Podcast: Do blogs need comments? A return to a blog post by Joel Spolsky in 2007, posted by the WordCamp Canada people in 2025. #

I found another thing that's possible in the age of ChatGPT. A few years ago I wondered if a product existed. I wanted a small footprint audio amplifier, with that could control a pair of high-end tower speakers I've had for a long time. I was tired of huge receiver boxes with buttons and dials and inputs for all kinds of audio input. I no longer have a phonograph or a CD or tape player. Just one audio input coming from the TV, that gets all its input from an Apple TV box (or the one made by Google or Amazon or whoever). It should have a volume control and an equalizer. And forget about dials, it should all be controlled from an app on my phone. But most important, it has to be small and happy with wireless connections except for the crucial connections. If such a product existed five years ago I couldn't find it. But last night I was roaming around on my iPad while watching the news, and thought to ask this: "I have two good speakers, need a modern amplifier that takes HDMI eArc input and powers the speakers. I want something simple and small." Well yes, turns out such products do exist. And from the initial list provided by Gemini, I ended up buying the first one they recommended, though I was tempted by the second. Then I thought to ask about the speakers, I bought them for $3K when I moved to Berkeley in 2006. I took a picture of the bar code sticker on the back of one of the speakers and gave it to Gemini, and it told me all about it. It was more information than I had when I bought them. It was worth $300 to see if the speakers were worth keeping. They've done a fair amount of traveling from California to NYC then to the mountains. I love the idea of the WiiM product. I also loved the Denon, but the WiiM fit the bill and was less than 1/2 the price. None of this was possible before we got the AI bots. #

I wish ChatGPT would listen when I say "Just answer the question." I've tried, but when it can't figure it out it ignores the request and dumps a lot of bullshit at you. Maybe Trump can address that in his keynote to the AI conference in DC. Just kidding.#

Someday Manton and I will make a very nice Markdown editor for Mastodon. Once it's working I'll pitch Rich Siegel to do the same for BBEdit. Along with the WordPress connection, that should nail it once and for all that Mastodon is a blogging platform. Manton is the right guy to do it, he has all the protocols implemented on micro.blog. All I want is a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002. We're turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web. #

This comment makes my day. Some features you develop and never use. I poured a month or so into the blogroll software last year, and it turned out to be a total win. All the new stuff floats to the top. I can quickly find out what they posted. It's a portable version of my feed reader. A tighter user interface for FeedLand. And right now I'm working on another user interface for FeedLand. The categories in FeedLand make it possible to do as many projects as you like with the same set of feeds. The Great Art project has a Bluesky account, and is available via RSS, in both an hourly and daily form. You need them both. In the new timeline, it's too much to get a work of art every hour, but to have one waiting for you in the morning is a perfect way to start the day. And I was reminded that my friend Paolo had just written a post. RSS is the thing that ties everything together. And a bit of OPML too. #

I really like the Wikipedia slogan, "The internet we were promised." #

I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better. #

Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)#

I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. An example of a post I edited with the new command. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. It's for tuning up your text. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting. #

I was poking around on an old server, and found a domain that looked interesting, and it was. The first version of Daytona, built around an outliner. I got the impression people didn't like it, so I developed a new one using a more conventional approach, and I love that one too, and I did a better job the second time. But it's interesting to poke around the old one as well, and it still works, which is great to see. In an alternate universe in the year 2025 the whole human species is organized by one big outline that everyone contributes to in peace, love and harmony, as opposed to this one which grunts and snorts on Twitter and can't even put a freaking title on their posts. #

I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you. #

Podcast: Rebooting the Democratic Party.#

You get better results if you just accept the insanity of CSS.#

I'm helping Automattic with their marketing. The WordPress-Mastodon connection is the world's best kept secret. Reminds me of that great scene in Dr Strangelove where the Doctor asks the Russian ambassador what was the point of the Doomsday Machine if they kept it a secret. I won't spoil it. Automattic tends to do this, develop crazy excellent stuff and then proceed to never talk about it. I do the same thing, it's easier to promote someone else's product than to promote your own. It's probably why you should always get a lawyer even if you're a world class lawyer yourself. Anyway, they have blown open something huge, and I very much want people to understand it, so it can create pull for the same feature in Bluesky, Threads and elsewhere. This goes with something I've learned in decades of experience in tech, people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors. And btw, I'm sure Mastodon, if it has an ego at all, is equally unaware of the great thing they have done. Here's a clue, writers were once empowered by the web, and that ended with Twitter. Now it's coming back. But it doesn't do any good if people don't know it's there. #

A story about listening to friends vs competitors. Back in the early 90s I was working on system-level scripting for the Mac, supposedly with Apple, but it's no secret the rank and file at Apple didn't like us. They were told by the execs they had to work with us. So when it came time for WWDC, they "forgot" to invite me to speak on behalf of the new stuff. Instead, they had Bill Gates do it, even though Microsoft was not involved yet, they would support the tech in their Mac products eventually, esp their MSIE web browser. Anyway, I was friends with their top PR person, so she called me up a few days before the conference and asked what Bill should say, and I gave her an outline, and when he gave the speech, he did a great job. Couldn't have said it better myself. Microsoft was one of the few companies I've ever collaborated with that didn't seem to resent individual developers. It was a big source of their power. Huge actually. (On second thought, later they did seem to be more or less like any other big company, when they embraced RSS. They didn't actually want my help, they just wanted me to say nice things about them.)#

One consequence of each AI vendor having their own browser is that each will have their own OS-level window. This may make it a little more or less manageable. Hard to foresee the possibilities. Not sure a browser is the best place to put AI. I'd prefer perhaps an environment that supports a GDI like Quickdraw so we can start using math instead of voodoo to design interactions. #

I want Mastodon to take off as a blogging platform. That means hooking it up to existing blog platforms. I want our world to connect to theirs. I'm lucky to have bet on WordPress, so my product gets the connection to Mastodon for free. But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it's only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon. That's the goal. I just wrote a couple of posts where this became clear to me. Who has the code and expertise to create a simple interface from the outside world to Mastodon. The interface doesn't have to be RSS. But it has to be maximally simple, and it has to cover the basic features of blogs that Mastodon supports. #

The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks it's running the show. I've just given it instructions to think of itself as a command line that can understand English. Just answer the question exactly as asked. #

Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the electorate and the press. We have new analytical tools, we should use them. We're only now, far after it's too late, finding out the awful things that the BBB going to do to us. The Repubs planned this out far in advance. They probably even had software tools to advise them on ways to word the bill as the changes were negotiated. #

Have they made ChatGPT more stupid in the last couple of days? Or maybe I'm starting to see the problem. I was trying to debug a piece of software that sends mail. I use Amazon SES. I wanted to see if the software was actually communicating with the server, and thought for sure there must be a log of requests on the AWS system. Where is it? I asked ChatGPT. It starts telling me to check all these things and never got to the part about where the log is. So I said, just tell me where the log is. Again, it tells me about all these nice things I should check first. I asked again, this time in ALL CAPS which is how I communicate that I really mean it. Again more bullshit. So I think to ask Is there a log? No, it says, actually there isn't one. #

I took a long drive today on back roads, down toward Poughkeepsie, and on the way back a big pickup swerved into my lane. I had to swerve away from it and hit the brake, and had a bit of a conniption. Got me thinking. Who was it that did this. Man or woman, young or old, spaced out or thinking about getting a libtard to freak out, all kinds of thought. Then I remembered what keeps us safe in situations like this, very few people are going to deliberately try to kill us this way because they would die too. Mutual assured destruction. But I'm a programmer, trained to always think of things that could go wrong, then I realized omg, what if it were a self-driving car? Someone could program it to assassinate a random or specific person, or worse, hack the car remotely, or hack a thousand cars everywhere at the same time to kill people all over the world. I thought we could prevent this by right now requiring there always be a human sacrifice in every car, sort of a hostage to assure good behavior, sometimes. #

How did they get soldiers to do this? American soldiers? We are truly lost. Were they masked too? What happened to their honor? Why the fuck would an American soldier need to hide their identity? Anywhere, but esp in America? Why don’t they put down their weapons?#

On Bluesky: "The web is still there under all this michegas, ready to be magical again any time we want it to."#

New thread on Mastodon: OK, i give up for now on getting a team of nerds together to build a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub along the lines of what Automattic has done to bridge WordPress to ActivityPub. We will need that to happen, I would much prefer to get it done in advance, but people don't know me or trust me well enough to believe I might see something that they apparently don't. I'm pretty confident they will, but I would really love to get some help. #

Kos is moving to WordPress. Very cool. It means people who write for Kos will be able to use my writing tools. I am sold on the idea of WordPress being the OS for the social web. That's the point of having a platform, we used to call it "users and developers party together."#

I saw that Matt backed off from porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress, basically turning WP into an OS. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but probably overwhelming in complexity. But it was the right idea. We need fewer runtimes. If you can merge two runtimes, go for it. Anyway, this is all related to the "open social web" -- in fact it's central to it. We've got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything. We would go back to the potential the web had before Twitter and Google Reader split the blogging world in two. I swear the answer is make it so that all these networks can do inbound and outbound RSS and build on the reality of the open social web, not just the hype. #

I asked ChatGPT for two sentences on the Innovator's Dilemma -- "[It] describes how successful companies can fail by focusing too heavily on sustaining innovations—improvements to existing products for current customers—while ignoring disruptive innovations that initially serve smaller markets but eventually overtake the mainstream. These disruptions often seem inferior at first, so established companies dismiss them, leaving space for new entrants to rise and dominate."#

WordLand v0.5.19 -- Lots of little fixes. #

An improvement in WordLand on the server, we now post metadata to WordPress, along with the HTML rendering so that code that runs on the server can now access and possibly in the future even talk back to WordLand. You never know where this stuff can go if the developers take advantage of opportunities to interop. #

tinyFeedReader is a hit. But the docs aren't clear enough. It has no user interface, it's a package you can include in a Node app that calls back to you when a new item comes in from one of the feeds you've told it to watch. It's a totally teeny little framework for a feed reader, you get all the standard stuff tucked away out of site, you write the functionality you want to implement. It would be a good thing to turn over to your AI programming partner. It's for people who want to add a feed reader to something else. #

Today is Independence Day in the US, so how about an Independence Day for the web. One simple way would be to hook RSS up to ActivityPub, turning Mastodon and Threads into a big feed reader. It could easily be done in software, it would just take money to keep it running. Not something I could attempt personally. But I would totally help with the software and design. It would open the door for lots of new apps that could communicate with users through a single simple API. I want to talk with people about this at WordCamp Canada in October.#

How odd on Independence Day a law goes into effect that funds a secret police for the US. The goal is to flow people from inside the United States into concentration camps, and ostensibly deport them to other countries. It may turn out to be easier and less expensive to just gas them and burn the bodies right here in the USA. I listened to this morning's Daily podcast to hear how they summed up the bill. They focused on taxes and health care as most of the other news orgs have been doing. They were puzzled why the Repubs didn't seem to care if it hurt their electorate, but they didn't state the obvious answer. They don't care. Remember Occam's News. I guess they didn't want to say it out loud so they just telegraphed the question. It worked, message received. #

WordLand v0.5.17 -- Two changes with linkblog support. #

BTW, this is where we're going with WordLand. We can have a nice social web that builds on simple open formats. I will make an instance of this to show it can be done, both sides, reading and writing. They will work wonderfully with each other. You can write a nice reader and/or writer and it will work with this simple network. A technological coral reef. Think of the MacWrite and MacPaint of the open social web. Enough to get the ball rolling. #

Looking forward to putting linkblogs in WordLand to bed, I don't think too many people other than myself will use the feature, but I wanted to get it right and then move on. #

WordLand 0.5.16 -- Rounding out the linkblogging features. #

Software internally is mostly pipes connected to other pipes, each adding a specific quality to whatever passes through it. If you have nice standards for what you send through the pipes, you can do more of what you imagine. This is called orthogonality. Factoring is when you notice a repeating pattern, give it a name, and a set of things you can do to it, those would be names of pipes. I have to ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this, but I am also asking my human friends. BTW I expect this seems so natural because our minds probably work that way too, internally, below our conscious awareness. #

More feedback on the design of Bluesky's API. #

Bullshit. Lisa Murkowski goes on a press tour and sounds like she could be the one that breaks away from Trump in the Republican Senate. As with all of them, always, it was an act. She has a role to play, she's The Agonizer. They are amazing in terms of how organized and orchestrated their campaign is. #

The archived source for June 2025. #

I needed a tiny feed reader for an app I was working on. #

If the Dems were competitive they would run ads now with Senator Tillis talking about the damage the new Repub bill will do to Americans, emphasizing this is a Republican speaking, taking one for the country. #

Another criticism of the Bluesky API. They make each developer do the support for Open Graph metadata, when it would be much more efficient for them to support it on their end. I would be happy to give them the code. It's not that complicated. But translating the OG format, which for crying out loud is a huge standard, into their arcane format which is only supported by Bluesky, is going in the wrong direction, and frankly is ridiculously arrogant. Show a little humility. Facebook is huge, and the format isn't just used by Facebook, everyone uses it. #

When I was having trouble getting into my AWS account last week, I ordered a Yubikey, which everyone says is the best way to go. I thought I'd set it up first thing Monday morning (ie now) but it turns out it's a major undertaking? Why does this have to be so hard? I guess I'll find out, but not today. I want to make some progress on my development project first. Maybe later. #

A case study in APIs. Creating a new post via Bluesky's API.#

We live in interesting times. Never a dull moment! 😄 #

The latest David Frum podcast is about crazy tech billionaires. Once again he talks about who he's willing to listen to. He's really smart, thinks about things, and speaks brilliantly, but cultivates his ignorance and seems somewhat proud of it. In contrast, I listened to Jon Stewart's weekly podcast yesterday and it was as usual outstanding. Like Frum he thinks and speaks brilliantly, with the addition of being hilarious at times. In this episode he talks to an Iranian friend, a new perspective we don't hear often, but fits in with what I had understood about Iran. It's a highly educated country, a good standard of living and are mired with a repressive government and no options for regime change. When you hear that talked about on other podcasts and cable news shows, remember -- it's impossible to change regimes unless the country has prepared for that. There is no regime-in-waiting in Iran, hasn't been one since the 1979 revolution. This is the next danger in the US. Will there be anything remaining of our political system? It's almost all gone now. Funny to listen to the people on TV about surviving the next 3.5 years -- what do they think will happen then? Nothing will happen, that's the most likely thing. Back to Frum, what a shame there's such a smart guy, so cloistered, and boastful about it. That's not a good way to proceed now imho. #

Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho, and probably very funny, and respectful.#

I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook. #

I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited. #

Fixed the images that broke on morningcoffeenotes.com, a site that dates back to 2003, when it transitioned to https in 2024. #

With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.#

Glossary: Tiny Little Textbox. (An idea I might try, coupled with Daytona, I should be able to build a glossary of terms I want in my official vocabulary. Ideas that have stood the test of time, that mean something now, but eventually will be set aside and no one will know what a TLTB was.)#

The longest continuously updated RSS feed in the known universe. #

I'm working my way through The Bear, and it's great because you remember that you love all these characters and you can immediately start living the ongoing drama of their lives. I feel like a cat perched on a window watching everyone doing their daily stuff. Looking forward to going back to the beginning and starting over. #

BTW, I think the right way to read Scripting News is getting the nightly email. That's the pulse. I jot stuff down during the day, mostly in the morning, and later add links and finish stuff up. The scripting.com feed is updated in realtime. So you may get many versions of an item over the day, which might be a problem with feed readers that don't watch for changes. I noticed that my changes to a recent podcast shownotes page don't flow back out to my podcast client app on Android. FeedLand btw, records changes, and they flow through to the timeline. Coupled with rssCloud, which is supported in every WordPress site, makes the whole thing realtime. People assume that feeds have to perform like a feed reader. But if you have a component running on the open internet, hooked up via websockets to the client, you get the flow they get in twitter-like systems. And we didn't have to invent anything that didn't already exist in 2009. #

WordLand v0.5.15 is out. #

Masked secret police is pure terrorism. We should ask NYPD what we have to do to protect ourselves from them, and then do it. #

I, like a lot of other people, assumed that Americans would be terrible at authoritarianism. Shows we have a lot to learn. Americans are pretty good at it it turns out.#

Krugman doesn’t understand what’s coming for NYC. And doesn’t understand the leadership Cuomo uniquely provided at the height of Covid. It’s pretty likely what’s starting in NYC will be worse than Covid or 9-11. Funny thing is Krugman did get it, a few weeks ago when the crisis in Los Angeles was peaking. He wrote a piece that was terrified, and realistic. The National Guard had been nationalized. Marines were invading California. But now that Calif hasn't been in the news, it's easy to swing back. I bet if the election had happened during the worst of it, Cuomo would've won. #

Bernie Sanders asks what the Democrats should learn from Mr. Z's victory in the NYC primary this week. Here's what I say. Forget about ever rising from the ashes of what remains of the party. Right now, the issue is how to defend the city from the coming war with the US government. They're already holding the current mayor hostage. This will be worse than 9-11 and Covid. We have no leadership. We're totally fucked, what the Democratic Party does or doesn't do, at this point, simply doesn't matter.#

Podcast: Holding your nose, the aftermath. #

A preview of how a WordLand linkblog works, which is of course a WordPress site, viewed in my blogroll. When I clicked on the link, I was surprised that it goes to Poynter, and not to the linkblog. But then I remembered that's the point of a linkblog. And it flows through to the feed, and the blogroll software understands. So now I have an end-to-end linkblog. #

Another reason to love WordPress. Every freaking WordPress site had great RSS support. They did more to keep feeds alive than anyone else. Google tried to kill RSS in a particularly humiliating way. WordPress kept it going. #

A NYT article from last year about 34th Ave in Jackson Heights where "a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020." Before we moved to Flushing when I was in 5th grade, we lived on 92nd St and 34th Ave. What a difference that must make. I love it when cities take chances like this, and the people in the neighborhood seem to love it. #

Jeremy Herve is a developer at Automattic. Here's what he said about yesterday's podcast. He liked the idea of WordPress as the OS of the open social web. Glad that resonated. It has so much more than the other possible platforms. The others couldn't even realistically claim to be part of the web. They don't support writers very well. We're going to build slowly and deliberately around this idea, always staying open for competitors, because that's the most important thing about the web, beyond its simplicity, it never locks its users in. That's a deal-stopper. As I've learned how WordPress works internally, I immediately saw that they embraced the concepts of the web not just as words, but in their practice. I never hit a wall that kept me out of doing something they already did. And they also appear to never break users and developers. That's one of the basic rules of the web, it's an unchanging thing, no one can break it because everyone is a guest. Anyway, there is only one web. Keep that in mind. Nothing exclusive about it. #

Podcast: WordPress and me.#

Dan Knauss, one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada, wrote a post on their blog using WordLand. Here's a screen shot of what that post looked like when he was editing it. That's all you need to see to understand the role that WordLand plays. It's a pretty self-describing product. #

A great scene from The West Wing. Use your imagination, something similar is probably happening right now.#

Today's song: Peace in our time.#

People talk about "regime change" as if the only regime that could change is the one in Iran.#

Note to linkblog readers: I just flipped a switch and am now using WordLand to do the linkblog. Today's links are good, but the ones from prior days were mainly test posts. They will scroll off in a few days, and it'll be as it always has been. Still diggin. #

One more thing about the linkblog, it no longer cross-posts to social media sites. I want to see if I miss having the links there. It also won't have the limits. Maybe it'll be better if my accounts are a bit more quiet. Also the RSS feed is in a new location, I want to wait a bit to make sure it works before publicizing the URL. #