It's even worse than it appears.
A guest on Ari Melber last night (I think it was Jamal Simmons) said what I've been saying about the 2020 election. It'll probably be a Russian style election where the incumbent gets 98% of the vote. We can't afford to wait for that. Think about all the other crazy stuff the incumbent is doing, that we can see, and then the stuff that is being covered up. Depending on the election only makes sense as a distant Plan B. I think even most Republicans would see that at this time. #
If the Democrats played hardball, they’d have a series of votes that force Republicans in Congress to choose between dumping Trump, and decloaking as Nazis.#
The only way to find out what your users want is to let them speak in a fashion that you have to listen to them.#
I'd like to see Melo and Jeremy Lin join up and become friends, work out, and reinvent basketball, and then approach the right team. They're smart, still-talented players. I think the stink on both of the comes from the crazy missed opportunity of the Linsanity period.#
  • Larry Yudelson, a longtime reader of this blog has a commercial Mailchimp account and offered to let me use it to test nightly emails for the blog. #
  • I get one test per day. Reminds me of the punched cards days of mainframes, only worse. Turnaround generally was less than an hour back then. It's okay though, I find it somewhat relaxing to consider Mailchimp only once per day. #
  • Here's a link to the email for yesterday's blog posts. I'm not sure how long that link will work, so here's an archived copy and a couple of screen shots. #
  • A few notes follow.#
    • I have been able to fix a bunch of the problems using CSS. But some I can't fix because they put the styles inline. No way to override those as far as I know. #
    • If I could I'd get rid of the top two items. They repeat info included elsewhere. They're the kind of noise people rightly skip over. I like to take that kind of noise out. #
    • They chose a really ugly color for links, and hard-code the font for headlines.#
    • It's funny however that some of my overrides work when I view the email in the browser, vs in GMail. In GMail their styles dominate. In the browser, mine do. #
    • The way my email address appears in the By line abuses the <author> element in RSS. If I wanted it to link to an HTML page about me, instead of providing my email address (a real mistake), I would have to break the <author> element. That's fucked up. They should have a namespace that calls for exactly what they want and not force people to break RSS to get a good result. Interop isn't any use if people don't respect it. #
  • Anyway, I can't make it perfect, but I can make it okay. I'm thinking of trying another service that has an API and see if I can make it perform better. They do call this blog Scripting News after all. 💥#

© 1994-2019 Dave Winer.

Last update: Saturday August 3, 2019; 12:08 PM EDT.