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. đ#
- 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: âIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.â#
We had the world conned into taking our âdollarsâ 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 âArt Of The Conâ 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. đ#
- 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. #- Iâm 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. #
- Itâs 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."#
WordLand v0.5.6: You can customize the menu that pops up when you select text. and we now handle sites with large category lists, the previous limit was 100. #
I'm rebuilding my nightly email-sending code from the bottom up. Something I never properly understood is that most mail clients don't include your CSS files, so people were seeing the writing and images with no style. What an embarassment. As often is the case in 2025, I have ChatGPT to guide me through getting this right. The secret is inline styles. And there's no simple way to do the conversion, except element by element. Seems like an OS could do this for us somewhere along the line. Now I have to think about how to test it without trying to just switch it over, trying to avoid breaking everyone at once. But the nightly email might start looking a lot better for some real soon, and for others, only slight almost no noticeable differences.#
We should demand that the new owner of Chrome must respect the open web as something it does not have the power to change. Google never got this and we're losing the archive function of the web because of this. Please read and pass on -- now -- we're in a unique position to fix this.#
One of the nice things about WordLand is that titles are optional. Some posts are too short to require a title. In a sense they are their own title. We know the benefits well, having used Twitter for a long time. There's no reason this simple idea shouldn't work in RSS feeds and blogging, in fact RSS doesn't require titles. And there's no requirement in WordPress either. So we support them, with gusto. I want this network to do what Twitter does, and everything Twitter doesn't do, that writers want. #writersweb #- There's a company that I have an account with because they're the only ones who provide the service I need, so I have to stay with them. They have made my telephone unusable, they call me all the time from varying phone numbers, wanting me to do things, or with a "courtesy reminder" that I could spend more money with them. My number is a cell phone btw. On my user profile on their site, I unchecked phone as a way for them to contact me, only leaving email checked. They appear to be ignoring this. My question is this -- how do I get their attention and get them to stop calling me. The constant interruptions are interfering with my life and work.#
- That was a ChatGPT prompt. It gave me lots of options, but two were outstanding.#
- First, they knew their privacy account, and a form on their website for reporting privacy violations. #
- They suggested I use commands in my cell phone to block unknown numbers. #
- I hadn't thought of doing this until today. Usually the big companies have all the power. They can force you to call them back and wait on hold and then it's not clear they'll even understand or respect the request. ChatGPT also suggested the FTC (heh I doubt if it can do much with Trump as president) or the state Attorney General (we still have a government in NY). #
- So think about it next time you have trouble with a megamonolithic company that's bullying you. We may have a tool at our disposal that levels the playing field.#
Yesterday I wrote a piece that summed up Twitter as an entrepreneurial project. "It would have been better if the founders had made less money, and opened the door for lots of competition right from the start. That's the philosophy of the web. Instead they captured the web, amputated all its good features, and locked it in the trunk and then cut off its air supply. That was inevitable given the path they went down. Yes they changed the world, and in turn are creating a lot of misery." If anyone writes the history of tech in Silicon Valley in the early part of the 21st century, I hope they focus on the damage done, not just the money made. Don't glorify the fortune, it's our freedom that's paid for it. And the amazing thing people will discover if they look closely is that the open technology cost very little to develop, so you don't need the backing of VCs to create open systems, you just have to be right at the right time and have the ability, focus and ambition to create enough base technology to bootstrap the idea.#- Good morning from Oaxaca in Mexico. We are here with my sad and depressed programmer friend, back from his European tour of glee club train compartments, receptions and cheese races with Europeans named Gouda, happy and carefree while my programmer friend, pictured here, thinks about returning to the good old United Snakes of Americans. As he sits on the beach, admiring the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, he considers taking a job at a local Burger King. He enjoys their hamburgers even if he is not enjoying life at the moment. His eyes are tearing up as he remembers the tragedy that befell him and others in the Great Gouda Race of Luxembourg. #
- Start with the dark imagery of the Ridley Scott commercial for Apple in 1984. A woman athlete is running toward a screen carrying a big hammer, getting ready to hurl it at a huge screen with Big Brother's head, lecturing a huge hall filled with lifeless people listening. He has dead eyes. The runner represents life and freedom. The overall image is dreary and lifeless but she is a bright light of hope for the future. Inspire me with this image. I want to be inspired.#
It's crazy to even think of moving Chrome from Google to OpenAI. The web needs to not be owned by anyone, esp not owned by the tech industry. What Google tried to do to the web is obscene. I love ChatGPT, but let's keep Chrome out of their owner's greedy little hands. Set it up so it stands alone.#If you're a young person contemplating a career in tech, great! It's fun, and you can help people doing this. But please don't listen to the VCs and entrepreneurs who say it's all about changing the world. Instead think of it this way -- you're going to create tools for people who may change the world, in collaboration with lots of other people. No one person is that smart and experienced that they know what's best for the world. The stories you heard about great inventors probably aren't true. And the ones who actually changed the world, may not have changed it for the better. Look at what happened with Twitter as a cautionary tale. Imho it would have been better if the founders had made less money, and opened the door for lots of competition right from the start. That's the philosophy of the web. Instead they captured the web, amputated all its good features, and locked it in the trunk and then cut off its air supply. That was inevitable given the path they went down. Yes they changed the world, and in turn are creating a lot of misery. You don't want to do that, brilliant young tech person, right? Let's make the world better, one little evolutionary step at a time. More about this in yesterday's post. #
A video demo that shows how to set categories in WordLand, and I ramble through lots of philosophy and trivia. But the answer is right up front so you can skip all that michegas. ;-) #
Many good points in yesterdayâs unusual Olbermann podcast, but the one that stuck with me is that at some point Republican incumbents will figure they donât have a future in what Trump is trying to create and thus have everything to lose if he prevails. He thinks senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) may already be there.#
Zeldman tries WordLand: "For bloggers who mostly write, itâs a clean, distraction-free interface with strong basic features that lets you offload CMS duties to WordPress."#
- Silicon Valley encourages entrepreneurs to think in terms of changing the world. I was one of them when I arrived there in 1979 at the age of 24, with world-changing software ready to go (or so I thought). A few years later, I shipped a way of writing that was only possible on a computer, and in a small way I suppose it did change the world. I kept innovating, but over time I came to realize that one person trying to change the world is usually futile, but what's even worse, you might actually manage to change the world, and that's going to be a disaster for you and the world. As Elon Musk is doing right now. #
- Musk is the perfect cautionary tale for "be careful of what you wish for." No one person should change the world. We are a creation of evolution, and we also are creators of evolution, but evolution is the result of lots of infinitesmal events, not some great god-like creation that young people tend to dream of. That's what he's doing wrong, trying to force his vision on all of the rest of us. We'd be crazy to wish for what he wants, and we're not that crazy. #
- I have a pretty good idea of what he wants because like him, I think in terms of what you can do with networks of computers and people. And I understand their weakness, and also believe in the good intentions of 99.99% of the people, so even though our networks are not perfectly secure somehow we seem to get by. But Musk has gotten inside, and is doing what he wants, and the rest of us don't get a say, and he's of the 0.01% you absolutely don't want to have the keys to the treasury or nukes of the United States in 2025. #
- A lot of wise people over a few hundred years set up a system where we all get a say, and it's gotten us by pretty well. When one person takes control, that's disaster, because no one, not even Musk, is an immortal god. He's got huge blind spots. If you try to rewrite every bit of code too fast you end up with a broken system. He'll leave and we'll have to deal with what remains. And hopefully after we get over that, we'll figure out how to not let a future Musk get in there again. And that's going to involve a fair amount of pain for the billionaires. If you all want to start helping to solve the problem, now would be a good time to get involved, Mr and Ms Billionaire. Thanks for listening. #
- BTW, I've mentioned this before -- there's a great joke in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper. It was about Albert Shanker playing the role of Elon Musk, who wasn't born when the movie came out.#
I know this is ancient history, but I was thinking the other day about how Tim O'Reilly kept saying he had nothing to do with the temporary takeover of the name RSS by RDF advocates. But it was an O'Reilly exec, Dale Dougherty, who drove it. I suppose perhaps Tim was saying, effectively, that Dougherty never told him what he was doing. But the information of his involvement was available publicly. At the time, we had the web (obviously) and good search engines. And O'Reilly Associates was a journalistic organization -- he could have asked someone to research it for him. Also the tech guy who ran the project was an O'Reilly employee. Maybe Tim didn't know. But he sure took it out on me personally. A lot of doors were closed to me because of this clash. But I don't apologize for anything I said. It was a company thing. If Tim wasn't aware of what his #2 guy was doing, sorry that's not on me. But everyone involved knew it was O'Reilly doing it. #- Anyway -- if ChatGPT had existed at the time, he could have asked for an impartial opinion. I'm going to try it now. Here's the prompt I wrote.#
- In 1999 or 2000 (not sure of the exact date) there was a fork of RSS, turning it into a dialect of RDF, a format that was being promoted by the W3C. They called it RSS 1.0. #
- It never really took hold, never became widely used, because the earlier version of RSS, v0.91 was being adopted at a very high rate because it was being supported by all the blogging platforms of the day, and by major publishers, including Salon, Red Herring, Motley Fool and Wired. Later the NY Times would support RSS 2.0, which was an evolution of RSS 0.91, and then the entire news industry followed their lead, and RSS quickly became the most popular way to read news on the web.#
- Here's the question. Was O'Reilly Associates involved in the RSS 1.0 fork? Tim O'Reilly, at the time, said it wasn't involved. But Dale Dougherty, the #2 exec at O'Reilly lead the effort, and the technical lead was an O'Reilly employee. Would it be fair to say that ORA was involved. Would the fork have happened without their involvement? Try to be as impartial as you can.#
- I have asked ChatGPT to give me a shareable version of its answer -- but I find that often people say they can't read it. But you have the prompt so you can ask ChatGPT or any other AI app, for it's (hopefully) impartial response. #
- Update: I fed the same prompt into Claude.ai and Gemini.#
- People who look down their noses at ChatGPT and its cousins tend to say it's not art. Hardly the most interesting thing, but as I've written, art lives mostly in the mind of the viewer, it's the effect it has on the viewer -- that imho is the art. BTW I can tell when people have actually used the product, and most of the critics haven't. Sorry but until you use it you won't know how obvious that is to someone who does.#
- Lately I've been interested in using ChatGPT to mash images together. Yesterday I asked for a rendering of my headshot through a self-portrait of my niece. It's like sampling with music but with images. I say here's a photo of me, and here's a drawing someone else did. Can you render the image of me in that style? As I did yesterday with my niece's portrait of herself. #
- I've also been doing stories that started with an image of Mark Zuckerberg, calling him "my programmer friend" and taking him through all kinds of adventures, none of which could shake his depression. It was like the Wordle Kitty from last year, only these only went out via Facebook. I wish I had them in an easily shareable format, but next time I may start a group for them, or something else. #
- Today I came across a cartoon of Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense drawn by Michael de Adder. I thought wow that's different. I wonder what ChatGPT would do if I asked it to render my headshot in the style of that drawing? While it was doing the work, I tried to imagine what it would do with it! Would I be wearing a military uniform? Would I salute the viewer? Would it change my expression? Here's the drawing, and below it, the rendering.#
"Dave's not here."#
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."#
âYou gotta do what you gotta do.â#
I got a US Mail notice to answer a Census form, so being a good American I did. It was a .gov address, and looked like a government form. The initial questions were standard census questions, then they started getting into personal things that I didn't like answering. Then they asked if I was born in the US. That's a really shitty question to ask now. I was glad to see that I could just click Next without answering any question, and they got worse, more invasive, esp considering who the president is, and who he brought with him, so I just closed the page and wrote this post. I would, if I had it to do over again, not answered any of their questions, or maybe stopped at the standard Census questions from years past. #
One reason I want to bring blogging and social media together is so I don't have to think about where I will post stuff. This is really important. I want my blog to be a complete record of everything I write publicly. The way our online writing world has been siloized, basically no one has that. We're going to try to fix that, and not with just my software, but by setting some new standards for interop, extensions to RSS, so that there's no exclusivity to making software for writers or publishers. That's what I mean when I say something is "on the web." If your system is not 100% replaceable, today, they you are not on the web and should not claim it. If you're thinking about freedom, btw -- this should be part of your big picture. So many smart people don't want to know how our networks work, and that makes you a victim. And it's not that hard to understand, no matter what people have led you to believe. #
I keep coming back to this -- ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I've been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you'll see its significance. You didn't write it, I didn't. Each of us may have contributed a little, and isn't that what we want? To help build the base of human knowledge? It gives our lives meaning. Sometimes I wonder how much value people place on themselves and so little on progress. I think we all want our lives to have meaning. Well here you go, it doesn't get more meaningful than this.#