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. #

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. #

This is how I read my news. In FeedLand most pages are public. #

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. #

Today's song: Rockin' Chair.#

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. #

I also updated the About tab, to be a bit more current. #

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. 😄#

BTW, this is what Scripting News looks like in FeedLand. #

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. #

A bit of a mindbomb. All the different ways to view Frank Meeuwsen's blogroll in FeedLand. #

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. #

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 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. #

In the US we celebrate Thanksgiving with Alice's Restaurant. #

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.#

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 got a response from Matt to my offer of $10K. My response to him. #

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.#

I like to take a screen shot on opening day of a new feature.#

Found and fixed an error in the implementation of FeedLand's new reading lists feature. #

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.#

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 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. #

Report that news.scripting.com wasn't working. Fixed. #

Bluesky has a hidden feature no one knows about yet. 😄#

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. #

Some news. I've been working with Automattic for most of this year on a new version of FeedLand that runs in their cloud. The advantage is it will scale like the most popular websites, as WordPress does. There have been lots of internal changes in the software, but at the same time, it still runs on a $10 a month Digital Ocean server, and on desktops as well. The next FeedLand works at all these levels, for a person, a workgroup and the world. Obviously, lots more to say about all this. 😄#

If Threads is serious about being open, what's preventing them from adding a simple posting API and outbound RSS. Very lightweight well-established technology. We could start building around it now.#

Someday an author is going to construct a universe in a LLM and let users interact with it. That sounds boring, but here's the interesting idea that led to it. Yesterday I asked ChatGPT to draw me a image of an ancient band performing in the desert with cacti as the audience. Then this morning I had the idea of moving the concert into the pond behind my house, except this time the audience are frogs. I have a private Facebook group where I tell the story of the pond, including the animals who come to visit. Some of them I invent, they don't actually exist. And they have relationships with each other, at least in my mind. A natural thing to make part of this private group would be the LLM of all the animals, and their stories and relationships. And other people's models could incorporate mine. This was an idea I had for SimCity, and the web of outlines, neither of which happened. Maybe it'll happen in LLM-land.#

But first I need to be able to interact ChatGPT-style with the archive I've already created. Yesterday I saw Guy Kawasaki's chatbot, trained with transcripts of his podcast, and I have total LLM-envy. Guy says it was created for him by a company named Sentiyen. #

The great thing about the private Facebook group is I have invited friends from all stages of my life. People I knew in from high school, New Orleans, Madison, Palo Alto, Cambridge and Berkeley, NYC and Woodstock. Even people I knew as a child. People I only or mostly know virtually. Imho, people who won't use Facebook miss out. Its greatest feature are the people who use it. It's the kind of village we yearn for, at a DNA level. People you will never stop loving. I don't think I've ever mentioned this group on the blog, but maybe I should do that more, because it's a uniquely civilized, friendly and soul-nourishing online place, at least for me. #