It happens. Sometimes I stumble across an app that I obviously wrote, but can't remember doing, or even how it works. Such is the case for this OPML to JSON converter app. #

A message from a human being. When someone is attacked online, don't assume there are actual people doing the attacking. By now we should all be aware of Russian strategies for making us hate each other. And no doubt others have learned the craft. This story is as old as the net. 3 minutes. #

Why is our software so bloated? The problem is that when we get a consensus platform, so we can all focus our energies on optimizing, instead another platform gets invented, so we have to spread our resources paddling hard just to stay in place. It takes years and years to go from prototype to a well-oiled machine. In cars, how many years were there between Ford's Model A and Model T? What were they doing? Gratuitously changing indenting styles? Creating more hacks to try to solve callback hell by introducing fresh new hells? Or writing your docs in some arcane syntax built on top of the language everyone uses? We have 10000 times too many programmers for what we're getting done. Create limits. There are only so many MLB or NBA players. If there were fewer programmers we'd have to stop reinventing and try to be efficient. There's a math to this I'm sure of it.#

It's not well known that Aaron Swartz made a contribution to RSS 2.0, wrt the <cloud> element. We were initially only supporting XML-RPC and SOAP protocols, but Aaron suggested also supporting HTTP-POST. It was a good idea, and it came during the comment period for RSS 2.0, so it was possible to add it, so I did. #

Poll: Will Kavanaugh ultimately be confirmed? #

My own opinion. Kavanaugh will not be confirmed. I expect Christine Ford to be a compelling witness. Reporters will interview classmates of hers and of Kavanaugh's. Some Repubs on the Judiciary Committee understand enough about the issue to be far more sensitive than they were with Anita Hill. But some will not, and this will spark rage at Republicans including from within their own base. A lot of women vote Republican. There's a decent chance a handful of Repub senators will quit the party, or even become Democrats. As I said yesterday, governing has become a burden for the Repubs. They know how to bully, they know how to obstruct, but this is far more complex. They won't be able to hold their coalition together. Think of it as an intra-party wedge issue for the Repubs.#

It's been a long time since the Repubs were playing something other than the bully or obstructionist. Now the politics gets more complicated. This might be the moment when Repubs switch parties. The stars are lining up for that.#

RSS was successful not because of the efforts of people on mail lists debating the merits of various formats. It happened because Netscape seeded the market with a few popular feeds. Blogging software supported the format, so all blogs had feeds. Then software developed that made it easy to use the feeds, and finally the mother of all news pubs, the NYT, jumped in and everyone else followed. With the benefit of hindsight, the mail list people thought was so important, wasn't. #

There's a reality distortion field around mail lists. You feel you have arrived at The Place where all decisions are made. Yet when you decide something then what next? Who wants to tell the subjects they have to change? ;-)#

Poll: Will Benioff lead a revival of TIME or will it continue its slide? #

Main thing wrong with journalism: too scared of pissing off Repubs.#

If Trump can't deliver a Supreme Court confirmation, what good is he to the Repubs?#

Statement by Manafort's lawyer: It's a tough day for Mr Manafort but he's accepted responsibility and he wanted to make sure that his family was able to remain safe and live a good life. He's accepted responsibility and this is for conduct that dates back many years, and everybody should remember that. #

The conversion of Manafort from enemy agent to FBI asset makes me proud to be American. We have a Russian tool as president, his party is thoroughly infested and in control of Congress. It feels like America might still win this one, and if so it'll be because of that corny stuff Superman used to talk about, Truth, Justice and the American Way. Ingenuity and persistence and the conviction that we're right. If we emerge with our pride intact, we better work on rules that keep enemy agents from occupying our government. BTW, if you haven't watched Active Measures, please do. It's like three months of Maddow in one sitting. #

Do any pubs, such as plan on a status center to track hacking leading up to the November election? Someone should own this reporting. Let's not wake up in mid-October having not prepared at least somewhat for this.#

I voted for the establishment Democrats in Thursday's primary in NY. It's time to close ranks and present strong opposition to the Republicans. I expect to do the same in the November election. As Obama says "Better is good."#

More restoration work on userland.com websites. Came across this post from 6/15/99 about ScriptingNews 2.0b1 format that predates RSS.#

I injured my right shoulder 25 years ago in a skiing accident, it was worth it, I was in top shape and showing off, and crashed spectacularly. I could have had it fixed with arthroscopic surgery, but opted not to. The cost, every so often my shoulder goes lame and is extremely painful. It's always (so far) been solved with rest and patience. I think I must have hurt it when I took the fall a couple of weeks ago, which otherwise appears to be healed. So it's been hard to sleep. Luckily there's a new season of Bojack Horseman to feast on. It's made the pain of my shoulder disability a lot easier to bear.#

Hot tub spas should be as prevalent as Starbucks. Three to choose from any block in Manhattan. The idea that humans can't immerse their bodies in warm water as readily as they can buy stimulant is barbaric. How much happier the world would be if soaks were commonplace.#

I'm doing restoration work on a bunch of old UserLand websites. I just came across this screen shot of the weblog editor that was built into our first RSS aggregator, my.userland.com, in July 1999. I sort of remember it. It was super lightweight. It shipped, but we never really promoted it. It was way simpler than Manila. Things would have come out differently if we bet on this one instead. I often wait and do more powerful software when simpler stuff might work better. #

Manafort flipped. Occam's News says we will soon know all about the conduit between the political operations of the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. That's obviously the role Manafort played. #

On Tuesday I posted a braintrust query re how to get a list of all the files in a repo using GitHub's tree API. Last night I got some useful answers, and I can pick up the project. Will report back. #

I voted today and I'm going to vote in November too. 💥#

Saving the web and saving democracy are related projects.#

Not sincere: Writing about decentralizing the web in a Medium post.#

Short Twitter thread. 1. Saving the web and saving democracy are related projects. 2. I guess why save democracy has a simpler explanation than why save the web. 3. The founders would have understood it. Every colonial town had a commons. The web is that for us in 2018.#

One idea pundits and politicos have trouble with is the difference between voters and parties. When Susan Collins blames Democrats for the campaign against her, she's missing that it's voters doing it, not the other party. A big difference. It's like fighting the Viet Cong when you think you're fighting the army of North Vietnam. It's what they call an asymmetric war. The people can probably bring down one senator if we really focus on it. We should do just that to open the eyes of the press and the politicos.#

Scripting News archive for 9/11/2001. Start at the bottom and scroll up. It began as a normal day, and then... BTW, this is one of a few thousand days I've been blogging at this location. We still have no plan for how this archive will persist, nor the archive for your blog. Think about that when you click on all the broken links from that day. #

Braintrust query: GitHub API questions. How to find the root of a repo for the tree api, and are the content and tree APIs deprecated as of Oct 1? #

JavaScript sample code to get the directory of a GitHub repo. #

Minor epiphany. A GitHub repository is very much like a Frontier object database. Makes me think #variables might make sense here, esp if you're using the repo to store a website. The Website Framework comes to the Unix world in a surprising way? Hmm.#

For a while I was thinking riding season was over in NYC, but then the weather got a bit warmer, and I couldn't resist. It had been a few days. I wanted to get back on my wheels. I got rained on, but no problem, I was dressed for it. And nothing beats the feeling after a good bike workout. The endorphins are singing their feel-good reward. Lal la la Dave did good, they seem to be saying. And in my mind I think there must be a way to get this feeling in the winter too. #

Should j-schools have a course in civic writing for non-journalism majors? Kind of like basic writing taught in English departments, but for public writing? I bet Thomas Jefferson would’ve gone for it.#

A question all tech companies should be prepared to answer and users should be asking. What's the plan for when your company goes away. What will become of what I created here? I am sure none of the companies we pour our lives into have any kind of plan.#

Our number one post 9/11 failure — selfishness. A failure of ours to see how interdependent we are. We don’t live on a frontier. Without each other we would all perish.#

Crowdpac is running a compelling campaign to convince Senator Collins to do the right thing re Kavanaugh, and I would donate if I had more of an idea about who Crowdpac is and if they can be trusted. Also we need two Republican votes, and all the Democratic votes to send Kavanaugh back to the appellate court. Where is the campaign for the second Repub, and the campaign to be sure no Dems defect?#

Now that Twitter is somewhat algorithmic, it's got the same problem as Facebook. I see the same tweet every time I visit. 19 hours after posting. I must have seen it a dozen times. It wasn't funny the first time. #

Oy. When I wasn't paying attention it seems that possibly GitHub deprecated the API I'm using. I'm really not sure. The calls I make are all in the Contents part of the REST API. Maybe these are not the ones that are deprecated. I sure hope not. #

Video: Jim Carrey on Bill Maher. #

The seasons are changing, so it was time for a new header image. The old one was of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park and the skyline of CPW taken on a super hot June day. The new image is of Naomi Osaka, a sports hero with a story. #

Big idea from Obama's speech. Better is good. This could be the US motto, as much as E Pluribus Unum, which is a similar idea. In a country that is the amalgamation of free people, no one ever achieves everything they want. But better is good.#

I find these animated GIF shots of NYC intersections captivating. #

Journalism is eventually going to form something like the NBA or StubHub, a central organization that manages the aggregate of all their businesses, yet allows each to pursue independent strategies. The analogy. I can watch the Mets play in San Francisco. The Mets are paid, as are the Giants paid when they play in New York. I want to read a story on the New Yorker website today. Tomorrow I'll want to read something on Mother Jones or NY Mag. I can't possibly, as a reader, have a separate business relationship with each. I pay the NY Times because I live in New York. But that should get me access to reporting by their competitors. #

Podcast: For the record blogging. This is why I'm interested in creating something that functions like Medium, but has as its stated goal to be long-lived. #

If you find yourself having a strong emotional response to something you see on the net, take a step back and remember there's a good chance you're being programmed. You don't have to take the bait. And you shouldn't accept emotional appeals at face value.#

A possible reform for tennis. Let the opponent reject a foul call, as in football. If Osaka didn't want the extra point or game, she could tell the judge to forget it. That would be weird psychology given that Serena is the established star.#

Poll: If there were an open source, publicly supported (i.e. no venture capital) not-for-profit essay-hosting service like @Medium that was easy and had a nice UI and could be cloned by anyone at any time, would you use it?#

The way to think of Kavanaugh is that he would be a high level White House staffer with a vote on the Supreme Court. The ultimate political operator.#

Radical idea -- Nike runs ads praising people for burning their Nikes in protest. "That's what we were talking about," they might say. Of course they can't, because the only thing Nike ever says is "Just do it." It's up to their spokespeople to say things other than that. #

I liked Obama's speech. He talks about voting the way I talk about the open web. People think it's my fight. They're wrong. It's our fight. If you don't help, it won't happen. And so far it seems to me we're headed for a Trump-like loss on the web. You'll miss it when it's gone. I was sure that Google's trying to own the open web wouldn't stop with attacking HTTP. They didn't even wait a month before launching the next attack on web addresses. There was no resistance, why should they wait?#

They deleted Facebook, but I bet Facebook hasn’t deleted them.#

Honestly, I don't think I've ever smoked a joint while doing a podcast.#

Note to Elon Musk as TSLA continues to decline, and who smoked weed on a podcast last night, from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers from the 60s. “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”#

There should be an inverted real estate market where buyers could list their requirements. Sellers could peruse, the way buyers scan Zillow now. Who knows if I'm looking in the right geography? There could be lots of places that match my desires. #

Poll: Did the anonymous op-ed writer confess to a crime? I should have added "not sure" as a choice. I actually think that's the correct answer. Presumably the person took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Seems to me this is extra-constitutional at least, and it may be a violation.#

John Gruber says what we're thinking. Why, if you can't map a domain to your site on Medium, would you use it to host a blog. Rafat Ali, another longtime blogger, says once Medium shuts down there should be an ethical replacement. I wonder why they can't co-exist, and then answer my own question. The problem isn't cost, or the tech -- it's users. Medium has momentum, still, as the place-of-record for web writing, much as YouTube is it for video. It's a shaky foundation. No business model, huge money already invested. Not a good situation.#

Here's a conundrum. This appeared in my Twitter timeline. It's from @potus. I must have followed that account when Obama was president. Now Trump is using it. 24 million followers. Do I have to block it? What about the next president? For now I'll just unfollow, but it might have to be blocked, if he uses it in a more troll-like fashion. #

I think there's a place for a simple RSS-based Instagram clone. Subscribe as in an RSS reader, with the URL of a feed. It displays items with <enclosure>s that are images. Wouldn't have as many users as IG, but IG was fun before it had so many users.#

opmlToGitHub is a new demo app that reads an OPML file, converts it to Markdown and uploads it to GitHub. I think outliners are a great way to write readme files, that's how I've always done it. I just added this feature to my nightly archive app, and created this little demo app as a byproduct. It contains a fair amount of code that might prove useful in other apps. MIT license. ✓#

I'm using GitHub more and more as a platform. Part of the reason is that it was on my path. My GitHub code has been maturing, and my project to get more future-safe is progressing. But I am aware that it's now owned by Microsoft. I wonder if they see GitHub in a compatible way to how I'm using it? That's something you have to worry about when building on a corporate platform. #

Continuing to scrub my Twitter feed of troll RTers. A few every day. When will people figure out that RTing a troll just gives them power.#

Updated: How I archive Scripting News. I’ve been backing up my blog to a GitHub repository for the last year. The idea is that the content of my blog should exist even if scripting.com were to disappear. The process is now documented, hoping to leave clues for future historians.#

If Evernote had built on open formats and protocols, now, as the company is failing, the users’ data would remain usable.#

I like what Nike did by using Colin Kaepernick as a model. I think this is possibly a cleansing process. It'll force people to look at what exactly it is they're against. Whether Kaepernick might be a patriot and not a pariah.#

OK, this is one form of screen-shot RT I actually support.#

Every voter in the US should listen to last night's Maddow re the Kavanaugh nomination.#

I unfollow people who RT the troll. That includes people who paste screen shots on Facebook. Remember trolls die in darkness. #

New season of Bojack Horseman on Sept 14. 💥#

Facebook broke the API that allowed me to cross-post there. Now I'm getting regular reminders from them about how I should be posting more stuff to Facebook, my readers are bored, they say.#

Fear of palindromes: aibohphobia.#

this.how now has an index page that links to the howtos. #

A new FAQ explains how I archive my blog to GitHub. If you're a tech blogger, please consider archiving your blog in a similar way. I provide the source to the Node app I use to do the backups. #

Avenatti works because while he cares how he's covered by the press, he doesn't follow their rules. The other Dems follow the rules. Hillary was the worst. So they could get her on her emails, not because there was any substance, rather because she was "defensive." They criticized her for following their rules. Heh. Break out, there's no penalty for doing so. #

Yes. Always program a concert/rally opposite Trump's. Better comedy, more irreverent political ranting. Position Trump as the ridiculous imitation tinfoil-hat-wearing make-believe despot that he is.#

I'm finally watching Man in the High Castle. I had read the book, long ago, and found the first couple of episodes too dark. Just starting episode 4. No spoilers please.#

With all the Kavanaugh mischief, seems like Tuesday would be the PERFECT day for Mueller to drop indictments on Don Jr and Kush.#

One of my basic rules of discourse is to never tell another person to shut up as long as I can easily stop listening. And the converse, if someone tells me to shut up, or implies it, they're wrong, and I don't argue with them. But I have an exception to the rule. If a troll is destroying a community and people engage with the troll, I will tell them to stop, and explain, as lovingly as I can, that they're as much a part of the problem as the troll is. There is no excuse for engaging with a troll. #

When people say "no pun intended," what they really mean is "pay attention to my pun, very much intended."#

That was quite a speech by Obama. It's the kind of speech McCain might have made, but it says more that Obama said it at McCain's request. The very last thing said about McCain before being buried.#

I've started backing up my linkblog RSS feed to the GitHub repository. It will be backed up every night along with all the other content on Scripting News. #

Emails like this from Google about "violations" on my website are really disturbing, esp since I don't run any Google ads on my site. I wish they'd STFU about violations, or say what the violations are. I always can use a good laugh. Their email is a violation of my independence. Fuck off. #

Respect really gets to my core. People working together, listening, finding the connection. That’s humanity at its best.#

The smell of incompetence and desperation.#

The Village Voice is shutting down. A New York institution, it was born the same year I was. One nice thing is that they are keeping half the staff, 15 to 20 people, to figure out how to archive the site. Any time a publication does this, we should offer to help, to learn from the experience, and develop a base of knowledge and best practices. I need to figure out how to do that for my blog. I want to do that sooner than later. Tick tock, the runway isn't getting any longer. ✓#

Journalists can't say that Google doesn't skew search results for political effect. In fact, we're pretty sure they do (consider what they'll have to do to get back into China). So the best you can say is that the company claims they don't do it. Journalism is doing this wrong.#

This is not the kind of thing I usually write about, but things change, and I think it's okay to change what I blog about. A couple of days ago I was walking down a car ramp into a garage, here in Manhattan, unsure of where I was going so I was looking down at my iPhone studying the map. I also had a 30-pound pack on my back which made me more top-heavy than usual. I tripped over a speed bump, at first I thought I would be able to recover, but because of the weight of the pack and the downwards slope of the driveway, I was going down. I hit on both hands, my knee, somehow my side got involved and I hit my head. My hands took the worst of it. A little blood, mostly road-rash. Three strangers came to my aid, very nice people, and I was up and dusted off in a matter of seconds, horribly embarrassed, and in pain. It wasn't until hours later that I realized that if this happened a few years from now it could have been a lot worse. For now my whole body is sore. Reminds me of how I felt after a bike accident in NYC a few years back. This was nowhere near as bad. I told a friend I feel fragile. To look at me you might think that's ridiculous. But it's true. 63 ain't 23 or even 43. And I'm sure 73 will also be different. 💥#

I did a lot of driving in the last 48 hours, and that means I listened to lots of podcasts. And a lot of them were about John McCain. Surprising to me that I wanted to hear more about him, even though in life, I felt I knew all I wanted. I had mixed feelings about him. I remember when he ran against Bush and first did great and then got whipped. He does do a good New Hampshire town hall. He likes to say how honest he is, but I heard him do a lot of lying, esp about the Iraq War. That's the worst. To let people call you honest, to call yourself honest, while you're lying. That's worse than just being a liar. Anyway, he was an interesting person. One thing he said in an interview in the mid-2000s is that we should repeal Roe v Wade and then have a great debate about it. I wanted the interviewer to ask him why we can't have the debate before repealing it? I can't imagine there's anything more to say that hasn't already been said a billion times. It's a morally ambiguous situation. No amount of debating will change that. Some things just are. We will never come to agreement. Accept it. Now tell me again why appealing Roe v Wade is the right thing to do? Of course he's dead now, so we'll never know. ✓#

I also thought he was a spitballer. The kind of kid who sat in the back of the classroom and made wisecracks about the other kids and the teacher. But he never went to the board. He did a lot of shooting from the hip. Choosing Sarah Palin was a great example. A brainstorming session, do something bold, and oops a tragic mistake. He did it again when he suspended his campaign because of the financial crisis, called a big meeting in DC to brainstorm ideas. He had no ideas, couldn't even lead the meeting. Obama did. He would have been a terrible president. We might have done a few bold and disastrous things, and I'm sure the important stuff would have fallen through the cracks. We were right not to elect him president in 2008.#

I just want to add, it's sad that he's gone. I felt this more deeply than other celebrity deaths. I guess we really get to know politicians. For a musician their music doesn't die with them. Same with writers. But it's different with parents and one-time presidential candidates. #

What can you do to help? Unfollow people who RT the troll. Trolls feed on flow. Deprive them of flow, they shrivel up and die. People who RT him are undermining our future. Unfollow without a second thought. Eventually they'll get the message that RTing him has a cost.#

nytimesriver.com began in 2006 as an experiment to see how news reading on a Blackberry might work. I kept it running for twelve years, hoping the NYT would get the idea, and do it for itself, or even better, let me do it for them. Earlier today I got a letter from an in-house lawyer at the Times. It's a nice letter, given that a lawyer wrote it. But after all these years of being ignored, the first response is from a lawyer? That's not only rude, it's sad. So I decided the best thing to do is turn the site off. I don't feel like paying a lawyer to represent me when I'm just doing this project because I want the NYT to do better by its readers. If they decide to say thanks, or even maybe buy me lunch, I'll consider turning it back on. ✓#

John McCain's farewell statement. This is probably why Trump doesn't want the flag flying at half staff over the White House. BTW, I couldn't find a canonical copy of McCain's statement. So I thought where should I put a copy to point to where it might have a chance of surviving for a while. I chose GitHub. But we still don't have a good "for-the-record" place on the web, imho.#

David Johnson on Twitter wonders what's the diff betw LO2 and OPML Editor. That's an interesting question that never occurred to me, because they are so disjoint in time. The OPML Editor is derived from Frontier, which is an outliner among many other things. But the OPML Editor does present as an outliner. One that lives inside a very powerful scripting environment, server and object database, all integrated, and evolved over a couple of decades. It's like the cellphone on the dashboard of a 747. However at this time, the power of the scripting environment would be wasted on an outliner user, most of the additions have fallen into disuse. That said, LO2 is a clone of the outliner inside OPML Editor, which was a clone of MORE, Ready and going way back to ThinkTank which first shipped in 1983. The long and winding road of Dave's outliners. #

I have never seen an Alex Jones tweet, believe it or not.#

More on inclusivity, which I wrote about yesterday. I wrote a piece in 2016 about how boys interpret the demonizing of men. It's very much related to the idea of being inclusive. If we're fighting for respect and justice there can't be any limits on who is entitled to it. #

Another thing about Instagram. When you paste a link into a comment it doesn't hot it up. So they are even less a part of the web than Twitter and Facebook are. #

I went to Bronx Science, one of two special high schools in NYC that you have to take a test to get into. I took the test when I was in 9th grade, in the late 60s. The NYT recently published five questions from the test. I got four of five right. The one I got wrong was controversial. They have a discussion in the Times article why no one agrees on the correct answer. I was befuddled by it too, it was the one I got wrong. I was especially pleased to have gotten the geometry question right, because I haven't thought about geometry once since I left high school. Not a whole lot of geometry in software development work, or even in a math degree.#

The OPML Editor is my fork of the Frontier code base, started in 2004. It runs on today's Macs. In the flurry of activity in April, I broke the Mac part of the download page. I have now fixed it. 💥#

The best reason to vote Democratic: Real oversight of Trump.#

I've decided to get involved on Instagram. My name is davew there. It's weird they don't let you post pictures from the desktop web browser. You have to go into the JS debugger and tell it to emulate a phone browser. Then you can upload an image.#

I'm also going to start using Mastodon. I see they call their posts toots. I'm sorry but that makes me think of farts. If they'd have asked me I'd have said to call them grunts or snorts. After all I can't imagine a mastodon tooting. That's the kind of thing a monkey might do. BTW, little known fact, my handle on CompuServe back in the 80s was Mastodon. PS: I absolutely despise dark backgrounds. Hurts my eyes. I can only read dark text on light backgrounds. #

Ever since Facebook turned off the API, doing something new with Little Card Editor has been on my todo list. One thing I wanted to be able to do is include a card in my blog, the same way I include a tweet. I thought I'd have to factor out the card renderer in the app, so I could call it from my blog renderer, but there's a much dumber and simpler approach, just include the image of the card as it appears in Twitter. It works. As you can see in this post. So I am able to do that now. Bingo. ✓#