FeedLand is different from any feed reader you've used. Try it out. Scroll down, and when you see a feed that interests you click the wedge next to its name. Newly updated feeds come in at the top.#

Life is really cheap in the US these days. We lost over a million Americans to Covid. A few deaths from gun violence or assassination doesn't move the needle like it used to. #

All the feed reading in FeedLand happens in the open source reallySimple package. If one wanted to extend it to support another format, one could do that. I am open to incorporating those changes in FeedLand. And of course the same code could be used anywhere in any project because reallySimple is open source. Why wait for Blue Sky. This approach is simple, and ready to go, today. Build a platform one brick at a time not in a big explosion of specs, imho. #

For decades I've used BofA to pay bills, but I was never satisfied with the service. They don’t keep records, so I can’t see all the checks I’ve sent to an account. And lately their website is broken. I contacted them to get them to fix the site, but as I expected, they made me jump through hoops to prove I had tried everything. I tolerated that once, but then they passed me over to another department, and I could see all the hoop-jumping was going to happen again. I give up. So on Twitter I asked for recommendations of banks that do a decent job of bill-pay. And I'm getting some good tips. Have a look, and if you have good or bad experience, please chime in. #

Someone actually told me yesterday they would stop reading my blog if I didn’t stop using Twitter. I blocked them of course. I have many mottos, one that has served me well in circumstances like this -- Don't slam the door on the way out. It's powerless and manipulative. If you have to go, just go. Quietly. Anyway, it's bullshit to leave Twitter just because the current owner is a prick. We use the platform for lots of stuff, and it's still useful. Until there's a place to reassemble (yes, I've heard of Mastodon), Twitter is what we got. #

Today's song: The Needle and the Damage Done.#

Musk deleted the offensive post. A good sign. Someone around him, his mother, a sibling, perhaps -- connected and said you don't say stuff like this when real people are suffering? #

Now's a good time to point back to a piece I wrote in 2017. Warning what would happen if a Republican bought Twitter. Has anyone heard Musk say he's trying to protect American democracy? A realist would have to say at this point that American democracy is not a good bet. I think it's pretty much already gone folks. Musk has opened his channel with Putin, and the two are going to exchange favors. Musk is in a stronger position than Trump was, probably even when Trump was president. He has all this money Trump never had. And now he has a platform more powerful than all the newspapers in the world. #

Musk said what Trump would've said if he were on Twitter. This made a connection for me. Musk wants to be Trump. At some point he will welcome Trump, but only when Trump is just the old version of Musk. Like the Beatles inviting Elvis to do a concert with them. He could do it but it wouldn't matter. #

The assassination attempt on Speaker Pelosi is the biggest news since Reagan was shot. #

Elon Musk said something horrible and this is causing some people to get serious about qutting Twitter. I see why they might be doing it, but I didn't quit Twitter when Trump took it over, and his tweets were impossible to avoid. But people are doing it, and that gets me interested in the idea of a brain-dead simple to use and simple to host way of pushing messages into the ether so friends can easily and quickly catch them. Nothing more than that and of course an API, also minimal, for peering. #

If you're leaving Twitter, something to do before deleting your account -- save a list of the people you follow. You may need it later.#

The Repubs are still demonizing Speaker Pelosi. #

In theory you should be able to read this page on FeedLand without logging in. If you can or can't please post a note here. Thanks! 😄#

There needs to be a Busy Developers Guide To ActivityPub.#

As an example, here's the BDG we did for SOAP in 2001. #

I can't believe no one else is pissed off about the fascist commercials on the World Series. I refuse to watch it. Last night they were trying to incite race hate between Hispanics and South Asians.#

BTW, Trump wasn't banned from Twitter for being right-wing. He was banned for organizing an attack on the US govt, openly, using Twitter. No one on the left has done that, despite what some idiotic Murdoch-employed pundit said on the BBC this morning. Someone in journalism ought to ask Musk about this, btw. Or at least raise the issue. Is it okay to use Twitter to organize acts of violence?#

Yesterday I wrote: "Why would I leave Twitter? It's like living in NY and not taking the subway. Sure it's dirty and smells bad, but it's how you get places." From this certain people concluded that I was in favor of Musk buying Twitter. Geez I hope you don't write code with that logic. I was having a Twitter conversation with Ben Smith, editor in chief of Semafor, and he volunteered he was staying with Twitter, "going down with the ship," he said. And Sarah Kendzior, a pundit and brilliant, creative thinker, said she lives in Missouri, and if she can handle that (it's the state that sent Josh Hawley to the Senate), she can handle Twitter no matter how awful its management. I'm with Smith and Kendzior. Also, having started on Twitter in 2006, and having contributed its foundational ideas, and as one of the shareholders Musk bought out, I'm anxious to see how this goes. I didn't quit when Dick Costolo was CEO, it's hard to imagine that Musk could be any worse. #

Today is the first day that Elon Musk owns Twitter. It's also the first day that I'm not allowed to wear a contact lens in my right eye because I have to get my lens replaced at the end of November, and to get the measurement for the new lens you have to not wear the contact for two weeks. My appointment for the measurement is in two weeks, hence no contact lens starting today. For most people this would not be a problem, just wear glasses, but I already have the lens replacement in my left eye, so the glasses I'm wearing have nothing for the left eye and a strong correction for the right. I existed this way for a number of years, and kind of got used to it, but hated it. And today, having worn the contact lens for years, this arrangement not only makes my vision deceptive it also makes me nauseous. But I will, somehow, get through this. I'm worried about driving though. I guess at this time I'm kind of glad to have a Tesla Model Y with FSD. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this. :glasses:#

BTW, owning a Tesla does not make me a Musk fan-boy. I bought it before I knew much about Musk, a year ago. It's amazing how in-your-face he's become in the last year. #

Edward Snowden said today, on Twitter, something very wise and imho true. "Platform censorship had clearly gone too far. Content moderation should be an individual decision, not a corporate prison. Let people make their own choices — and not just on Twitter." Indeed. Twitter already has good tools for individuals to systematically ignore posts from Trump, for example. Just block him, something I did in 2016. But I can't stop people from RTing him, even when he is banned from Twitter. They post screen shots. I need a way to block that bullshit too. I do not want to hear anything from Trump. I don't give a shit if he's a former president. That used to be a title of respect, but Trump cashed that out, and a lot of other good stuff about the US, a long time ago.#

Why would I leave Twitter? It's like living in NY and not taking the subway. Sure it's dirty and smells bad, but it's how you get places. #

I just realized a lot of people have the wrong idea about NYC. I've never been mugged. No one in my family has ever been mugged. You go around and do stuff in the city and yeah sometimes it doesn't feel safe. One time a drunk asshole from Utah or Wyoming walked into me and tried to pick a fight. I did what NYers do, no eye contact, keep walking, just mind my own business. I thought it was funny he was trying to explain how to walk in Manhattan. Fucking idiots walk six across, take up all the space, drunk, what do they think is going to happen. Of course next time they're going to be carrying a gun thanks to the Supreme Court. #

I like the name FeedLand because even though it's a new name, it feels familiar. I also like that it's not any brand of feed, let's move beyond that. Feeds are feeds. I don't care what language you use. Let's have fun. And "land" well -- that was half the name of a company I started many years ago, that did some great stuff that I'm proud of. #

To FeedLand users, Ed Zitron wrote a great piece today about Facebook. Nails it. So I found his feed and subscribed to it. You can subscribe with one click if you're logged in. Right now I'm the only subscriber. It'll be interesting to see if I can communicate with some FeedLand users through my blog. 😄#

FeedLand can also generate feeds, not just read them. For example, when I like an item in a feed I'm reading in FeedLand, it's automatically added to a public feed of the items I've liked. Every user gets one of these feeds. I've subscribed to the feed in Feedly, since it's RSS, it works. Of course you can also subscribe to it in FeedLand. #

If they like you, journalists will tell your story as one of invention, creativity, vision. That's how they used to speak of Zuck and Musk. If they don't like you, they talk about you as a bully, quoting people who lie about you, or misdirect. In both cases it's journalism. You have to question both approaches. No one they glorify really knew what they were doing, they had as many flops as successes. And the people they demean, in order to get where they are, had to be pretty freaking creative and honest because the old adage in tech applies -- you can't lie to a compiler. 💥#

A quick demo of the Feed List as a feed reader. #

A screen shot of the first 20 feeds on the FeedLand hot list. Soon you will not need to log in to read this. The hotlist is also available as a subscribable OPML list. Just import it into your favorite feed reader to keep up with the most popular feeds in FeedLand. Also note that these are early days and the list is heavily skewed by the feeds we offer to get started. That will probably change over time. #

I am subscribed to 470 feeds. You can view my feed list as a feed reader, because of a feature I added late in the development process. The wedge next to each feed expands the feed to show the most recent five items from the feed. With the When column selected, the feed list is in reverse chronologic order. This was not planned, I just put the sorting titles in because it made sense (it's a feature in most file systems). But when it started updating I realized this was something unique and powerful. A feed list that is also great for reading feeds. They update pretty frequently, so there probably should be a feature that disables automatic updating temporarily. There is such a feature in the Settings dialog, but it's hard to remember that you've set it. #

I wrote a simple utility today that generates the starter list from a set of feeds I've put into the starters category on FeedLand. It's proof that this works nicely as a platform for moving around lists of feeds. The code is almost as simple as it would have been in Frontier, twenty or so years ago. We're getting back into the zone. 😄#

Today's song: Mr Soul.#

As of 11:40AM Eastern, my newest product, FeedLand, is open to anyone who wants to use it. Hopefully a foundation for building out the user side of feed reading. It should be every bit as empowering and useful as podcasting. And happy 20th to RSS 2.0, many happy returns for 20 more. #

I highly recommend reading the Starting Up doc. It shows how to find feeds to subscribe to, read the news, and find other users. FeedLand is all about people, feeds and news. It's not like any other feed reader that you've seen -- in fact it's very useful in conjunction with feed readers, thanks to the OPML subscription list standard. #

There's a newly public support repo on GitHub, with a readme on the home page and a long list of issues we've discussed going back to mid-summer. It's for support only. If you're stuck, can't figure out how to do something, or something appears to be not working. But please read the home page first, before posting. It's a small community, all volunteers, so use the resource carefully. And absolutely no speeches, or even feature suggestions. You can use the open web for all that. After all this time, we're not naive about how to keep peace in these groups, it's by having absolutely no tolerance for abuse. #

A Node.js utility that reads OPML subscription lists and removes feeds that are no longer reachable or parseable. #

I don’t think there should be fascist political ads on MLB playoff games. I'd like MLB to clean up its act, or there should be a boycott.#

We optimize iteratively for incompetence in government, that's why you end up with actors who look ok in a suit who say words and get to be on tv and live in nice houses, eat good food, fly on private jets, and go around in motorcades.#

I'm 83% decided that on Monday we'll open FeedLand to anyone who wants to use it. We've got a lot more work to do, so we might as well get started with that. #

A nice testimonial from Matt Mullenweg, about my role in getting podcasting started. Matt has made his own huge contribution to the open web with his WordPress content management system, and many other projects. I think FeedLand will fit in well with their new open source podcast client. Scroll to the end of the announcement to see how enthusiastic they are about sharing subscription lists. They don't know it yet, but they're going to get some incredible support from FeedLand. It's designed to plug into that interface. I suggested to Matt that they go the next step and let the user enter the URL of an OPML list, and read it periodically so they can manage their subscriptions elsewhere. I like it because it'll mean all my favorite podcasts will be available there and on my web podcast site. #

We the people ought to make this election a blowout of turnout. Fill the streets with voters. A real show of power. Fuck the politicians. The Dems seem pretty complicit if you ask me. Scare the daylights out of all of them.#

I love this quote from The Counselor. "They don't really believe in coincidences. They've heard of them. They've just never seen one." He's talking about the mob, and how they don't listen to excuses. If you owe them money you pay them or they kill you. But it's clever the way it was written. I think we need more of that in how we judge malfeasance by Trumpers. Stop being so fucking patient. Trump stole the documents because he has customers for them. That's all he cares about. Stop defending him. These aren't coincidences. #

If I were in charge of the Democratic Party's advertising leading up to the midterms, I'd zero in on Clarence Thomas's opinion on the Dobbs case which said the insane part out loud. The next things that are going to be made illegal, after abortion -- contraception, same-sex marriage. The other conservatives say no, but we've been down that road. People expect to be told about the evilness of the other side, and if there is no evil in the advertising, it's reasonable to assume there is no evil. #

Watching last night's playoff game between the Yankees and Astros, there was a moment when the camera zero'd in on the Houston pitcher, doing nothing. The announcers describe the scene. Someone from the crowd had run out on the field and tried to hug the Houston infielder José Altuve. They described how the police were trying to catch the guy. How much would his lawyers cost for this? $10K another announcer thought. And he'll spend the night in jail, another collegue guessed. But we didn't see any of this. The camera never pointed at the action because to do so, MLB felt, would encourage people to do more of this. It's a rule for a kind of journalism, sports play-by-play. I don't think there's much actual journalism in the coverage of professional sports (I can go into that another time). Okay so what if there were a similar rule to political journalism, if they were not allowed to run stories based only on polling. For a different reason, because polling has proven to be wildly wrong in the last few elections. Polls were almost certain HRC would win. They got whole sections of the country wildly wrong. Many other examples. There are theories about why this is, but no one knows. So it seems hugely damaging, even unprofessional to report poll results as news, esp when it isn't disclaimed in the headline, so it's clear they're writing about fiction and the story is almost certainly 100% bullshit. #

One of the big lessons I learned from selling what people now call Tools For Thought a long time ago, that there's a very limited market of people who see their job as thinking, even if there's a lot of thought to what they do. If you go to a Monday staff meeting and when it's your turn to speak you say "I spent the week thinking about stuff" you might be the first one they cut when it's time for layoffs or promotions. Bosses want to hear what you did, not what you thought about. The secret is this -- production applications. Things they do with your product as opposed to thinking about things. If you find one of those that resonates, sell the shit out of it. For us it was presentations. It kept showing up near the top of lists of what people used ThinkTank for. When we made features specifically for presenting, the product took off. We went from selling "idea processing" to presenting. Sure there's a lot of thinking in preparing presentations, that's why the product worked so well for that. It's like saying there's a lot of steering in driving the car. What you're doing is driving. Steering is just part of it. #

FeedLand is not yet released. It is currently being used by about twenty people, since early August. I don't want to add more yet, because this product is about community. We're not ready yet for a lot of new people. We're going slow and deliberately. I remember from past experience how community cultures develop. I want to get this right.#

The first segment on today's Countdown with Keith Olbermann asks where are the Democrats' commercials warning of what happens if we lose the legislature in the upcoming election. It's going to be tragic, people ought to have a chance to know the consequences of voting Republican.#

I'm writing FeedLand docs today, preparing for some new users. My hope is they'll actually read the docs, but -- well at least I hope they read the Getting Started docs. I try to make the writing interesting, with lots of screen shots and side-stories. Easter eggs where possible. Once I get going I do actually enjoy this kind of writing. I've only been doing it for 35 or so years. Heh. Ooops. #

I agree -- the formats that are with us forever are RSS and HTML. It's not because I love XML over JSON, I don't -- but I also don't argue with reality. A waste of time.#

People who link to stuff use feeds. #

People seem to like news.scripting.com -- that's so cool. So I installed it as the third tab on the home page. Just click the News tab to be instantly transported to the news from the feeds I collect. #

If I were dictator of MSNBC, here's what I would do. Give Keith Olbermann the 9PM hour. Keep the following: Lawrence, Joy Reid, Alex Wagner and Stephanie Ruhle. All the rest goodbye, including Morning Joe, Ari Melber, Chris Hayes, the Republican who's on before Melber, the idiot who punted on this interview with Speaker Pelosi, and if Chuck Todd is still involved, please put him out to pasture. I'd also give an hour to Elie Mystal, it'd be fun to see who he chooses as guests. And completely get rid of the standard guests. They are so freaking tired. They need a rest. And with Olbermann on top again, well at least it would be interesting bullshit, not the normal self-important leftover bullshitty bullshit. #

As a son of Holocaust survivors this is exactly how I feel about people who plan to vote Republican in this election, and journalists who pretend that there still is a Republican Party.#

The tag server I implemented last year has been offline for a few weeks. Just fixed the problem. Let's see if it works again. #

Tonight's final game between the Yankees and Guardians was rain-delayed, but while they were waiting to see if the game would be played, they had a panel of four baseball experts talking for a long time about absolutely nothing because there was nothing to say. It's raining at Yankee Stadium. How many ways can you say that. I felt sorry for them, but they were kind of people who even when they had the normal amount of time to fill said nothing but platitudes. That's their job. I did a bit of channel switching, looked in on MSNBC and CNN, and they had the usual panels, just like the one for the rain-delayed baseball game. I finally landed on a lovely sweet movie I had seen before, Juno, and was reminded that humans can tell powerful, funny, touching stories using this medium. It doesn't all have to be sad, mindless, soulless bullshit. I think that's why we're all so unhappy with our lives and each other. We're addicted to watching the same actors saying the same old boring bullshit day after day, and we're angry about that, and have to blame someone, anyone but ourselves, for putting up with it. #

Ignorance is derived from the word ignore. It's the act of ignoring, or ignore-ance. #

Right now my favorite song in creation is Can't You Hear Me Knocking. It's got everything, but most important, a driving bass and drums and a steady beat. It's always in my Peloton playlist, every time -- it's when I drive the bike fastest and steadiest, with a huge grin on my face. And it's two songs in one. First it's the hit as conceived by Jagger and Richards. But then it just goes into a jam, not part of the song, but they loved it so much they kept it. It's got a Santana sound. I never seem to get tired of it. The lead on the second half is Mick Taylor not Keef. #

How will the fascist autocracy be put down or will we go all the way, as Germany did in the 1930s? Will Kanye West be the minister of extermination for the American Nazi Party? Will this year's election, where the press still reports this as Repubs vs Dems, be the turning point?#

Do Repubs really want to defund Social Security? Do pensioners know this? Do the Repubs deny this? If true, it’s pure theft. That money was taken from our paychecks so it would be paid back when we retired. It‘s our money.#

That Trippi Show is first to pledge support for open podcasting via RSS. I looked for the home page for the podcast and didn't find it. That would be the place to put a nice little icon saying RSS is cool and this is where you go to use our feed. Maybe it's time to do a this. #

Another new podcast fails to proudly say it supports the open podcasting protocol otherwise known as RSS. It's the reason you can publish whatever you like without the need to get Apple's approval, or anyone else. Support the open web. It's the right thing to do.#

Did you know developers get brain fog? We do. I used to call it stagnation. It usually comes after a period of intense productivity. I run real hard and fast in a direction, drive it to its conclusion -- sometimes it results in a feature, other times a dead end, with lessons learned and ideas for other branches to take, later. Either way it leaves the well dry, and you have to patiently rebuild (or re-kindle, re-prime) your flow, which often takes days. #

I'm looking for RSS feeds of great art museums.#

Watching the video from Jan 6. No one has so far commended Congress for keeping their cool while their lives were totally in danger. I remember while the insurrection was going on, wondering if right then our government was being executed.#

Today's song: Sunny Afternoon.#

We limit each other by the boxes we put each other in. And it's not just you that's boxed in, everyone is. But you probably only see the ways you are. It's happening everywhere to everyone. You're doing it too.#

Suppose you became a billionaire, assume through hard work, ingenuity, risk, sacrifice, all of it. You earned the money. How would you expect your life to change? Would you expect to have more power? Would you have the same friends you have now?#

Being poor guarantees that your friends love you for who you are.#

I've been head-down on a programming project the last few days. I feel like I've figured out the very top level of the UI for FeedLand, and while the ideas are fresh in my head, I'm staying on the path. #

My grandfather who barely escaped Nazis who were killing millions of Jews told me to shoot and kill people like Kanye West. He was furious at how we were treated, and I share his fury. Maybe the only way we’ll be respected is if they fear us.#

When you hit a paywall from a link on Twitter, it seems the proper remedy is to block both the pub and the linker.#

Idea: Peloton-like trainers for your feeds.#

I know some people who read my blog don't use Twitter. You can still read my Twitter feed because there's an RSS feed I maintain of all my tweets. #

Multiple-party real estate deals must be a thing. I have a house and want a new house. I want to do the switch in one transaction, rather than risk owning two houses. This is analogous to the arrangement they have in sports. Team A only wants to trade player X if they can also trade out player Y. Similarly, homeowner Judy only wants to buy this house if she can sell her house in the same deal. #

What am I supposed to do now? I've been glued to the TV watching every Mets game as they lost to the As then Atlanta and now San Diego. Where are the Mets going to lose next week? Help.#

I heard a quote this morning from Trump on NPR where he claims credit for the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol. And this criminal is still walking around? What hope is there for this country if we won't defend ourselves.#

Will the Mets have to tear down Citi Field after this desecration?#

When I was going home from the last game of the 2000 World Series on the 7 train into Manhattan, there was a kid crying. I looked at the kid and thought, son, if you're going to be a Mets fan, you're going to be doing a lot of that. #

On the bright side, the Knicks season starts on Oct 19 in Memphis. Of course their season will probably end much like the Mets season did, but that's a long long way off. #

I am testing rssCloud support in FeedLand now. #

Of course people will want to know why do rssCloud when the W3C diss'd RSS by reinventing something that already works great. I think the question answers itself. 😄#

This kind of disrespect is very popular among techies. They want to say they invented something, which is a lie -- but if they never tell anyone about the things that came before, they kind of hope to get away with it. It's one of the worst things about tech, and why progress takes so long, why we're still "solving" problems that were solved when I was in school, and that was a long time ago. It's not just big companies that do this, sometimes one-person companies do it. Shaking my head. It would work so much better if we built on each others' work.#

There's a great movie, Any Given Sunday, just about this. I re-watched it yesterday. There's so much truth in it. Young people, men especially, want to be the hero and ignore that winning requires that people work together, and that the real joy of being human comes not from being the great conqueror (as young men imagine), but having 12 people in a huddle fighting for something worth fighting for, together -- as a team. I don't want to be Don Quixote, but if the tech world doesn't want to collaborate, I'm not going to stop being creative, or stop hoping that someday other techies see things the way I do. Working together is where it's at. BTW, that's really the point of Rules for Standards-Makers, in case that wasn't obvious.#

I've been reading chapters of Manton Reece's book. It's a really sad story, but I don't think it has to be. There was a lot of collegiality in the early blogging community, and we shared our work. He mentions Manila in passing, but it solved a big part of the puzzle that eventually became WordPress, Facebook and Twitter, and btw micro.blog. All the source information is in the archive of Scripting News, this blog. Manila was the culmination of a couple of years of open experimentation I did into how you could simplify content management so ordinary people could do it. First we had to understand what the problem was (two models for the content, one the editing view and the other the published view, there needed to be one model), why content management was too complicated for writers, and then how to make it usable. And then there was a lot of code to write, UI to design and endless iteration. And it had an API. That was a big deal. It's probably why Twitter and WordPress have APIs, btw. All that (unless I missed something) is left out of Manton's story. I was hoping for the actual story about how this worked to be chronicled in his book. Not only because I want to be in the story myself, but also so that today's developers know how these kinds of things come to be. Most of the stories tell the wrong freaking story. 💥#

I have a great news product for bloggers. I hope to get more readworthy bloggers on that site. It's kind of sparse! Still diggin.#

The Mets suck. As a lifelong Mets fan I know this. I love the Mets. It’s a family thing. Parents and grandparents loved the Brooklyn Dodgers so I love the Mets. But what bullshit that supposed Mets fans booed our starter as he left the field last night, and many left before the game was over. As usual some fucking Yankees fans got Mets hats and are pretending to be Mets fans. #

What Facebook is doing with the Metaverse is doomed to fail. When has a big established tech giant invented the next layer of the virtuality? If there’s any validity to Zuck's vision, the reality will be achieved by a startup, competing with other startups. Facebook which now foolishly calls itself Meta! (might as well change their name to Bullshit!) will, if they’re lucky get to buy one of the leading startups, will eventually get a new CEO who will write off the Meta! foolishness, and Meta! will go the way of Topview, Copland, OpenDoc, OS/2, and all the bullshit Bill Gates threw at the open web.#

Judy: "He's like you, but with a human head."#

I love seeing the Democrats take the gloves off.#

The NYT has a new technology podcast, but no indication on the site what the RSS feed is. I know how to find it, but what's the problem in supporting the open standard that made podcasting uncontrollable by the tech industry, something they seem to think is a good idea?#

When I'm in a groove programming, I find myself saying out loud, "perfect" and "thank you" regularly. When I'm paying attention I can hear myself doing it. #

Now that I have FeedLand running reliably, I am reading more of the few bloggers I've found that are blogging regularly. That includes Manton Reece, who I know from early Frontier days. One of our best developers, and a steady fellow, which was much appreciated. I know he's a sports fan too, living in Texas he follows the San Antonio Spurs, which is of course a legendary team. I am, as you know, a Knicks fan. But I have to say, until the Mets are finished, and probably a few weeks after that, I'm focused only on baseball. I'm very modal with my sports. I'm either in or not. I can't love two teams at the same time. It's just who I am. Anyway, Manton has written a book about microblogging and he runs a service called micro.blog which hosts blogs, running his software. I feel that his blog and my new reading software have brought us closer. And I look forward to reading his book. #

Comments and questions re FeedLand continue to be welcome. #

BTW, here's my list of bloggers. But most of them aren't updating. I hope to add to this list, to find bloggers who are writing about interesting stuff with good web energy. #

For all the ups and downs the Mets ended the season with exactly the same record as the Braves, 101 wins and 61 losses. The only reason the Mets are in the wild card and the Braves get to wait for the next round, is that they won one more game against the Mets this year than they lost. It's like the game of inches Al Pacino's character rants about in Any Given Sunday. Life is made of inches. #

I added a new feature to FeedLand today. There's now a white-on-orange XML icon in the upper right corner of each news product. Screen shot and example. The icon links to the OPML subscription list for the feeds on the page. This came from a question on the thread, basically asking "Where are the feeds." I love those kinds of questions, they help direct the development of a product. My perspective is so muddled, I've been living with this product for nine months already. I can't see what it looks like to someone seeing it for the first time. #

This is the OPML subscription list for the nbariver site. We could use feeds for a few more good NBA blogs (understatement).#

Last night on MSNBC, Maggie Haberman explained why she sat on some of her biggest Trump scoops. She says sources gave her the info on the condition that it can only appear in the book, not in news. The reason -- they wanted to postpone Trump's reaction to the leak to the future, knowing that the lead time on books is much longer than news articles. This is impossible to confirm, and it casts doubt on her integrity. The safest thing for her to have done is to leave the non-reportable leaks out of the book, to avoid the appearance that she's withholding news so she can make more money with the book. #

Someone in a J-school should study paywalls. A PhD thesis? Quantify what's going on and how effective (or not) each approach is.#

Jeremiah Moore: "In the past you could buy a day-pass for all news released by a given newspaper on a given day. Called 'buying the paper' it had a reasonable fixed cost."#

Substack has a sadistic kind of paywall. You start reading a piece, get into it, enough to wonder where it‘s going and boom, it’s time to subscribe or get out of here. Leaves a humiliation that’s hard to describe. This is the page that triggered the paywall, it's not doing it now -- I have no idea why. This is the second time I've seen this paywall. Anyway, I clicked on the link because I thought I might learn something, instead I have a pain in the gut. Trains you to never read anything on Substack again, and, like all other paywalls, it does not make me want to subscribe. If you have a comment, here's the original tweet. #

I thought the Turtles were silly when I was a kid, but now I'm listening to Elenore, and man it's really good. (And also silly.)#

My friend Anton Zuiker has been one of the early users of FeedLand and his news product is the Duke River. He works in the Duke University medical school. He's been a long-time user of my software (much appreciated). When he visited me in NYC a few years ago we rode Citibikes in Manhattan, even right through the middle of Times Square. Anton doesn't flinch at adventure. 💥#

I like a man who's ok looking like an idiot wearing white rain boots.#

BTW, the Mets were rained out yesterday and the Braves lost, so technically the Mets are not yet eliminated in the race for the NL East. But it takes just one Mets loss or Braves win to do the deed, though, so we're hanging on by the thinnest possible thread. #

Funny thing happened watching the Mets game last night, which I had a bad feeling about right from the beginning. When they finally lost, I slammed my left hand on the arm of the chair in a reflexive move. The watch which was also on the hand started shrieking wanting confirmation that I had taken a hard fall. Presumably it was going to try to get me help if I did. I answered no. It asked if I fell at all. I thought for a second and said no. But I did have to think about it. The Mets have always been heartbreakers. As a fan since 1962, there have been lots of downs, but the ups are spectacular. We keep hoping for another 1969 or 1986. The day will come, that's the feeling. Will this be the year? Well, if it is, it's going to be a long slog with lots of heartbreak on the way. 😢#

If Texans elect scum to lead them, does that make them scum too? I don't know. But they could try to be charitable and welcome people less fortunate than themselves. That instinct is in them too. Has to be, we're all human. And stop the self-pity, it's bullshit. You think you're teaching northeasterners about immigration. Hah. That's laughable. All of us of us are immigrants! You are too. Freaks.#

If news orgs cared about readers they would give us a way to read any article we want under reasonable economic terms. By requiring us to subscribe to read one article they are guaranteeing that we won’t read at all.#

The Mets were beat in Atlanta. Fact. We lost.#

I think of Colin Kaepernick when I hear anything about the NFL. I don’t understand how anyone who believes in free speech will have anything to do with that league.#

Having listened to and loved the most recent episode of 500 Songs about the Turtles and their songs, my friend said now you have to start with the first. I looked all over the web and I couldn't find a list. So I looked into their RSS feed. It's huge but they're all there, all the episdes. How am I going to parse this? Then I remembered I have it in my database. So I wrote a little query to get me the enclosureUrl of all items from that feed, and it worked. I love it when this happens. #

The greatest idea in Wired in the early days when the web was young were the easter eggs they added innocuously in web links. I like to do it too. #

Once when I was a little kid, my mom driving, her mother, my grandmother, in the front passenger seat, my brother and I in the back seat when all of a sudden we noticed that Nana was wiggling her ears. Whoa. She's doing that for us! Incited, we carried on as kids do. Laughing and rolling around. Yes that's what to do. Nothing is all that serious, say the kiddies. #

It looks like the API thesaurus.land was an interface for went off the air. Oh well it was a good idea. Kind of fun, for me at least. 😄#

The server for tweetfeed.org has been down since Sept 21. It's back up now and reading tweets and updating feeds. This is my feed. I've added this service to my monitor so hopefully next time it goes down I will be notified and fix it sooner. Still diggin! as they say. #

The monthly ritual is done. Here's the OPML archive for Sept. #