A cool feature for FeedLand users. When you Like an item, it's automatically added to two RSS feeds -- one for your likes, and one for the likes of all users on your FeedLand.It's basically a single-gesture linkblog. There's a lot of that in FeedLand, where things have been factored to a point where they couldn't possibly be simpler. Of course since they're standard RSS feeds, you could follow them from any feed reader. #

Archive of my blog from March 2003, marking the start of the war in Iraq, and my arriving in Cambridge to begin my fellowship at Berkman.#

Reading my notes on being at Harvard, it sounds like Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I was very excited, and it shows. In hindsight, I was about to have some great adventures. One of the best experiences of my life. Now twenty years later, I'm still very grateful for having had the opportunity to work with the people I met at Harvard, and the power afforded to me with the H-bomb business card. The friends I made there still benefit me to this day, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference. #

So it's been twenty years since I started at Berkman. Thanks to Charlie Nesson, Jon Zittrain and John Palfrey for giving me the chance. Met so many who became lifelong friends, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference. #

I remember when I got a key to the building. I didn't ask for it, and I certainly didn't expect it. My first thought was hmmm i wonder what i can do with this? That's where the regular Thursday evening meetup came from.#

The first thing I did when I started at Berkman, twenty years ago, was to get a blogging server up and running. It was 2003, so I used Manila, a product we made at UserLand. It was the first weblog server at any university, in the world. Early days. A few years after I left they converted to WordPress. A solid move both times because by then UserLand had shut down and the default blogging server was the software made by my friend Matt. #

In FeedLand, if you're being asked to log in every time you go to the site, you're probably opening it via a bookmark that goes to the old URL. The easiest fix is to edit bookmark so it goes to https://feedland.org/ -- note the https. Another fix is to do a hard-reload of the page. This will force a new version to reload. It redirects if it gets a non https request. #

I get that people don't like that ChatGPT will return incorrect results. But as a software developer, I can experiment with the product with that caveat, and imagine its uses once the quality of the results are better, however they achieve that. I don't have to wait to think, in other words. With that disclaimer, I searched for docs about how to do a hard-reload in popular browsers. Those docs are hard to find, and when you find one it's heavily monetized. So instead, I asked ChatGPT to write a docs page to answer this question. Looks pretty good to me! No bullshit in the page either. #

A steady flow of new signups on the first FeedLand server. #

Almost everything you do on FeedLand is public. You can read anyone else's feed list. Example, Ken Smith's list. If you're signed in, to subscribe to a feed just click the feed's checkbox. You can also see who's been on recently, when they signed up, how many feeds they subscribe to, and how many pages they've viewed. You can also see the feeds that have recently been subscribed to. The idea is to make feed discovery as easy as it possibly can be. We steal (and improve on) ideas from social media apps that didn't exist last time I took a fresh look at feed systems. I don't think of FeedLand as a feed reader -- it's more of a feed management system, imho.#

I first wrote about the use of checkboxes in this way (see above) in 2007. I called it Checkbox News.#

Another important feature, every user has their own feed, which you can edit in FeedLand, of course. To write a post, click in the edit box at the top of the page, type some text, click the Post button. It should show up in the list of user-feed posts, below. If you want to edit one of your posts, click on the text, make the changes, click the Update button. Of course there's an RSS feed for each user, which you can subscribe to in FeedLand or any other RSS-compatible application (there are many, as I'm sure you know). #

It's important for users to have their own feed in the same way it was good to be able to develop software for the Mac on a Mac. Most users will never make a software product, and maybe most FeedLand users won't write publicly, but you want to make it was easy as possible for people to contribute to the ecosystem they use. It's a philosophy of the active not-just-eyeballs users. It's a basic democratic idea. #

Docs: Starting up in FeedLand.#

On reflection, it's amazing I wasn't killed in my teens. #

Poll: I was having a discussion with a friend the other day and I said none of my friends have had plastic surgery. They asked how I knew, and I admitted I didn't.#

It will be possible to create better teachers out of ChatGPT tech. What led me to that is that it certainly could help people write better bug reports. It would have far more patience than a busy developer, whose job is to fix bugs, not decypher a user's (justifiably) imprecise understanding of how software works. But a chatbot could help, patiently asking the user questions. Then, of course, over time -- the user would learn how to do it themselves, and get this -- they would also learn how software works. There might be some great programmers out there who don't know they are. 😄#

Back in the day, as they say -- when I was going to a city somewhere around the world, I'd post something on my blog and we'd get a meetup going. The world was smaller then or so it seems. Maybe it's just me, maybe I've gotten smaller.#

It seems like the transition of FeedLand from Twitter-based identity to email-based identity has more or less worked. As part of the transition, and please this is only for people who read Scripting News, so don't pass it on -- membership in feedland.org is now open. It had been closed since Dec 12 when I started working on the transition. You only need an email address to sign up, not a Twitter identity.#

My blog is being taken over by ChatGPT. It sometimes can replace four apps I used previously: Google, GitHub, Twitter, Wikipedia.#

I was wondering how I could create something that behaved like an app on the Mac desktop from a page in Chrome. I want to use web Drummer to write docs about something I'm working on in Electric Drummer. It helps to have each in its own window for something like that, rather than switching back and forth between tabs. I was going to post a braintrust query but realized I could use ChatGPT and get the answer right away. It seems to have worked. #

I kind of like the idea of letting the ChatGPT version of history be the authoritative one. In the record of my own life, it's more accurate than Wikipedia, which has been hacked mercilessly since inception by opportunistic credit-takers#

I am surprised when things that depend on Twitter still work.#

I asked ChatGPT for information about "river of news."#

Don't panic when asking for help with software. The problem probably can be solved, but only methodically. #

We're having a huge snowstorm today in the Catskills. Expecting about two feet of wet heavy snow. I'll probably lose power at some point and my internet connection, but I have Starlink as a backup.#

Today's song: A Apolitical Blues.#

Rachel Maddow is bullshit. Every time I listen to her, when she's talking about something I know about, she makes something innocent sound nefarious, I assume depending on her viewers not knowing the facts.#

I was fascinated with Communist China when I was a kid. A forbidden place. Hardly anything came out, except culture created out of Communist Party lies. I wrote letters to the Chinese Consulate in New York asking for everything they had. They sent a huge poster of Chairman Mao and colorful books with gorgeous drawings of Chinese kids doing amazing things because they studied the teachings of Chairman Mao. I wasn't stupid, I understood this was propaganda, but I loved the way they did it -- as a genre. This is what I wrote in one of my best friends' autograph book when we graduated sixth grade and went on to junior high. #

Another glitch -- the other day I asked FeedLand users who had not already registered an email address to do so now. It's basically impossible for me to test this, because I don't have any accounts to use to test this since the connection with Twitter has been pretty glitchy lately. It turns out it's too late to do this transition, so we'll go ahead with the switch to email identity for feedland.org. When it switches over, you'll have to log into feedland.org using your email address, which should work for people who pre-registered. I know it's complicated, I hate it -- it's the worst use of both of our time, we get no new features for all this bullshit. But Twitter is no longer reliable in this role, so we had to do it. I'll keep you all posted here on progress, and appreciate your patience. I think it'll all be pretty smooth after this change. #

To email subscribers, sorry for the glitch last night. Probably due to the switch to Daylight Savings Time, the wrong version of Scripting News went out at midnight. This feels familiar, but there's nothing in my notes about how to work around this. I will have a look at the code during the day today and see if I can figure out what went wrong. I was able to get the correct email to go out at 6AM EDT today by editing the stats.json file for the app to indicate that the email for the day hadn't yet gone out, and it immediately started sending out the correct email. #

If Trump were president, he'd have tried to extort some kind of fee to rescue the depositors at SVB. Or just ignored it altogether.#

Podcast: I'm crazy and I know it. 🤪 4.5 min.#

When Facebook launches their Twitter replacement, will they pay us to write for them, or is it the same old bullshit model where we work for free like hamsters spinning the wheels.#

On the other hand, we should have an open source Twitter replacement that's fucking easy to install and runs itself. Node.js. Runs on desktop in Electron for local users. It could be much easier than Mastodon. A fractional-horsepower tweeter. If anyone wants to work on that, let me know, I'd like to be part of such a thing (mostly as a user and app developer).#

My step-niece and nephew, Miranda and Jake, in Jamaica had a routine with my uncle, their step-father. He would scrunch up his face looking at a plate of food and say "I don't like this!" And they would in a chorus sing "But Ken it's gooooood for you!" They were the cutest kids and he was pretty cute too gotta say. #

This song sounds incredible on the Amazon Echo Studio. #

Okay now I have to tell you about my latest experience with ChatGPT. The subject is CSS. It's possible to do all kinds of crazy logic on DOM elements, given all the different selectors they have. But how to combine them to do what you want to do? You can stare at the table for hours, and do trial-and-error, but if you're like me, you gave up before you even started. But with ChatGPT, you can formulate the question according to what you want to do, and it creates a docs page that probably never existed before, that shows you, with examples, how to do what you want. I just did that. Amazing. It digs you out of corners. Nothing like this has ever existed. #

In five years most of us won't be using Google-like search engines. #

For some people using Mastodon is a political cause like being a Republican. I try to avoid the demagoguery by unfollowing, even blocking people, but it must be growing, because increasingly it can't be avoided and more and more of the messages are touting events that I know are pretty freaking insignificant. As an implementer, you have to watch out if you support features that are only in Mastodon and not based on ActivityPub. Which suggests that as the bigco's start implementing AP support, they're all going to face a conundrum. If we want users to think what we're doing is anything more than symbolic, we're going to have to use the Mastodon API and not ActivityPub, because no one else is doing it in AP, therefore there's nothing to interop with or test against. It's hard to promote a feature when you've never been able to test it. The whole thing is pretty shaky. And most people aren't aware of the subtleties. Time to get out a bucket of popcorn and stay on the sidelines until some of this becomes real. #

If you're a current FeedLand user and you haven't yet registered an email address with your Twitter-based account, now is the time to do so. We're going to be switching the whole system over to email-based accounts soon, and it'll be more difficult to transition your account if you haven't taken this step. 💥#

I asked ChatGPT to write a Zillow-style ad for a house in Hurley, NY. #

Poll: How broken is Twitter?#

A hundred years ago I asked a Microsoft exec when they’d ship open source and was told it’ll never happen, not in their DNA. It happened. When will Twitter peer with Masto? It could happen. #

There's a new test version of Electric Drummer for the Mac. #

Earlier today I used Google to try to find a doc I wrote a few years ago. I am the author. I have the original. Well a bunch of people copied my file and posted it on their sites, with their template and their ads (I don't have ads), and for whatever reason Google ranks their docs higher. Mine isn't even on the first page. So tell me, how is that Google isn't implementing a "man in the middle" attack? Why aren't they taking the heat for delivering incorrect results?#

Same thing happened with the RSS 2.0 spec. There is only one original. Try to find it in Google. Lotsa luck. There's so much bullshit on the search results page. It's amazing we're trained not to see the lies that Google passes off as facts, but somehow we're supposed to hold the startup accountable instead.#

Then I asked ChatGPT where the RSS 2.0 spec is. They got it right. ❤️#

I'm definitely going to see this Jennifer Lawrence movie. #

Keith Richards: "To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it."#

Today's song: You Can't Hurry Love. #

I asked ChatGPT for ten popular songs by The Supremes. #

And a list of popular songs by Cher? Now all we need is an interface to Amazon Music so I can play the songs. Maybe some checkboxes next to list items. #

While my posts on Mastodon tend to be better-distributed than my Twitter posts, the "discussion" there is every bit as insipid and pointless as it ever was on Twitter. People don't read the posts, don't click on the links, ask impossible-to-parse questions, I have no idea why they bother. I want small-scale friend-nets, that aren't connected to anything else. Just my best buds. I don't give a shit if anyone else reads it, or doesn't. I want quality. Sick and tired of all the mindless bullshit. #

Please don't come out with something called Podcasting 2.0 or The Podcasting Authority or Podcasting As Designed By God. Come up with a neutral code name, and explain why what you're doing will benefit podcasting. And then sit down. 🚀#

I asked ChatGPT what was the first weblog. And note, the response is archived on my own site, statically rendered, in HTML. Makes it easier to share results, and for those results to get into search engines. Screen shots are bullshit. #

Here's source code for the Frontier script that copies the chat-gpt files from the Downloads folder to a calendar-structured sub-folder of my publicfolder on scripting.com.#

Manton Reece is our eyes and ears from BlueSkyLand. I applied for a beta, but wasn't given one. Just as well, I'm loaded up to my ears with other stuff.#

Advice from the developer of the chatgpt bookmarklet on how to customize the name of the file it generates. #

Heard someone say you can't leave your PhD to your children, but you can leave them your farm. I take exception. Both my parents had a PhDs, and this gave me examples for the value of knowledge and intellect, and how to figure things out. I didn't inherit their degrees, but I did get their intellectual power.#

BTW, the bit about NetNewsWire supporting the source:markdown element in RSS may sound ho-hum, but it's actually huge. The new things in open formats tend to sound boring when you first hear about them, they take a few years to fill out, but this is enough to get the ball rolling. FeedLand is imho going to be an important product. NetNewsWire already is. Between the two products there's enough to start a bootstrap. Now I'm using their announcement to entice others to jump on board. They're listening more carefully than before. That's why I'm writing this second post, to be sure people don't miss it. Here are the developer notes for adding Markdown to your feeds and to your reader software. #

Last night's Knicks game was wonderful. As the Nets gave up on their buy-a-championship nightmare, the slow-growth Knicks approach has been going great. I'm sure the Knicks would've signed KD or Kyrie if they had offered, but so thankful they diss'd the Knicks instead. Idiots. Now the normal order has been restored. Hopefully the Knicks continue to add pieces slowly and let home-grown stars like IQ continue to grow. It's intoxicating to watch him get the chance to excel as in last night's game, and completely exceed all reasonable expectations. The whole team is fantastic. Our loyalty to the team has paid off. #

ChatGPT: "Give me the names of 23 cities, anywhere in the world, whose names begin with T and have exactly three syllables in their names." Obviously some are wildly wrong. But it's still useful to come up with potential codenames for projects. Better than my previous way of doing it, browsing a Google Map sort of randomly.#

A feature request for the bookmarklet I use to save ChagGPT queries. #

I have a new way of syncing up my outline with the public web, and it's quite a bit slower than the previous method. Which means sometimes I rebuild my home page before all the changes are uploaded, leading to some hilarious mistaken posts. Have to tighten this up. #

Mastodon, where I have 7.6K followers, generates far more flow than Twitter ever did, where I have 66.7K followers. #

NetNewsWire will support Markdown in the 6.2 release. 💥#

FeedLand already supports Markdown in both directions, with the source:markdown element, of course. Interop. #

It's time to see what Tumblr is up to these days. I've had a site there for many years. Of course it has an RSS feed. Previous posts are in March 2014 and then May 2011. The feed looks pretty straightforward. Looks like every post must have a title? I don't remember it being so noisy?#

New rule: Idiots get muted. Assholes are blocked. #

Pot roast is much better on the second day.#

A long time ago a reporter friend who wrote for the WSJ sent me a link to a blurb for his new book, with my name under it. They wanted me to put this text in a blog post so they could quote it. There was no request, no "please," just here's the job. I didn't do it, and got a flamey email from the guy which surprisingly included a threat to never quote me again. What shocked me then and still shocks me today was how pro forma it seemed. The kind of thing they do for each other all the time in the news business? As far as I recall, I never wrote about it, and certainly never mentioned the name of the reporter. All that's interesting about it to me is that it appeared to be standard practice.#

Poll: What's the difference between a Nazi and a neo-Nazi?#

A GitHub repo with the contents of the RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard. No changes are contemplated, the spec has been frozen for 20+ years, but it's nice to have an off-site record. #

Today's song: Legalize It.#

The other day I was kvelling about how great ChatGPT was at finding feeds for news sites that didn't have paywalls. Until I noticed that some of the sites most definitely did have paywalls. So it's not perfect. It's a totally 1.0 kind of thing. If you don't know what that means, it might be a good time to re-read Microserfs. #

BTW, I wish ChatGPT would statically render their results pages, so I don't have to do screen shots just to quote them. Make it easier for us to promote our discoveries. It's so ridiculous that in 2023 we're still using screen shots as the way to hook networks together. #

Update: This project has the source to a bookmarklet that I used to create this static HTML version of a conversation on ChatGPT. Problem solved. It could be packaged so it's more easily used by a non-technical user. But it's very nice to have as-is. Thanks!#

Tonight's Knicks game was pure delight. Haven't enjoyed basketball this much since Linsanity. I still don't buy that there's a Knicks-Nets rivalry. There aren't any Nets fans. They are a backup team so if the Knicks are out of town you can still go to a game. Now that the carpetbaggers have left, everything is back to normal. Dallas and Phoenix can have them. Good riddance. #

This piece I wrote on 12/28 is what I think should happen next, turn the web we use into a fantastic place for writers. Right now it's a freaking disaster. #

I continue to take a break after much michegas converting to email identity and HTTPS. I've got Electric Drummer more or less working, and I think I'm going to stop short of getting all of it working, given that I want to keep taking this break and am not up for more grinding away. Something changed over here, and I'm more inclined to let you all take care of yourselves for a while. Mastodon is fine, even though I can't write for it using the tools I like to use. So far only my blog qualifies, and my docs and this.how stuff. I'm enjoying the winter here in the Catskills and dreaming of other cool things to do. Software right now far from my mind. That could change at any time. #

Welcome to March! The usual archiving and initializing. #

I've been using Facebook for many years. Even so, I've never figured out how to navigate the basic structure. I want to see all the comments I've posted in reverse chronologic order. Where is that command? Then it hit me, they need ChatGPT as the UI of their product. Let's give it a try. "In Facebook, how do I see a reverse chronologic list of all the comments I've left on other people's posts?" Here's the result. I tried it, got the list, edited a message. This solves a huge design problem in software. How to simplify complex software so people can feel more in control. #

A few days ago I asked Brent Simmons where we go to talk about ideas for making our products work together in interesting new ways. Where do we go to congregate? I just watched a fantastic documentary about Laurel Canyon in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s, near Sunset Strip, which had lots of bars, for all kinds of music and the musicians who made the music. Lots of famous names. People who created a generation of pop music, with lots of collaboration. This is a necessary component for tech. When I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1979, I kept looking for the pulse of the place. Where do people meet up. And within hours I found Ken's House of Pancakes on El Camino in Menlo Park was a good place. There was Siam Garden also in Menlo Park. Chef Chu's in Los Altos. Rossotti's in Portola Valley and of course Buck's if you like VC. For a few years, my yard in Woodside was a frequent party place. I am amazed by all the people who came to BloggerCons. Okay so now we're on the web, we've been here for 30 freaking years. Where do you go if you have an idea you want to share ideas with other developers, who may not develop for the same platform, or work for a large company. This is missing. At one point the discussion group on this blog served that purpose, but it was taken over by trolls, of course. But nowadays we have less crazy ideas about "free speech" and know how to ruthlessly dispose of trolls. I'd like to figure this out. #

I'm always looking out for good clip art for my blog. An example: Sarah Sherman playing a TV host caught on a roller coaster for 19 hours. Sally Field on Letterman, and a cartoon image of President Carter. #

I don't believe in character limits in blog posts. I hope in a few years all these discussions about what's the optimal number of characters for a post will be seen as farce, like the scene in Amadeus where the Emperor says Mozart's opera has too many notes. I don't think it's up to Emperors or software developers to have opinions on what's the right number of characters in my writing. What if in turn, as a writer, I said your code couldn't have more 500 characters per file. What's the likelihood that this edict would make any sense? Hopefully that puts it in perspective. There's a simple solution available to everyone, a More link at some arbitrary breakpoint, that does enough to encourage short posts if that's what you're after. And it also makes sense to writers. #

In Jamaica when they say someone “dirty shirted” you that means they disrespected you. I was looking for a reference to it on the web and can’t find it. Did I imagine it?#

I keep finding legit tasks for ChatGPT. For example, I have a new utility that hooks Chokidar up to websockets. If a file is modified, a message goes to a server, which in turn forwards the message to N listeners. Chokidar is a very nice utility with lots of configuration options, but sparse docs. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do to improve latency, ie the time it takes for a change to a file to be noticed and acted on. The docs provide some vague clues, but when I asked ChatGPT if I could adjust the latency, it gave me a clear yes, and showed me how to do it. Also suggested there might be lesser-known toolkits that would be better for this kind of application. #

It’s that time of year where you think winter must be nearly over but this is just the beginning of the torture.#

I mentioned the other day that I was having trouble building Electric Drummer after many months of being focused on FeedLand. It appeared as if I wasn't able to get it to build. Problem solved. My written build instructions were missing a step. I couldn't move on until I solved this problem. Electric Drummer is essential software to my daily work. I do all my for-work writing here. That's a very basic thing, and something I might take on, starting from scratch with an online world that assumes the writers are always able to write in their favorite apps. If an online system can't accomodate this, we don't write for them. #

Anyway -- now that Electric Drummer is building, there are lots of things to fix now that the lower-level code that it uses has been fixed to accomodate HTTPS. When they say supporting HTTPS is a breeze, only if you don't already have a codebase. Those GoogleHoles are sooo sneaky. Just like Russian propagandists. It's okay this is the relatively easy stuff. Of course fixing these problems will break other things. Sigh.#

Azeem Azhar: "ChatGPT has organised much of the world’s information and made it easily accessible."#

ChatGPT is basically a user interface for search, and it's a breakthrough. We can't and shouldn't go back. It's too good not to use.#

Fixed a problem in Drummer. The About tab was missing in user blogs. A bit of breakage in the transition to the new identity system, fixed. #

The vexing problem I explained yesterday is solved. But not the way I expected it to go. I kept banging my head on the Electric Drummer codebase, and I couldn't get it to build. Of course I have a process for that, but it had been months since I did one, and somewhere in there something stopped working, silently. I gave up in frustration after a few hours of slogging, getting nowhere, and on my way out, cleaning up after my failed adventure, I realized I could do it without changing E/D at all. It's a long story, no space for it here -- but I wanted to close the loop. I am now able to edit my I/O in E/D and I'm a H/C.#

I've been thinking about how memos work in highly structured organizations. When you're cc'd on a memo as CEO you like to see up front if there are no action items for you below, that this is just an FYI thing. When I was a CEO, a long time ago, I never had the time to read every sentence in every memo I was cc'd on, nor would it be appropriate. Everyone had to learn to be clear about the presence of action items before starting their narrative. Just putting an FYI at the top with a short list of people who have to act. Most memos, I found were totally informational, ie contained no action items for anyone. #

I used to live in Woodside CA, where snow on the ground was unheard of. Until today. Wow. And now I live in Woodstock NY where snow this time of year is the norm, yet this year there has been almost none. #

First, it's good that people are working on new features for RSS for podcasts. Why not. But you should choose a modest name for your effort. By calling it Podcasting 2.0 you're basically forcing anyone else who wants to do something here to call theirs 3.0 or 4.0. Just come up with a random name, like The Oslo Project. How did I come up with that name? I asked ChatGPT to do it : "Please give me 10 random names of European cities with less than 4 syllables in their names." Here's what it came up with. Or you can ask for children's names. Or color names. Or Yiddish words. And then please, look at what the other guys are doing and instead of implementing something slightly different with a different name, just do it their way. The only goal here should be upgrading the user experience and interop, so there's no freaking lockin. Keep the bullshit to a minimum. "Available where you get your podcasts."#

I'm still trying to figure out how to retrofit Instant Outlining in Electric Drummer without having to implement support for the new email-based identity system. It's especially hard to do that for an Electron app, it took a huge effort to get Twitter identity in there. E/D stores files locally, and combined with Public Folder, means it doesn't need any help storing stuff where it's public accessible. The hard part, I'm finding, is to figure out where I need to stop it from overwriting one of the head-level attributes. I wrote all this code, but it's so freaking complicated. Having cleared that up, I'm now ready to take another approach. I'll let you know how it goes. #