Scripting News: Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Something very scary just happened. There's a bug in Drummer that it sometimes updates the wrong outline when an I/O update comes in. This can result in hilarity when somehow the updates overwrite the file for Scripting News, and it seems there is no backup. It's a bug. And bugs hurt! I looked everywhere and kicked myself virtually for not maintaining a backup of this vital file. Every time I publish there should be a copy preserved. Well, it turns out that was happening. I post the outline to the instantOutlines repo, and thanks to the power and elegance of GitHub, there's a snapshot of every update, going back to when I started doing this on June 17. Catastrophe averted. Whew. And wow GitHub is starting to turn into a very nice network file system. #

We're finding that the LogSeq people and I have the same values re software and users. In yesterday's Twitter thread, they asked what would be the perfect storage system. I said: "my answer, for now, is daveappserver. But it isn't perfect, it's what we can do now that meets the criteria for now and the near future (the vision, the direction I want to go in). I think we share that. We want users to be as independent as possible, and to empower all levels of technical interest. I don't want the responsibility of keeping the world's ideas online. I want that distributed with rock-solid interop." I think that's about as concise a definition of why I do things the way I do them. As I was sure they would, the Logseq folk agreed. #

The best approach to solving our problems is to spread the gospel of journalism, to everyone who wants to learn. Teach elementary school students. Make a semester of journalism required for all college grads. The model of journalism of the past no longer works. That's why lies are winning, people have no idea of the elements of good journalism.Teach senior citizens how to do good journalism.#

Brandon Toner is trying to get PagePark running on his Ubuntu server at Digital Ocean. It seems like he's pretty close, but is stuck on a DNS question. He uses Namecheap, a service I am not familiar with. If you have set up a PagePark server, and have a few minutes could you help him out? Thanks. #

Last update: Tuesday July 13, 2021; 6:03 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)