It's even worse than it appears..
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Short podcast. Mostly about how exciting it is to work with people on RSS again, but at the end I talk about a misbelief that I advocate that people should run their own webservers. Even in my most positive days about making the web easy I didn't think that. But I do think we need alternatives to the VC-backed "free" web hosting companies like Medium and Substack. We keep learning this lesson, and at some point we should get it together to provide really free hosting for writing, with no business model attached, supported by foundations and contributions. It just doesn't cost that much to do the hosting of text files. A Twitter thread expands on this idea. #
The Secret Service must have known Trump was trying to overthrow the government. Assuming they swore an oath to defend the Constitution what’s their excuse for not stopping it?#
Which Markdown?#
  • Joseph Zitt: "It's very cool that you're supporting Markdown -- but which Markdown are you using?"#
  • This of course is a great question. I answered it, the way all Markdown questions are answered. #
    • Of course as you know there is no One True Markdown.#
    • The approach we all take with Markdown text is to stay within a reasonable subset of the syntax, and hope for the best. ;-)#
    • I go by this cheat sheet, which I keep in an icon in the chrome of my browser, easy to reach for. And it seems to work.#
    • Re the Markdown processors I use --#
      • On the client side -- I use something called MarkdownCoverter, which I downloaded many years ago. I seem to recall it's the one that StackExchange uses, so I figured it's got to be pretty good. In all the years I've been using it there haven't been any complaints as far as I know.#
      • On the server side -- I use markd. I don't recall how I decided to use this one, but it has also served me well.#
    • As I understand it Gruber likes the way it has evolved. #
    • The shit does kind of hit the fan when it comes to using Markdown in something like RSS where interop is the primary thing. #
    • But this was one of the first enhancements I wanted to get out there in 2022, the 20th year of RSS 2.0.#
  • PS: See the previous two day's posts about Markdown in RSS feeds. #
We all know this feeling#
Edward Hopper#

Last update: Wednesday July 20, 2022; 9:43 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! :-)