Where is the Resistance?#
We know journalists are not The Resistance, which begs the question -- who is and why aren't journalists searching for them?#
I heard Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor in Chief of The Atlantic, on NPR this morning talking about their special edition about what a second Trump presidency would be like. I'd love to read it but I am not a subscriber. I'd like to hear Goldberg interviewed on what happened to buying an issue of a magazine just because I want to read it. I think it's actually a bigger story, because realistically, it's probably good journalism but won't do anything to prevent a second Trump term, where hearing him explain why they have such a bizarre economic model might help them try another approach and thus provide greater service, and very likely increase their revenue because it would give readers a way to ease into subscribing.#Goldberg said they are not The Resistance, they're journalists. Well then my question is what good are you exactly and why are you using up all the airtime? Why is NPR even bothering to interview you. He said it clearly, he was just trying to save his conscience for after the Nazis came to power in the US. We have bigger issues than Jeffrey Goldberg's conscience. Why doesn't NPR and The Atlantic go out and find The Freaking Resistance and introduce us to them. My grandfather said something to me when I was a little boy, with such clarity, I can never forget it. He said David, when the Nazis come (he was sure they would) you need to go up on the roof with a gun, and shoot them. He knew. He didn't say "David, run" or "David, write an article in The Atlantic so you have a clear conscience." He said I should fight. With guns. That was the lesson he learned from his experience. So where is our Resistance? What the F are we waiting for? #
"Wait and see what happens" is a losing strategy. By the time you figured out what happened, if you ever do, it's too late.#
- Cross-posted from Threads. #
- I have a lot of trouble calling Facebook some other name.#
- I feel like I'm being used.#
- The company is still the same company it was when they locked up Facebook and fed us to the enemy during the 2016 election. I haven't forgotten.#
- Why are we letting them build our new online home if that's what this is supposed to be?#
- This is part of recognizing the stakes in the next election folks, this is something you can do about it.#
- Using Threads is as dangerous as voting for Trump.#
Twitter poisoned our minds with the idea that by taking away the basic features of writing on the web they were encouraging people to write shorter, better, more to-the-point posts and that would make communication on the web like poetry. It was a very zen-like mystical idea, and imho totally wrong. And it's still repeated as if it were gospel -- it's a typical response when I beg for a standard that is more realistic, that incorporates the basic features of web writing: simple styles, links, optional titles, enclosures, the ability to edit and unlimited length. The fallacy of this response is that you are free to write however you want, if you feel your ideas are better communicated in short messages, go ahead. I want to use all the tools in my writing. And if you don't want to read all that I write or any of it, there are tools that make that easy. So everyone wins, and you don't have to try to impose your ideas of religiously pure writing on anyone but yourself. #A corrollary to the textcasting philosophy is that I should be able to use any writing tool I like to post to the web, and have it flow where ever I want. The idea of being forced to use a teeny little edit box to write my wonderful prose is as silly as bunding a word processor with a printer, and forcing you to use that editor if you want to print it with that printer. If I sent you a document written for my Brand X printer but you had Brand Y, sorry -- you can't read it. I'm at the point in my life where I have to explain to young folk how great things were when I was their age, but it's true in this case, when I was in my 20s and 30s, there were simple standards for text, and you could print documents produced by any writing tool on any printer. And as a result a wide variety of writing tools and editors were available, and there was lots of innovation in a very short period of time because everyone had competition they could learn from and had to keep up with. Now there's no reason for Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Bluesky, Mastodon or whatever to improve their editors because after all you don't have any choice. That's another important facet of textcasting that we borrow from podcasting -- lots of ways to create and lots of ways to listen mean things can get better. With lock-in, they can't. #
- My old friend Chuck Shotton just showed up on Bluesky. #
- I love Chuck. We've been through a lot together over a long time. #
- We had a ton of fun in the early days of the web on the Mac. Chuck wrote the HTTP server we all used. And he loved Frontier, so we made our products work incredibly well together. #
- Those were the days! 😄#
- Anyway, of course I immediately followed Chuck in Bluesky, but then I realize, I can also follow him in FeedLand because thanks to John Spurlock, we have feeds for every freaking Bluesky user. #
- Spurlock is a gifted programmer, like Chuck, who thinks creatively and doesn't mind priming the pump of a bootstrap, something Chuck and I have done many times in the past. (Chuck is an largely uncredited contributor to the bootstraps of RSS, XML-RPC, podcasting, object databases, content management systems, hey pretty much everything I've worked on since 1994 or so.)#
- Okay, now I get to the point. #
- I want to build with confidence on the feed connection with Bluesky. Today I know the ability to subscribe to a Bluesky RSS 2.0 feed is there, but will it be there in the future? I would feel better if the feed support were built-into Bluesky, part of its basic feature set. Another very simple API that gets ideas out of Bluesky and anywhere feeds go, which is, as you know, everywhere. #
- Feeds should be the baseline of compatibility between social media platforms. #
- Working with Spurlock, we have given Bluesky a huge headstart, a lead in what I hope will be a race to feed support in all the social media apps, to hook them up to the worldwide feed bus. It's a way to get interop without having to concede that any comprehensive API is the winner. Think of RSS 2.0 support at the TCP of social networking, offering a LCD compatibility to a world that desperately needs one. #
- And then after we have that, we can talk about the format of the data we're sending over this network. We have some work to do there too, but luckily the capabilities and limits of RSS 2.0 are a perfect match here. #
- In summary, the reason we want it is so we can do more with confidence with Bluesky, integrate it into more systems. #
- The reason the Bluesky people should want it is that it offers a way to interop with all social nets, that will take almost no effort on their part, and there's no guesswork, we already know how to make feeds that will work pretty much everywhere, and it lets them take the lead in what will be an important way to communicate on the net. #
- And the reason it's good for all of us is we can start viewing the web once again as a fully supported writing environment, and let the writers of the world get to work on solving all our problems (of which we have many) and get the freaking technology out of their way. #
- Think of it as the feed-iverse, it's easier and more low-level than the fed-iverse, and can be implemented in a weekend. And it's fun! #
We could make this election a literary expo. Get the great apocalypse scifi and poliscifi authors to write a daily installment of what President Trump and his governing mafia will be doing on 1/20/25 on 1/20/24. Every day a new atrocity in serial form. A textcast. Finally something worth writing about. #
Recreating Twitter is boring. One of these ventures that's trying to do that should blow the doors off the whole thing, and get rid of every limit. Just support writing and reading and get on with it. #
If you've been reading news.scripting.com and only want one panel (as some people do), you can bookmark just that panel. For example, this is the link for my Tech news category. Or the Bloggers tab on Scripting News can be accessed directly in FeedLand like this. "By category" is just one way FeedLand can display a timeline of news. #
BTW, we care when an item changes, so if we see the text has changed, or a link has been added, or an image enclosure, we update the database and update the rendering on-screen. #
We're thinking about different ways to render art. For example, this is news from my Art category. I could see this kind of timeline feeding another kind of image viewer app, maybe something running on a kiosk or in a store window. #
I'm back in the Wordle groove, having done the last 42 puzzles without missing one. I think I understand the game much better now. I do sometimes make mistakes, and always pay for them. The thing that keeps me coming back is the feeling when you press Return to see the result of your first guess. It's like opening a present, only better. If you get two green tiles, you can bask in the glow of being extremely lucky. If you guess well you usually can solve the puzzle in three or at most four moves. I've never gotten it in two, and I don't usually try, and when I do it's usually a mistake, I would have done better to stick with the plan of eliminating a bunch of letters and confirming others, and then go for solution in the third round. But the thing that keeps me coming back is the feeling of getting a really good present, and that feeling of fortune and a bit of love, self-love, when you see the answer, decide to go for it, and see five green tiles open up one at a time. That's the feeling that keeps me coming back day after day. #"Wait and see what happens" is a losing strategy. By the time you figured out what happened, if you ever do, it's too late. #
- I wrote this as a Mastodon post to a bunch of people who somehow I got cc'd to. I figured I should share it here too. #
- Let's start with feeds and build as much of a Mastodon as we can, without inventing anything new and see what we come up with.#
- That way we know at every step we're standing on a solid foundation of interop.#
- At the same time invest in the feed support of every contender, no matter what "verse" its part of. #
- John Spurlock has done an exemplary implementation of RSS 2.0 feeds for Bluesky. That format should be copied everywhere. He did it in about a week in July and it's great. We're building all kinds of stuff on it. Wish it were in Mastodon, and wish Bluesky would bake it in.#
- Forget about clubs, what we want is interop, maximally as widely as possible to force the silos to get on board. They won't unless they have to.#
- I pinged Doc the other day saying he should do an artcasting feed. #
- Doc is in addition to being a prodigious blogger, also is a photo taker and story teller, so he is perfect for artcasting.#
I was then going to think about what would be the easiest way to get him going, and quickly realized the fastest way is Bluesky because John Spurlock did it right and his feeds coming out of Bluesky are totally artcasting-compatible. Just like that. (Artcasting is one of those cases where almost everyone was doing it the right way. Absolutely no one invented it, it was just obvious how it should work, obvious to enough people.)#- But I wanted to talk about it with A8C people first, because it's also an opportunity to support it in WordPress, or to create a small app that interfaces to WordPress, so it can lead here too. But Doc beat me to it, he posted a beautiful picture of a building site his new hometown to Bluesky, and it appeared in his RSS 2.0 feed, and of course it showed up in FeedLand when I subscribed to his feed. #
- So I added it to my collection of artcasting feeds, and the new version is now available on FeedCorps and his name shows up in the list in the artshow app. #
- This is how we do it, keep turning the wheel.#
- Interop my friends. #
Podcast: What is Elon Musk doing? There's value in Twitter that goes beyond the balance sheet and share price. I saw the opportunity in January 2017, a few days before Trump was inaugurated. Twitter had just elected a president. What is the dollar value of that? In the hands of someone who knows how to squeeze money from the US government, as Musk surely does (and Trump had no idea) -- it could be worth many more billions than he paid for Twitter.#You can live in places where people do awful disgusting things, I know, I've lived in New Orleans, Berkeley and NYC. Twitter is so huge, this idea that it could disband just like that, well it isn't happening. Maybe it's time for us to say clearly what we expect of a social network and try to influence how they run them. We have these great tools for organizing, one of these days we're going to use them for good, in a serious way. And at this point the users have a lot of power relative to what we've had in the past. #
I'm cleaning up some loose-ends in the Scripting News redesign, esp in the phone version. After that, I'm going to start applying the same techniques to FeedLand on phones. Our timelines look fine in that context, here's a screen shot. #
This is the stupidest thing ever. We've had a bit of trouble with the implementation of rssCloud on the new Automattic-hosted server, the pings to coming from one server in particular. We did finally get to the bottom of it and all of a sudden it's working. Except for Scripting News. I added debugging code, stared at server logs, and scratched my head, until I decided to check if I was subscribed to the freaking feed. I wasn't. Once I fixed that little oversight, it's all working, nice and fast. Sometimes the bug is in your brain not in the software. 😄#If I could devote myself fulltime to AI development, first thing I'd do is teach a bot how to generate CSS with high level commands from me. After 15 years of wrangling CSS, I still create messes that are impossible to unravel, the only way to fix it is to start over, and then that gets out of control, and on and on. It would take some patience to establish some basic design patterns, but once designed I could say things like "a little less margin on top of the tabs" and boom that would happen. #
WordPress.org has a site where people share Creative Commons licensed photos. We asked them to support image enclosures (aka artcasting) in their feed. They just did. And as a result their flow looks outstanding on FeedLand, which totally supports this format. This is a bell-ringer event, this is what we're about -- building up and out from where we are in the land of feeds. We can do a lot if we work together. #Remember Bingeworthy? It fell off the air when Twitter blew up their API. I keep wanting it back, because I keep watching shows that should be in its database. I miss it. Then I realized it's not that different from the group of explorers who are putting their app choices into feeds. The Bingeworthy database is people, shows and ratings. The simplest relational database possible. It would be easy to represent each user as a feed, where each item is a rating. The link for each item would be a pointer to the Metacritic page. And then give each feed a category of bingeworthy. From there, we explore. BTW, this is the SQL code that creates the BW database. #
Another month past, archive created. Clean slate. #
Chuck came across a group of bloggers posting detailed lists of apps they use. There's been quite a turnout. Lots of useful info in these posts. #
- It's been five years since I re-did the Scripting News home page. It was overdue. The new version isn't all that different on the surface from the previous version, here's a list of things to look at.#
- Blog, the first tab, becomes Dave. #
- The News tab now is named Bloggers and it does something different, more on that in a bit.#
- The tabs work better, the pages aren't reloaded when you click on one of the tabs, but the URL in your browser's address bar changes, so you can bookmark it and go directly to the page you're interested in. And the browser Back button works as you would expect. #
- The big change under the covers is that it hooks into FeedLand on its own. When you're reading the Bloggers tab, you're reading content that came directly from the new Automattic-hosted FeedLand server. #
- The list of feeds behind the Bloggers tab right now are just placeholders. We're going to work with other sources, using reading lists, to create a news flow from blogs that we think are interesting, along with what other people think are interesting. How this will develop is not yet clear, but we are going to work on this. When I say "we," I mean Chuck Grimmett and myself and others at Automattic. This is the kind of stuff they do for WordPress users, so it fits right in imho with our respective skills.#
Speaking for myself, I want to engage with more bloggers. We used to have something, and I think we can again. #- We're putting a lot of development behind this. FeedLand has been in development for almost three freaking years. This last year has been spent turning corners, and building out features so they can scale to Automattic-level flow. And adding one major new kickass feature to the world of feeds -- reading lists. The ability to subscribe to lists of feeds. We're going to use that in a lot of places. I wanted to get that in the product before we started using it. And it's in, and it works. There are still a few glitches to work out, you know -- software can always work better than it does. 😄#
- All I can say is we're getting there. Today's FeedLand does a lot more and works a lot better than last year's. #
- And now Scripting News is part of that. So we'll be able to make the new stuff more visible, by using it here in this site. #
- Still diggin!#
- As they say. #
- #
- PS: news.scripting.com is still there and updating as before. #
I'm always doing test posts on this blog. This is one of those times. #
I've heard ActivityPub described as two-way RSS. If so, there are imho more direct ways to arrive at that. I think it's possible to create a federation system that takes a few days to implement. Maybe it doesn't need all the features they've put into ActivityPub. I'm pretty sure a lightweight social network is what's called for now. I know 20 different ventures have started up to do this, but isn't it weird that none of them have built on RSS. That's the only approach imho that has a chance of doing something unique here. I'd rather work with other people, but I'm not into replacing simplicity with something that's not very simple.#I'm back on Wordle, having solved the puzzle every day for the last 36 days. It's training my mind -- I see patterns I wouldn't ordinarily see, because I spend as much as an hour or two every day looking for patterns in letters, and finding them, eventually. I wish at times my mind worked more like a computer. When their bot says "there were only three possible solutions at that point" -- I wish I could see what they are at each point, or at least know how many they are, if not what they are. The training has also helped my mind debug software. I'm not as daunted as I often am when there appears to be no solution to the problem I'm working on. I'm sure I'll find it eventually. #
People who say Twitter is over aren't considering how vast it is. Same kind of situation as with Atom many years ago. It wasn't obvious how deeply installed RSS was, all the networks that had been created with it. It was basically impossible at that time to displace RSS. Anyway, same thing with Twitter today, no matter how vile the owner of the network is. It has been around since 2006, a time of huge growth in networking, and it captured basically all of it. So if there's anyone you need to reach, and they're hooked up to the net, you almost certainly will be able to reach them on Twitter. This is another situation like Napster. Never have you had all the music of our civilization available so easily to so many people. We could have done so much with that. The most prudent thing to do with Twitter is to organize a buyout for Musk, and get him out of that position. We don't need to delete it, not that we could, we need to get Musk out of a position of control. #
- I'm finally happy with the next iteration of Scripting News. It'll be quite a bit simpler than what I demo'd over the weekend. #
- For comic relief, I asked my friend ChatGPT, to draw a rendering of my new design, based on these instructions. #
- i want you to draw me a picture of the user interface of my blog, scripting news, as i describe it here. there are four tabs: blog, links, bloggers and about. below the tabs is a display area, where the content of the selected tab is displayed. above the tabs, across the whole width of the window is an artistic picture, with the big letters SCRIPTING NEWS overlaying it. Just below is the site slogan, "it's even worse than it appears." In your drawing the picture behind the letters should be of a hippie band playing in golden gate park. have fun!#
I spent today working on the plumbing of FeedLand-on-Automattic. Hopefully tomorrow I will get to work on more user-facing features. #
A braintrust query for implementors of rssCloud. Do you ping only when an item is created, or every time it changes? #
Posted on Threads: "Replies are almost always spam, they aren't talking to the author (though technically they are), rather they are talking over the author's head, trying to reach the people who read the author's post. If this is what's really going on, surely we can come up with a more realistic structure/UI that doesn't even involve the author." #
RSS Club is fascinating. I subscribed to their OPML file. Now I get all their posts, even if the list changes. #
Watched Oppenheimer last night. Very good movie. I like the artistic flourishes, reminds me of another movie I watched recently and liked, a lot, Spencer. I wasn't really interested in the life and death of Lady Di, but I also got through the latest episodes of The Crown, which I had resisted when the newest Queen was introduced. I find it hard to make the adjustment to new actors playing the roles of characters I had come to love, esp Claire Foy as young Queen Elizabeth, a fantastic actress who played in one of the most spectacular dramatic scenes anywhere anytime. The latest episodes of The Crown were about Diana mostly, and were fantastic. Back to Oppenheimer. I'll try not to spoil it too much, but the drama is puzzling, why are they going after Oppenheimer when he miraculously put together the Manhattan Project which created, in a race with Germany and the USSR, the bomb that ended World War II. The final scene, a flashback to an earlier scene where we didn't hear the dialog, between Oppenheimer and his colleague at Princeton, Albert Einstein, about what happens when you create something that changes the direction of humanity. What happens is this -- they push you aside. I'm not comparing myself to these two giants, but I have had the same question about how tech reacted to my contributions. My conclusion was that our culture has reason to erase the accomplishments of outliers. We prefer innovation to come in nice predictable packages, with a PR person on top, and when that's disturbed, we close ranks to make it all appear very ordinary. Anyway, all of this is very good holiday entertainment and thought provoking. My next adventure in video is Pachinko on Apple TV, which is somewhat confusing, but keeps me coming back, it's so compelling. I still have the last seasons of Ted Lasso and Reservation Dogs in the queue. And of course there's a new season of Fargo, which I'm sure I'll love. Right now my plan is to wait for the series to end and watch it all in a binge. #Screen shot of the latest prototype for the new Scripting News home page. It does the job I wanted it to do, presents in one user interface the content of my blog, linkblog, and several timelines from FeedLand. The previous version had the tab links down the left edge. I loved the way it looked on my desktop system, but then I tried it on my iPad, and realized it didn't work. Not enough horizonal real estate to pull it off. So I went back to the tabs-across-the-top format. I had to drop one of the tabs, and not use the nice Font-Awesome icons I used previously on Scripting News when there was plenty of room. The page is entirely assembled when you load it, so it only works with JavaScript turned on. #
Colin Walker wonders if he should try Bluesky. I say yes. At first I was pretty negative, after the implosion of Twitter, here was another Jack Dorsey network. I wasn't in the mood. But eventually I tried it, and I liked it very much. The mood is civil and often artistic. There are some very creative people there. And I think the API, while it's inscrutable to me, is understandable to developers who put their minds to it, and I expect Colin is one who will figure it out. And I don't think there's any hope of ActivityPub, it's far too underspecified, and interop is likely to be product-based, not based on the protocol, where the Bluesky protocol appears to be overly-well-thought-out, or maybe the docs could have more examples. I didn't have the time to dive into it when I looked.#
I was watching Christiane Amanpour on PBS the other night, at the end of a special report on AI. In her closing she said that OpenAI has a market evaluation of $50 billion, yet they only gave $5 million to journalism. This is a big loop. The same was said about Apple and IBM with their personal computers in the 80s. They make so much money they should give it to us. Then Google, Twitter and Facebook in the 00s and 10s. And now in the 20s the same tired appeal, a highly conflicted one (you don't hear similar cases made for other industries that are disrupted by tech). Now they've got the tin cup out for AI. Journalism could have owned Twitter, but they would have had to work with each other. Insiders in journalism chuckle at the idea, but it isn't funny. They keep letting tech own their means of distribution. In this case, it isn't too late. Start an AI news service, combine the flow of all competitors, and distribute the money the way you wish OpenAI would. That's honorable, and it might work. Basically, all information, including journalism is making another leap, with or without journalism. (Another random idea, don't bother publishing the news, just feed it into the AI mind and let us use the mind. That's what we want.)#One side-effect of using ChatGPT is I don't do nearly as many braintrust queries here on Scripting News. #
I changed something about the way FeedLand displays too-tall items. There's a screen shot on this page and a place to comment. Can you see what changed?#
Christmas season is officially with us here in the United States, as today is our most commercially consumptive holiday, Black Friday. Maybe the most American holiday of all. But it's also a time to be jolly and kind, nice not naughty, doing our part to consume at ever-increasing rates to keep the US economy humming. And it's a time for love, one hopes. Even so it's time to put Santa in his place, in the margin of Scripting News! I did my part today, buying a nice curved monitor for my Mac mini, and a new smaller TV for the den. Socks and a couple of nice shirts.#I'm working on a new version of the Scripting News home page, the first since 2017. There will be more tabs, that run down the left margin instead of the top. It'll have the content of Scripting News in the first tab, as it works now. And the linkblog will be the next tab. Then the tabs from news.scripting.com followed by the About page outline. And lots of room for growth, for new ideas for writers and readers. As always I use my own site to experiment with new web ideas. #
Journalists are still trying to land a punch on the AI sphere, but imho it's already too late. It's already far better at delivering the truth than all the reference sources on the web, including news orgs. One of the secrets to success in business, media and politics is to learn how to lead journalists to the story you want them to tell. There's are all kinds of tricks, I know because I succeeded in that world. When I ask ChatGPT to tell me about things that journalism got wrong that I know everything about, it gets it right. I don't know how that works, because what I think are their sources got it wrong. It's freaking amazing. Now I totally agree that the small group of super rich people who control tech are not people I'd like to see run the world, they break things I care about far too often. Too much power for people who can't or won't see outside their tiny shrinking world. #Someday Google will have a chatbot I can ask if YouTube TV can play Knicks and Mets games live, and if so how much extra does it cost. Navigating their website is hopeless. They must not want you to get that bit of info. They hint at the possibility of it, but I know from previous experience that the reason others do it that way is because they don't actually deliver on what they want you to think they deliver. I guess companies like that are betting that it's just too much trouble to get out of the deal, but the fact is it's incredibly easy to opt out of the deals, unlike with my cable provider, which makes cutting the cord and re-establishing it incredibly time-consuming. #2009: Every so often something happens, a family member or friend dies, and that makes the confusion come front and center. And once in a lifetime someone as close as a father dies, and that floors you. You get knocked down, and as you come back up, you're not the same person you were before. The mystery of life and the question of existence after life, they're always there, but they loom much larger after a loss.#
- Note: This story was written entirely by ChatGPT.#
- In the digital realm of FeedLand, a world pulsating with streams of information, there existed a unique society where knowledge and news were the sources of power. This world was composed of various domains, each representing different genres of information – from the News Mountains to the Blog Plains, the Podcast Peninsula, and beyond.#
- The protagonist of our story is a young, curious girl named Ada. In FeedLand, each individual had a personal Feed – a dynamic stream of information tailored to their interests and needs. Ada, however, was different. She had the rare ability to see and interact with all the Feeds in FeedLand, a talent that was both a gift and a burden.#
- Ada's journey began when she noticed disturbances in the Feeds – information was getting muddled, important news was lost in a sea of trivial updates, and misinformation was spreading like wildfire. This chaos was causing confusion and conflict among the inhabitants of FeedLand.#
- Determined to restore balance, Ada embarked on a quest to find the Core Source, the mythical origin of all Feeds in FeedLand. She believed that by reaching the Core Source, she could rectify the disturbances and bring order back to the information flow.#
- Ada's adventure took her through diverse territories. In the News Mountains, she navigated through towering peaks of breaking stories and deep valleys of in-depth analyses. In the Blog Plains, she encountered a wide array of opinions and narratives, learning to discern the insightful from the mundane. The Podcast Peninsula challenged her with a cacophony of voices and perspectives, each vying for attention.#
- Along her journey, Ada was accompanied by a group of companions, each representing different aspects of FeedLand's information ecosystem. There was Lex, a fact-checker with the uncanny ability to spot inaccuracies in seconds; Echo, a podcaster who could weave stories that captivated anyone who listened; and Pixel, a visual artist who could bring any information to life through graphics and animations.#
- Together, they faced challenges like the Trolls of Misinformation, the Echo Chambers where no new thoughts could penetrate, and the Filter Bubbles that isolated communities from one another.#
- Finally, they reached the Core Source, a vast, glowing nexus of data and information. Ada realized that the Core Source had become overwhelmed with the sheer volume and variety of information being generated. She used her unique ability to untangle the flows, filter out the noise, and establish new, more efficient pathways for information dissemination.#
- As a result, the Feeds of FeedLand became clearer, more accurate, and more accessible to its inhabitants. Knowledge and news flowed harmoniously, enriching the lives of all who lived there.#
- Ada's journey taught her the importance of critical thinking, discernment, and the responsible sharing of information. She continued to explore the ever-evolving landscape of FeedLand, always ensuring that the streams of information remained pure and beneficial.#
- Her story became a legend in FeedLand, inspiring others to be mindful of the information they consumed and shared, making Ada a symbol of wisdom and guidance in the digital age.#
- Thinking about WordPress this morning, APIs and feeds.#
This last year I’ve caught up with WordPress, have been asking questions, and one of the best thing about my work with Automattic is that the doors have been open. I have great teachers who are encouraging me, and of course are experts in and proud of WordPress, and as a result I think FeedLand and WordPress are going to work together in some very nice ways. Getting pretty close on some of it.#- A year ago I didn’t even know that WordPress still had APIs. At some point the code I had that worked with WordPress via the MetaWeblog API broke, and I assumed that it was the end of the line, and took the feature out of my linkblogging tool. But I was wrong. And not only that there was Calypso, a modern REST interface, that works in the same model I use for FeedLand and Drummer. It’s all there. I love it. All kinds of integrations will be possible. #
- Getting FeedLand to work in the new environment has been a step by step process. It was built to run on a Digital Ocean server, with a file system. I’ve converted now all the pieces we needed, and it seems finally to run smoothly.#
- Onward! #
news.scripting.com is a big hit. It regularly gets more traffic than my blog. A sign that it's time for some rearranging. #
ChatGPT was overloaded earlier this evening. I wrote: "I'm losing my shit here. I feel as lost without it as I would have felt last year without Google. Anyway here's the question I need answered. 'working in javascript in the browser, a question about using localstorage. are there any rules about how much storage you can use? would 10MB be too much? 50MB?'" Believe it or not my friend ChatGPT will have some advice about that and it'll be pretty good. You can't find that through a search engine, btw, which is why OpenAI is so important. #
There's a flaw in the design of our social networks. The idea that there are "conversations" when actually many of the replies you get are spam. People trying to attach their name to something that they hope gets them attention and followers. So when someone addresses something to you it can be confusing, because they aren't actually talking to you, they're talking to the imagined thousands of people over your shoulder looking for some new tweeter or tooter or threader to adore. When it's actually mostly people looking for places to hang their own spam to catch other people's attention and followers. Is there anything actually going on there? Sadly, no. #
I added an item to the artcasting test feed, and also added code in FeedLand to display them. On an initial browse around other feeds and collections, it seems a few are using the enclosure for images in artful ways. Some of it is spammy, of course. Should've seen that coming. Heh. But we limit the vertical space a feed item gets in the timeline, you can see the whole thing by clicking on it, and clicking again after having a look. If you want to create a genuine art feed, then I want to make it look great in FeedLand. And keep the more rude feeds manageable. If you're playing around with artcasting, let me know, I'd like to see how others are doing, and share interesting stuff with people who follow this feed.#- A creative diagram representing a technology stack as a building with multiple floors. At the bottom floor, label it 'TCP'. The next floor above should be labeled 'HTTP'. Above that, have a larger floor labeled 'RSS', with smaller adjacent floors labeled 'Atom' and 'ActivityPub'. The top two floors should be labeled 'Textcasting' and 'Artcasting' respectively. Surrounding the building, depict human-style animals like dogs, bears, owls, and hamsters, all dressed in business attire. Each of these characters should be holding signs with the names of tech companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Salesforce.com. The diagram should illustrate the hierarchy and importance of each technology layer in the stack, with a whimsical and engaging representation.#
- Matt Mullenweg: "Sales of the 100-year plan so far: 0. Hundreds of people filled out the form, though. I think we really messed something up in the follow-up, including not making it self-serve to start. Will review and try again. It's an important promise to us."#
- I'm very much a customer for this service. It would be worth $10K for to buy 100 years of persistence for my web writing. A simple easy to understand service that helps get the process started. #
- I transfer scripting.com to Automattic as registrar. #
- I upload the contents from S3 to Automattic server. Static files, HTML, feeds, images, code. #
- Automattic provides an API to keep the files updated and so I can add to them as long as I'm still writing.#
- The files are publicly accessible over HTTP.#
- Automattic agrees to renew the domain for 100 years, and manage access to the files, with reasonable limits and acts of god accounted for, etc.#
- I pay you $10K on signing. #
- Why should you do it -- simple, easy benefit, i think you'd sell a lot of contracts, and you could start the business now, and get started serving customers and learning what they want, how they work, and get ideas for where to go next.#
- Dave#
One of the fundamental laws of programming. A problem that seems insurmountable often succumbs to a good night's sleep.#
Brilliant post about RSS from Colin Walker. I agree with all of it. When a protocol or format is much more complicated that it needs to be, there's usually a reason, the proponents want to say they're compatible and open without having actual interop. #
BTW, I read in a news article the other day that I developed iPodder, the first podcasting client in 2004. This is not true. The first podcasting client was Radio UserLand in 2001. I did not write iPodder, it was a community effort. #
I admire Jeff Jarvis for his spunk, and on matters of journalism it's amazing how often I fully and enthusiastically agree with his point of view. But I have to just as strongly disagree with him about OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. I don't go for hype in tech, I'm very much a Show Me kind of guy. Every time I think of a new use for ChatGPT I'm blown away by what a breakthrough it is. Not just impressive tech, which it certainly is, but how incredibly useful it is. And how it understands my questions. And its infinite patience and good manners. I'm not trying to change Jeff's mind, but just to say I think my friend got this one wrong. #Why worry about AI taking over from humans, we’ve led our species off a cliff, maybe it’s time to try another approach.#
- Imagine a Silicon Valley board meeting with a young entrepreneur wearing shorts and a baseball cap, drinking beer, while the investors are wearing ski vests and their attention is focused on their laptop screens.#
If the Dead concert won't come to Dave, then Dave must go to the Dead concert. #
The first miracle of the web was that people could write and share knowledge. This was thought to have been a failure as journalism focused on abusive social media systems. But that's where the second miracle, AI, got all its info from. I guess something worked. 💥#
Colin Walker adapted his feed reader to support artcasting feeds. Also it turns out a number of established feed readers already do the right thing with image enclosures. So that nails it, this is the way to do it. Support in FeedLand will be added shortly. #
We're starting to work with people on artcasting. The idea is we want to send visual art over RSS 2.0 feeds. Photographs. Paintings. News. The consensus seems to be that we should use the enclosure element, as with podcasting. In this case, if the type begins with "image/" then an artcast viewer should handle it, and others should ignore it. We were at this place with podcasting in 2001, and needed some examples, so we had a feed of Grateful Dead music to start using the technology. Here's the artcasting test feed. Try subscribing to it in a feed reader you like. Hopefully it either ignores the enclosure or it does the right thing with it, displays it. Here's a thread for comments, questions and screen shots. #I think a basic hookup to a chatbot is going to become part of the textcasting spec pretty quickly. So far the best one I've seen is Guy Kawasaki's. I want to be able to ask for a list of things I've written on a given topic, and to be able to ask the questions in the same straightforward way I ask ChatGPT. #
Polls are not news.#
Here's a demo app that scrolls through pictures recently posted by one of the art feeds on Bluesky. Artshow is not itself a feed reader, it calls FeedLand, via an API, to get the recent posts from feeds in the list. It's all very simple, small pieces loosely joined. An illustration that there’s more to feed “reading” than we might think (podcasting is a another form of feed reading that doesn’t look like a feed reader). #BTW, Bluesky has excellent RSS 2.0 support. Here's my feed on Bluesky. You can hook that up to any feed reader, obviously. But think about it, this is something new. #
We need something like Black Lives Matter for Jews. Our lives do matter. But our right to continue to live is always up for debate.#
textcasting and ActivityPub are not mutually exclusive. It would be great if an ActivityPub instance would also support the features outlined in the Textcasting doc. It's equally possible that a non-ActivityPub app could support Textcasting. It's like saying you can send an MP3 over email and over SMS. Textcasting is the MP3. As the Textcasting doc says I'm interested in supporting writers. Really if we work on it, we can have a great writing and reading environment. #WordPress signin is now the default for feedland.org. I'm looking forward to being able to do some interesting things in the future with the WordPress connection.#
- I love that ChatGPT makes it possible to create visualizations for ideas that previously I could only present in words. #
- For example, I like to say that when I die my gravestone should say He's Done Digging or something like that, to stand in contrast to my long-lived motto -- Still diggin! I did some writing this morning about Future-Safe Archives, and thought to get that as a picture. The piece isn't ready to publish yet, but no reason not to share the illustration. So here it is.. #
- PS: No need for an actual gravestone. Online is fine. Hopefully we'll figure out how to make such things persist before it's needed. 😄#
I did my 500th Peloton ride today. #
I've often felt I should be able to stay in places I've lived sort of on an emeritus basis. A certain number of days a year based on the number of years I've lived there and maybe the number of people who live there who'd like to go out for a walk or a meal. #
We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of textcasting, btw. #
Someone must be working on a ChatGPT for SQL databases. I want to talk to my friend the chatbot, so it can write the queries for me. All the time. For example, instead of asking ChatGPT how to ask for the number of rows in a table, it could just tell me how many rows there are. #
Mastodon is like CP/M. Bluesky is like the Apple II. Threads is like the IBM PC (though not nearly as open). And Twitter is.. hmmm.#
You know I don't always like the same soda. Sometimes it's Diet Coke, and other times, Diet Dr Pepper. But for the last year or so the drink of choice around these parts is Fresca. But you know what's funny. No matter what my favored drink is, it's always the one you can't get at the local supermarket. Always sold out. Very weird.#
I just got a link to a story on The Information about my longtime friend Guy Kawasaki. We had a couple of great adventures together, early in our careers, and I'll never forget the moment when he gave me the idea that blasted my company out of poverty to success. I would have loved to read the article, but to do so I'd have to sign on, and I'm sure they would sell my address, and I wouldn't be surprised if I had to subscribe. So as much as it pained me, I hit the back button and wrote this post to say I would have been happy to spend $1 to read the article, and authenticate myself with a service I control (ie no selling my identity thank you). We've been around this block so many times. The writing world of the web is full of disappointment like this. I've written this post 100,000 times by now. #