Scripting News: Monday, November 2, 2020

Monday, November 2, 2020

Roast a turkey tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!#

All the commercial publishing services are broken in one way or another. Twitter has a character limit. Substack makes you use their editor, Facebook has no links, styling or titles. Medium has an api but you can't update your posts. We need something that simply works for writers and readers.#

Back in 1994 I had what was then a revolutionary idea. That a software developer could write about the world just like a columnist does. Not after stopping being a software developer, but as part of being a software developer. People really didn't understand.#

When they say Trump has a 10% chance of winning the election, that means, precisely, that if they had 10 elections just like this one, Trump would win one, and Biden would win nine. #

I use my Public Folder app on my Mac to keep local folders in sync with locations on S3. It works flawlessly, and performs a function I used to use Dropbox for, until they dropped their public folder feature.#

Poll: What will you do on Tuesday night?#

Another version of the previous poll.#

Ben Smith thinks Twitter may buy Substack, viewing it as Twitter Premium. Let's hope we can do better. Start by getting rid of the character limit in Twitter so we don't need to invent new channels just to distribute essays. Twitter can already do photos and video. People do all kinds of hacks to distribute writing. Let's re-legitimize it. Also can you imagine how pissed Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and founder of Medium, would feel if Twitter bought Substack? Leaving Medium out in the cold. It's long been assumed the reason Twitter didn't relax the character limit is because of Medium. As we say in the blogging world, oy. #

Eminem: Joe Biden for President 2020.#

Last update: Tuesday November 10, 2020; 4:31 PM EST.

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