From the beginning, I wanted FeedLand to make excellent use of WebSockets. It's an amazing technology for its power and simplicity. Basically it allows a server running in the cloud to send information to an app running in the browser, or for that matter an iOS app running on an phone. Then the question is what do you want to use the socket for? And the answer is that to make syndication even simpler and faster than RSS. If you want to know more, there's a client toolkit and demo app on GitHub, open source of course. How real is it? The blogroll on scripting.com is a sockets app, a much-improved blogroll from the ones we had 20 years ago. Also runs on WordPress sites. It's been running smoothly since March 2024. Pretty solid. And WordPress, that doesn't break formats, has supported the rssCloud protocol since 2009, and of course so does FeedLand. #Wes Felter explains what stablecoins are for. "Stablecoins work offshore in places where dollars don't, they're faster to transfer, they mostly can't be seized, etc. It's for the margins not the mainstream."#
- I'm part of the Berkman community email list. There's a tradition that people are introduce themselves at this time, so I thought I should also, since this is my first year on the list. This is a copy of the email I sent. #
- My name is Dave Winer. I was at Berkman in 2003-04.#
- I've been so impressed with the stories you all have been telling, and I felt I should get into the mix, but my story will be different because I am not an academic, though I love the academic environment, find it very energizing. #
- So, my story --#
- I started a bunch of things before coming to Berkman. Undergrad degree in math, masters in Computer Science, ran two software companies, was by some measure the first blogger, played a role in the bootstrap of RSS, and at Berkman we launched podcasting via the two BloggerCons we had there. #
- I loved the reunion we had two summers ago, and think we should build on that. #
- I got a very strong feeling from revisiting the campus that we should have kept going with the blogging we started at Berkman in 2003, and if we had done so, I think we'd be in a better position in social media today. We had a jump on Twitter, Facebook (which was also starting on campus at the same time). And we were doing everything with open protocols, all parts replaceable. Very different from the way the commercial networks are built. #
- What I'm working on these days is primarily WordLand, where feeds and words get together using nothing but the open web, with all parts replaceable. #
- We use WordPress, via its REST API, as the platform for writing, we add a beautiful and simple new writer's toolkit, all in one place with all the administrative stuff out of the way. #
- This product will also introduce an API that makes it easy for developers to create new editors because there are a lot of types of editors and people have their favorites. #
- I'm working closely with the people of WordPress, gave a demo at WordCamp Canada a couple of weeks ago. I loved it, a lot of the energy of BloggerCon. I wish I had joined them years earlier. Their community has been growing for 20+ years. In tech that's a long time. #
- It's also been about 20 years since we finished work on RSS 2.0, and that's the other major thing WordLand is built around. It's how messages fly around the net. Again totally replaceable parts. #
- Berkman helped us with RSS 2.0, the official spec is hosted at cyber.harvard.edu, and hopefully will remain there as an artifact, a basis for interop, for perpetuity. Many thanks for the help here, it needed a permanent place to stay frozen, the tech industry very much wanted to take it apart. It's still going strong even though tech leaders and journalists have proclaimed it dead many many times. Wishful thinking, things like RSS don't die. :-)#
- I am committed to getting around the silos of the owners of social media, and making it possible for developers and users to build their own networks with their own rules, and not have to wait for corporate programmers to give them the tools, we need to be able to make them for ourselves. This btw to me has always been the ethos of Berkman, coming from Barlow and Nesson, it's the old idea that the web should set us free, not create new more entertaining hamster cages for us to play in to delight our masters. #
- These days I wonder how we can help Harvard do the things it's so good at that few people understand. People, esp young college-age people, should know there are ways to contribute beyond attaining unusable wealth. I think what they want is a way to compete, to be great, to challenge themselves, and to win, and the money is secondary, a way to measure success. We can and should be creating new ways to measure the greatness of individual young people, directed towards more satisfying ends than making more money than they could possibly ever use. (And of course understanding that not all young people grow up to want to prove their worth, but the ones who vie to be the baddest billionaire have caused a lot of problems, and could use some alternate theories of how to be great. When I was young, I definitely was one of the ones with something to prove.)#
- Anyway back to Harvard. It took forever for Harvard to admit publicity that podcasting incubated there. It did eventually come but only in passing, in an introduction at a 2008 conference, where I took a picture of the moment. Thanks to my friend John Palfrey for making this happen. #
- I believe that universities like Harvard should be constantly hosting the kind of work we were doing then, like a teaching hospital. It's not enough imho to study technology and leave the development of it to the industry. Then you get software designed by bankers. I want a continuing stream of innovation to come out of academia, with people returning to teach what they learned to students who came to get skills that will help them do good and make a good living, and then a few years later they come back, again and again. It should be a self-renewing process. #
- I wrote about this several times over the last decade or so, I call this idea Developing Better Developers. #
- I think the next best thing for now would be to have a homecoming for Berkman every two summers perhaps, where we get a chance to develop a pulse. And see where that goes. It's obviously a lot of work. The one we had brought back a lot of good ideas and friendships that we should still be working on together. #
- I live in the Catskills btw, as you can tell from the subject line, just west of Kingston. Before that I spent nine years in Manhattan, before that Berkeley, Seattle, places like that. And Cambridge of course! :-)#
- Dave#
- PS: At the reunion I remember telling David Weinberger that I had hung up my spurs, I was done developing. It turned out I wasn't done. Heh. I think people like me never hang em up voluntarily. Who knows. ;-)#
It's the first day of "no more baseball" for the next ten months or so. I admit I don't really get involved until August. But this year was great, even though the Mets didn't make the playoffs. Congrats to my friends who are Mariners fans, they made a really good run. I was pulling for the Blue Jays, dreading a Los Angeles win, but as they say you can't always get what you want. And I don't mind that there's a victory for LA, a city that's taking the brunt of what's surely coming for NYC. Obviously they're waiting for the election to be over before they occupy the city.#Since the next version of NetNewsWire supports source:markdown I wanted to show how to find the feeds generated by WordLand that are compatible. #
I wanted to show Jake Savin, a UserLand dev and friend, how I edit my JavaScript code projects in my outliner. This is the source.opml file for the feedlanddatabase package, which you can edit in Drummer.#
In August 2002 I asked why RSS 1.0 is named RSS. I gathered up opinions and published it as a single document. I didn't edit or respond, just let people speak. I think this is a legit document type. And when implemented in 2026, it should all work with pointers. They should be only one copy of the text, where the author wrote it. Technically this is totally doable. Just a few independent developers to work with to start a bootstrap. We know how to do this. #
October blog posts in OPML. BTW, well-kept secret, I have a Node app that takes one of these outlines and publishes it to the web, in the format you see on Scripting News. If you can get your text to flow through OPML this way, you can have a replica of this site, with most of its features. And you can totally customize it in CSS. It's open source and very stable. It's called Old School and I wrote it in 2017 because I wanted my old blog back, I was fed up with trying to fit into the very small world defined by Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook and Medium. I decided then the cost was too high, and I'd be much happier if I lived within the limits of RSS, which is far better than the text formats defined by these other projects. Now I feel hopeful about this -- because Brent is supporting source:markdown in NetNewsWire. This is a big thing, because it will have the power to attract authors, developers of blogging systems, and other feed reading products.#I wrote a bit about Philippe Kahn the other day, and just remembered -- I forgot to write about Turbo Pascal. I had been using program compilers for C and Pascal for almost a decade when it came out, and it was shockingly different in a good way. Somehow it could compile a whole program in less than a second. Years before I had developed ThinkTank on the Apple II and IBM PC using Pascal, and it often took minutes to do the same thing! This changed languages in a great way -- later I would switch to Think C that had the same instant compiling. There were other great things about Turbo Pascal, because the editor was integrated, so you could start that compilation with a single keystroke. He understood that the quicker this was, the more in a groove the developer could get. Imagine if you had to wait a minute before you could read the prose you just wrote? It used to be like that. Going back to the 70s it would sometimes take many minutes, and you could run out of time, and wouldn't be able to change the software until they added more money to your account. Like the horse and buggy days. How far we've come. #
Wonder if you noticed that the main difference between social media and chat is which way the new messages flow and where the tiny little text box is, at the top or the bottom.#
The unique thing about neighbors is you can try to divorce them, but no matter what you do they will still be neighbors. There are few relationships as permanent as neighbor. They don't have to listen to you. But you should listen anyway, and try to figure out how they look at the neighborhood. Probably very differently from the way you view it. #
Good morning everyone. We're getting feedland.com back in shape. About a week ago we sorted out a long-standing performance issue. Once that was fixed, another problem cropped up, we weren't able to sign off and back on. We got that one too, this morning, and now it looks like feedland.com is finally performing well across the board. It's always been pretty stable, just churning away on feeds, reading lists, and pumping news over websockets, and all the other 3.0 type feed stuff. It feels like it's time to depend on it, even so we'll be careful, praise Murphy. The cool thing about feedland.com compared to all the other servers I've run stuff on over the years is that it scales automatically. It's on the VIP network run by Automattic. #
Just heard from Brent Simmons that the next version of NetNewsWire will support the Markdown in RSS. I wrote it up on my daveverse site, which I edit with WordLand, which means it has a special feed that contains source:markdown elements. You can be one of the first people with markdown-support in your feed, and in doing so, help the bootstrap. If you have questions, post a comment here.#At the same time I heard from people at Automattic that they had successfully installed the new version of the FeedLand software on feedland.com which runs on their VIP system, so theoretically should scale as well as anything on the net. There was a serious performance problem, that, with the help of Ryan Neudorf who I met in Ottawa, and Scott Hanson, longtime contributor here, was fixed. It was a daring move, it meant that all the timeline-generating code in FeedLand had to be rewritten. It was worth it. If you've ever felt that FeedLand was too slow at displaying news, please try again, I think you'll be pleased.#
Since many of us now program with AI chatbot assistance, it seems it's time to think about higher level languages we can use to specify what we're doing, new kinds of computers because we now have bigger more capable minds at work. #
Every OS should have a Help system that you can ask "How do I do this" and it understands what you're saying. The Mac OS tries to take you to a manual with a freaking table of contents! What do I look like, a robot? Come on it's 2025. Get with it. Maybe OpenAI should buy Apple. #
Before it’s too late there should be a rule that AI chatbots should not be allowed in any way to impersonate humans. We will come to see that as our biggest mistake, not stopping this before it got out of control.#
Apparently last night's email didn't go out, so I re-sent them. Hopefully people didn't receive two emails. #
- Wouldn't it be great if there was a holiday once a year where each of us had a virtual awards show for people we know who have special qualities that make them excellent people or friends. We put all our focus on a few personalities who have obvious defects. And we don't express public gushing love until people die. How much better our lives would be if we focused on the good, generous and creative people among us who have made our lives better? #
- I would honor people I love because they project strength and empathy, for me that would be AOC who I'd love to have as a niece or sister, or aunt, and no doubt she'd make a great mom. I don't like Schumer because he's sad and stupid. We need someone in that role who's more like JFK or even LBJ. Confident bordering on arrogance. Someone with the gravitas Schumer doesn't project. #
- I would give an award to Philippe Kahn for practical brilliance. I've learned from everyone I've competed with, and he had a practical philosophy about software I had never seen before. A feature that he saw that made the product more brilliant. They weren't huge things, but they showed he was thinking about the user. Not surprising that a few years after our competiton between Sidekick and Ready he went on to prove that a mobile phone would make a great camera. He not only thought of it, he made it work. That's the kind of spirit I admire. #
- I was on panels with him a few times, he always had funny things to say, irreverant, sarcastic, but one time he let Bill Gates have it (he was in the room) and called him out for "hogging the fast lane" -- and even though I don't remember what the issue was, I do remember that I knew he was totally right. #
- He's very much alive as far as I know. But I think it would be nice to write our epitaphs while the people we're praising are around to hear it! So going back to the original awards, that would be a requirement, the people you call out must be alive. #
My new WordPress News page is faster and looks better on phones. Also, lots of new sources thanks to suggestions from readers.#
I checked out Elon Musk's answer to Wikipedia by going to the pages on his site that Wikipedia mangles the most, in my experience. It looks like they basically copied Wikipedia, if so it's no better or worse. They'll probably be able to improve it, because ChatGPT tells a much closer to actual-events story. Net-net getting the story right is more important imho than keeping democracy open to trolls. #
Made good progress on a FeedLand performance issue. The new version is running on feedland.org. We're getting ready to try it on other systems. On the way I hit a problem with the wpcom package that implements the WordPress API in Node.js. Apparently the new version depends on babel/runtime, but it isn't listed as a dependency in their package.json file. I worked around the problem by adding that dependency in wpidentity's package.json file, and that fixed the problem. Had trouble getting this report in their issues section. #- Rebecca Solnit: "I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine."#
- I changed the header graphic on Scripting News today to raise a question with NYC voters. #
- Bill de Blasio was mayor. A funeral for two murdered cops. The police stand at attention, their backs turned on the mayor. This was a statement about him for sure, but even more about their disdain for the people who elected him, you and me, the people they're sworn to protect. I grew up in NY, and had plenty of experience with NY cops and this kind of disrespect is, from my point of view, who they are. I know they see themselves as martyrs, that's what the demonstration meant. But they also have a job to do and a chain of command.#
- There's a lot of pent up resentment and you can't just wish it away. The mayor, for better or worse, owns it. I can't imagine they'd have much respect for the Democratic Party nominee. Like it or not, this is the city NYers live in. #
- I am old enough to remember when John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, back when there were such things, was the newly elected mayor in 1966 and was greeted by a transit strike, shutting down subways and buses. The unions walked all over him. #
- I think NYC and NYers will fare better with a Andrew Cuomo. This isn't the first time I've stood up for him on this blog. He resigned in disgrace, humiliated, but I never will forget his leadership during the darkest times of Covid. Cuomo, along with Donald McNeil at the NY Times and Dr Anthony Fauci were the bright beams of intelligence and compassion.#
- House of Dynamite is a fantastic movie, it deserved the great reviews it's getting, and I found it easy to watch, though a lot of reviewers said it wasn't. It's exactly the kind of movie I like -- political thriller with ideas rich with intrigue. Great acting and writing. It's the 2025 version of Fail Safe. Both are like stage play, but this one examines the story from all angles, very skillfully, so the story is told iteratively. #
- The president in this story is throughtful and deliberative with no time to think. #
- It's provocative because the person who would make that choice now just destroyed part of the most famous building in the country on a whim, presumably to show us he has the power to destroy things, which you will not doubt even slightly when you watch House of Dynamite. #
- As you watch the movie, hold the thought in the back of your mind. What would Trump do. There was a time when we chose presidents based on our willingness them to have them decide whether or not to launch the nukes. We lost that perspective, but the problem never went away. #
- I see that the WordPress world is getting interested in adding AI features. I had some ideas a few years ago, about how I would like AI to be hooked up to blogging, and the ideas have developed a bit in the years since. #
- As a writer I want most is every bit of writing I’ve published turned into any kind of book I want at any time.#
- An example of a book lurking in the archive of my blog.#
- A user’s guide to FeedLand.#
- Knowing the AI would pull a users manual together on command, I’d feel more comfortable writing about it on my blog. As it is there’s a lot of good info between other blog posts.#
- I think it’s a great time to invest in new ideas for writers. #
- I have pretty good search on my blog, but so much more is possible.#
- Imagine a series of book types you could ask your AI friend to build for you from your own writing. #
- Eventually all user's guides will be assembled by AI. In the case of software products it should have already happened, though I'm just as behind the curve as everyone else is in this regard. #
- And of course the first docs to be produced that way would be A user's guide to WordPress. #
Great to see Les Orchard reading my site again. We did some great stuff together a long time ago in Frontier. He converted code from Perl (I think) to Frontier so I could use S3 for storage for users. I still use his code to this day. He's been writing of his memories of great feed reading tools of 20+ years ago, and I keep trying to tell my friend Les that the system we have now makes those products look primitive, as it should because so many years have passed. In 2022, I decided to give RSS another try. First I did a top to bottom review of RSS, and then I built FeedLand. If you loved feeds and mourn the day the music died, I have good news, it didn't die, you all just stopped believing it could happen. #- We've had a performance issue in FeedLand that we finally think we have tracked down. I'm working slowly and carefully on a new version with the new thinking. If it works, I'll tell you more about what worked and how it affects the software, obviously for the better. #
- What's notable about this fix is that it came about when I was talking with people who work on the open source WordPress project at the WordCamp last week in Ottawa. One of them took an interest and puzzled it out and came up with a theory. When we tested the theory on the real data, it made a big difference. If it works in the deployed version as well as it did in the test, FeedLand will be better for this. #
- Related, I've been asked if we'll share the subscription list for the WordPress News site, so this gives me a chance to show that any FeedLand-managed site, by default has a white-on-orange XML icon. When you click on it, you'll see the OPML list for the page you were looking at. The list is dynamic, so it changes whenever the set of feeds changes. This has become a huge part of the systems we've built with FeedLand, that's why you see apps that are deployed on one server using data from a different one. The federation protocol for FeedLand is a simple and well-established standard for sharing lists of feeds, OPML over HTTP. Kind of like RSS was when we were just getting started with feeds, it's how you plug systems together. Esp if you can take advantage of the fact they're all dynamic. Also that they work really well with categories. Lots to say about FeedLand. Glad we're turning this corner now. #
I'm really happy with the way WordPress News is shaping up. Every community should have a news site like this. #
Also after last week's conference we're starting to get help from the open source developer community around WordPress. Really friendly people, excited about what we can all do together.#- Tell the people who make AI's -- I want a way to have apps run in your browser that has direct connections to the AI engine, and it connects via the user's credentials, not the app devs (though you are entitled to know who the developer is). When I explored the idea of making apps for ChatGPT, this was the roadblock, I have to become a reseller of your service. Can't you figure out how to let the user pay directly? I just want to make tools, not be in the retail AI business. Feh.#
- This is the same problem web devs have, we have to become resellers for Amazon S3. Why can't Amazon, who already has an account for every freaking person in the world, let the user own their own data, which I believe they would reallllly like. I don't want access to it, I just want to make great tools for them to use. And they're free to use other products with the data. This helps encourage data format standards. It's why the PC software market was so much more vibrant than the web developer market. #
- I keep trying to explain this to people who aren't web devs, but in a position to help, and make a shitload of money, but all I get is blank stares, and "we don't do that."#
- Yesterday I did some research into how weblogs.com, in 1999, tracked changes in the blogs it was following. This was a precursor to feed readers. There was a main output file called changes.xml, a reverse chronological list of sites, not feeds, feeds didn't exist yet. #
- What the home page of weblogs.com looked like in June 2000. #
- A page that explained what weblogs are. #
- A snapshot of changes.xml from weblogs.com on Dec 13, 2003.#
- A search of scripting.com for changes.xml.#
- You can ask ChatGPT to tell you about changes.xml. I did, it was able to put together all the random bits that are now gone, it found them somewhere and I got a much better answer than I would have gotten if somehow all my docs had survived, and most of them did not. This btw is one of the great features of ChatGPT. Truly a miracle. #
- BTW, here's a transcript of my talk with ChatGPT about this stuff. Sometimes these links don't work for everyone. I wish they would get that working, dear friends at OpenAI. This is how your word of mouth builds. #
Question came up on TPM as to whether the blogosphere might reboot in Substack. The author concluded it can't, and I agree. Here's why. "One thing the blogosphere had that Substack can’t have is all parts were replaceable. You could use any blogging tool, and any feed reader and still be part of the world. Substack is a single company that has raised VC money. Vastly different incentives." And this has been tested. You have to use their editor to publish in their enviroment. They're unable to let you see their product as part of a toolset, it has to be the whole thing.#You know how the AI companies are all doing browsers. Why don't they have a local url that I could put into an <a> element that pops up the result of a question asked of the chatbot. Something like this. When you click on the link you find out what the Mets did. #
I'm okay with Trump destroying the White House step by step. We're going to need a lot of new things once he's done. There's going to be a lot of broken stuff that needs fixing. Feces covered monuments. Probably a new cemetary somewhere for his victims. But you know how when the Mets were defeated by the determined Yankees in Shea Stadium in 2000, we tore down the old stadium and built a new one. Same thing. The old White House will have served its purpose. We shouldn't even build a new White House on that location, just like we shouldn't have built a skyscraper in place of the World Trade Center. I wanted to see a mosque and a synagogue, a new football stadium, perhaps. A nice park. A place for a camp fire. Anything but an indestructable office building. We have so many of them. But where are the spaces for kids to play and learn and be friends. No, in place of the White House, I want to see a gorgeous public library. A place of learning. And a softball field and a nice swimming pool. We can tell the kids that once a bad old man lived here, and we decided it'd be more fun to have a big playground instead. #
I wonder if any established open source projects are converting to having ChatGPT or other AI manage the process.#On my drive to Ottawa and back, I never had to wait for a charger, and it never took more than 1/2 hour to fill the battery to 80%. The chargers are often in places with restaurants or supermarkets. And it's good for my legs to get out of the car and walk for a bit. #
Frontier's Simple Cross-Network Scripting is one of my favorite features ever. It made procedure calls over the internet almost as simple as procedure calls inside Frontier. #
I wish WordPress had a "home" social network. The community is all over the place, on Twitter, Slack, Masto, Bluesky, GitHub, and probably a few other places. I hope to have a social network that is built on WordPress and RSS. It would be open to the public, and anyone could start their own, by running an easy to install piece of software on a server. #
Took yesterday off, aside from a little blogging, which isn't work for me -- now on Monday, I'm going to do a few warmup projects, and figuring out which big item I should focus on in my post-WordCamp experience. #
I have to remember to use WordLand to post to Mastodon, because when I go in that way, I don't have a character limit and I can use styling. We were wrestling with this question at WC, how to market the feature in a way that would get people to go to WordPress to write for Mastodon. It would also be cool if you could turn on the ActivityPub connection in WordLand, without having to wade through all the menus and dialogs. Imagine if we had a confirmation dialog like this in WordLand.#
I have a really interesting idea for Netflix. Do a MCP so I can ask ChatGPT to find a show I'd probably like on Netflix. Then Hulu would have to hook up too, and HBO and Apple and everyone else. That would fix a big entertainment problem because I've already taught ChatGPT exactly what I like in movies and serials by giving it all my favorite shows and why I liked them so much. This was the idea of Bingeworthy, which I never seem to find time to work on. I really just want the freaking functionality. Someone should buy Metacritic btw, their process, however it works, is really good at finding the good stuff. But please someone who believes in open APIs, it totally needs to be in the Chativerse.#
- I presented WordLand for the first time publicly, the new one with a timeline, so it more clearly shows how we can build a beautiful social network just from open formats and protocols. #
- No user lock-in, every part replaceable, and open to developers to add functionality without having to reimplement the whole thing. These are all the things I think that have stood in the way of innovation in the web for many years.#
- A social network that starts out with no centralization and open in every sense has a much better chance of being decentralized than one that starts out centralized and swears they're going to stop doing that -- someday, fingers crossed, etc.#
Back home from my trip to Ottawa. Took the scenic route through the Adirondacks. Had an unqualified great trip. Should've gone to a WordCamp a long time ago. It's totally my type of people. I have a long list of things to organize, but for now it's time to catch up on sleep and rest, MLB and NBA, and make plans for the future. #
Wouldn't it be great if there were a list of WordPress users who have turned on their ActivityPub plugin, so we know who to subscribe to on our favorite ActivityPub service.#
I'm back at WordCamp in a big room waiting for Matt Mullenweg to answer questions for the people here. Yesterday's presentation went really well, lots of smart people really interested, fantastic discussion after. A very nice web culture. I went with three slides to get started, and then talked, demo'd, answered questions, and listened to ideas. Told a few jokes. Got a few laughs. It got the job done, help feed the word of mouth on WordLand. #
- Here's the link to the slides promised below. #
- I've been going back and forth on slides. I always do this. In the end I hate slides because I digress while going through them and skip ahead, end up wishing I hadn't used them. So I decided to compromise. I'll do the first three in some detail, and digress and go down tangents as I see fit. #
- The three main slides.#
- There were 20 or 30 more slides after that. #
- So what I'll do is this. Present the first two in some detail, then page through the rest quickly and come back and do the demo. Also publish a link to the deck on my blog so people can scroll through them at their leisure. And once the demo is done, I'll answer questions. #
- I have an idea that we can have a blogosphere that is as functional as podcasting. We just need users to get started, to get the idea off the ground. We don't have to accept the limits, we can have the full web if we want it. #
- Well, I think I'm done. I've got the outline for the slides complete. I can't possibly talk about all the stuff that's in the slides. Once I leave tomorrow I think perhaps I'll post a link for the slides and maybe offer a place to comment. Maybe. #
- I get very nervous about these things and then remember when I've prepared as much as I have for this, the talk goes quickly and people generally are nice, though I've been ambushed a few memorable times. Let's see -- Austin, Cambridge, San Francisco and Nashville come to mind. ;-)#
- In Austin it was because I was privileged. I was being honored because it was the 25th year of my blog, and I was one of the keynoters. I told the promoter his people wouldn't like me, and then I forgot I said it when it happened. I was stuck, I didn't want to get into a public argument with anyone. (Had I wanted to rebut, I would have said everyone in this room is privileged, just look around at how well fed and educated everyone is. We all flew in here. We live in a rich country where we are the elite of the elite. Now STFU, in my dreams.) #
- There have been times when I welcomed an argument...#
- In San Francisco, I was invited to lead a panel from the music industry about how great Napster was. This was probably in 2000 or 2001 when Napster was at its peak. It was an ambush. All the panelists made me the issue, and then they voted to kick me off the stage. I stayed there and waited until they exhausted their rage, and then asked them a question about music and Napster. Acted like nothing had happened. I had earned my place there, I was a very early industry adopter of Napster. I loved what it did for us. Imagine until then you either had to buy an album to listen to music, build a collection, or wait until it was played on the radio. (What is radio? Kind of an early form of podcasting.) People were talking about music in supermarkets and airports. This could not be stopped, I was sure of it, and they were acting like babies. I stood up and prevailed.#
- In Nashville, I was invited to be a sort of keynoter for a conference that was patterned after BloggerCon. I did not organize it, but I led a session, which was attended by a famous right wing blogger who I had invited to the Harvard BloggerCon. He brought a bunch of his friends, and they each said no one was listening to them but we were listening to them. I eventually sat down and let them have a session dominated by a few people repeating themselves. It was boring. #
- Finally I was set up by the promoters of a CMS conference which Berkman hosted at Harvard. I was the master of ceremonies. No one told me that one of my most virulent trolls was there, and when he got up to rage at me I asked him to sit down, but Charlie Nesson who was the senior educator there, and kind of naive about internet trolls, said he should speak his mind. I should have walked out at that point. I knew what was coming. It really shook me. #
- In Nashville a columnist in a local paper who said I caused the riot, btw. I swear to god I always take my discussion leader role seriously. I gave them all a chance to talk and they all said the same thing, almost as if they had been told to say it. #
- Let's remember how the web could have worked.#
- The ideal is to write in our blog space, and publish everywhere.#
- That's what we have been trying to do since Twitter came along. #
- Write on your main blog, cross-post everywhere it belongs. #
- This could have worked, and it still can. #
- But it can't work until we get agreement on what text is. This will be much-discussed at WordCamp Canada this week, based on what WordPress is doing and what Evan Prodromou will speak about and of course what I am speaking about.#
- Getting back on track is as simple as agreeing what text is on the web. For that we have two very good models: HTML and Markdown. #
I'm getting ready for a trip. And part of that is getting my laptop set up so I can post to Scripting News. If you're reading this, it worked.#
I'm narrating development work on my Daveverse site. If you're interested, that's where I've been while I'm shaking out core bugs in the new WordLand. These are the things I want to stay fixed and never have to screw with again. It does actually work that way in products that go through a shake-out process. Drummer and FeedLand both work pretty well. Sure there are bugs and things I wish worked differently, but I and a few other people use them as everyday tools. I'm trying to get WordLand with its timeline function to be that way. A bunch of new hookups via HTTP and Websockets. #Today's song: Oh My Love, by John Lennon. I was trying to remember this song. It kept eluding me. It's not one of his most famous. It's what you experience when you fall in love. Clarity. Endless possibility. At home in your life. For the first time. #
I know so many people around my age that were never told this simple truth that I heard Steve Jobs say in a video the other day. Paraphrasing -- the people who made the rules you think you have to live by weren't smarter than you. Once you accept this as fact, then if you can find the leading edge you can make it work the way you want it to. You can be one of those people. #
- I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I'll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? ;-)#
- I am presenting the day before, where I'll do a demo of the new WordLand, explaining how it's now twice the product it was last time you all saw it. It is still centered on WordPress as the place where all the user's writing is published. And somehow through the magic of software, we manage to make it into a social network. And the cool thing about the whole stack of software we build on, all of it is replaceable and of the web, in every sense.#
- There are things that Bluesky and Mastodon can do that WordLand can't. But there are also many many things we can do with the structure that WordLand creates that the others can't touch. There's a simple reason for that, if implementing something, no matter how attractive, without limiting the web-ness of the system, we didn't do it. This is the social network of the web. That means all the pieces connect with each other in fantastic unforeseeable ways. And anyone can discover these connections. That was the joy of the early web, the thought "Hey I think I can do that" and when you try, it works! We're back there again, if the people come. The technical challenge is still there but now is smaller. Getting people to look and fall in love (hopefully) is the big challenge.#
- After WordLand 0.8 is ready, real soon now, who knows what's next? That's the glory a bootstrap. Every step tells you where to go next. That's how you know you're hitting a target.#
- I don't know if Matt will be there for my demo, I hope he is. He and Automattic and the community have created a fantastic platform. Finding WordPress has a super powerful API that I didn't know about is like finding a new web. Let me know if you see it too. ;-)#
- So thanks Matt for your great contribution. I hope to be able to thank you for that personally in Ottawa next week. Perfect timing.#
- Cross-posted from the WordCamp Canada site. #
- Note this is for the 0.8 release of WordLand coming soooon. Not in the current released product. #
- A friend asked for this feature a few months back, before we had a Markdown mode in WordLand. #
- As I'm reviewing the product for first beta I realized I could now implement the feature he asked for.#
- How to..#
- Copy a URL to the clipboard.#
- Open WordLand, bring it to the front.#
- Go into Markdown mode by clicking the M icon. It turns green.#
- Select the text you want to be a link.#
- Paste the URL copied in step 1.#
- It creates the link for you, in Markdown syntax of course. #
- To see it in HTML, just flip the Markdown button off.#
- I call this feature Cute Paste. :-)#
- A video demo.#