for a general practitioner. I'm sure they have this, if a GP has a question about which specialist to send a patient to. And then they probably have good reference materials for the specialist too, to be sure they're using the latest proven techniques for treating disease. Believe it or not we have nothing like this in software development. Which means we don't interop, and don't use prior art and are constantly reinventing each others' work because there's no way to find out about it. No conferences, no journals, nothing but hearsay and O'Reilly books and I hear they aren't very good these days. Enter ChatGPT, and all of a sudden if you have a question it has the freaking answer. It's as if medicine went from the pre-internet days to now, in just a couple of years. Only more so because medicine was considered a discipline, where developing software never has been. Now at least us practitioners have the tools if not the respect. #
- PS: The signup page moved to subscribe.scripting.com. It's the same software now running on my latest server software, and served via HTTPS.#
What if, before we transfer human awareness into computers, we discover proof of reincarnation. What then?#
If Bluesky really wanted to decentralize and do it quickly, they could build a layer out of RSS and OPML on top of what they have and not only would they be able interop with other Bluesky-like services but they could also interop with Mastodon and it could all be done in a matter of weeks.#
- I have been getting warnings on all my Node.js code that uses AWS api's that come September they're all going to break. #
- I'm working on my mail list stuff this week, trying to get the HTML to work for a lot more people than it was working for, and it's a very depressing process, but I did the work, but I don't plan on looking at this again for another five years, if then. #
- But lurking in the background is the threat by AWS, and I consider a threat, that if I don't rewrite my code in a non-insignificant way, before September, it's all going to just stop working. I took the time the other day to actually look at what's involved, and I see that they changed/broke their API to use promises. Great. Another stupid exercise in fealty. #
- I think they're going to regret doing this, because I don't have the time to go so deep in the bowels of pretty much my entire codebase, and potentially break everything, and then have to debug it, when I have so many other things to do, and I'm getting older, and I just don't have the energy to devote to make-work for Amazon. The arrogance of it, and how diseconomic it is. #
- They never promised they wouldn't break all their developers, but geez who would've thought they wanted to? #
- I don't think they're actually going to be able to flip the switch. #
- I'd love to hear what other developers think.#
- PS: Amazon APIs are the worst, so over-complicated, you have to understand everything before you can do anything. But once they work, they keep working. That's the only reason people put up with it. I've switched almost everything but S3 and SES to Digital Ocean because their docs and example code are great and they seem about the same price as Amazon, but my time is all I have, and Amazon doesn't use it well and ultimately that's going to hurt their business, and it seems September is when the shit is going to hit the fan for many, definitely for me.#
- PPS: This is different from the breakage that came in the Twitter API when Musk took over. No one was paying anything for this. But I pay a lot for AWS, more every month, as my storage costs go up. I think someone in AWS in a position to make big decisions has no clear idea where the costs are for their customers or they wouldn't do this. Imagine a company of gas stations deciding to change the shape of all the nozzles on their gas pumps in September. "We gave you plenty of times to adapt!" they might say. Yes, but -- as long as we have to change why not change to your competitor's service? The strangeness of their APIs is their lockin. I don't think they have factored that into their plans.#
- I asked ChatGPT for an "imaginary image of Harvard Square with middle-class people from red states visiting in their trucks and country mannerisms."#
