It's even worse than it appears..
Thursday, December 1, 2022
Poll: I subscribe to HBO, Netflix, AppleTV, Hulu. Guess which is the only one I ever watch?#
My first Mastodon-empowered app is Radio3. You can now share linkblog posts to Mastodon, Twitter, Slack, RSS and a static HTML page. I use Radio3 to do the Links page on scripting.com. #
This is a huge deal. If I type a web address in a tweet, Twitter figures it out and hots it up in the rendered tweet. All of a sudden a tweet can link out to lots of places. Let's hope next up is Markdown support, optional titles, unlimited length and podcast enclosures and then you better believe WordPress and Tumblr will have to do it, and that will provide impetus for Mastodon. Here we go. Please keep going Twitter.#
2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again."#
Micropayments is such an awful term. Let's say I buy a Metrocard to ride the NYC subway. Every time I slide the card through a turnstile, what is that called? Is it a micropayment? Or I have an EZ-Pass responder on my car, so I drive through where the toll booths used to be without even slowing down. I don't know how much that costs, but I assure you there's nothing micro about it! One of the reasons business people at pubs must be tired of this discussion is it's their job to get MACRO payments for their employer, not teeny little micros. As I envision it, I would probably spend $100 a month on various pubs, and maybe more and more over time. When fluidity is added to the economics, how can you help but pay more. It's only because of the attitude about this at publishers that we can't have more news (and they get more money). Right now I only pay three pubs -- NYT, WP and Consumer Reports. My money should be spread around a lot better than that. #
I'm definitely starting to see breakage in Twitter. Things that used to work that now are obviously broken.#
Perhaps we should try exterminating Nazis now that they're voluntarily decloaking. They owe us approximately 6 million lives.#
My parents were children in Europe as the Holocaust was brewing. Their parents, my grandparents, got them out in time so that they could meet in Brooklyn, get married and have children, including me of course. My paternal grandfather told me, when I was a little kid, in his heavy Russian accent "Daveeed, when the Nazis come (he was sure they would) you get a gun and go on the roof and you shoot them!" My parents were horrified. I thought he was just a crazy old man. But he was a lot smarter and wiser than we gave him credit for.#
Welcome to December. Here's the OPML archive for November. #
Feeds in the Fediverse#
  • These are the goals for the software I am about to release.#
    • The network of RSS publishers and readers should be part of the Fediverse. This software enables the flow of RSS content into the Fediverse.#
    • To provide good simple working code for the Mastodon API. I had to do too much work to figure out how to get what amounts to a Hello World script up and running. Now you don't have to do all that work.#
    • You should be able to build feed-based utilities without giving any thought to reading feeds. Reading a feed should be as easy as reading a JSON file. This app illustrates how that works, using the reallySimple package.#
    • I want to get some code out there into the Mastoverse, to start building a rep in the community.#
They're not micro payments#
  • Micropayments is such an awful term. Let's say I buy a Metrocard to ride the NYC subway. Every time I slide the card through a turnstile, what is that called? Is it a micropayment? Or I have an EZ-Pass responder on my car, so I drive through where the toll booths used to be without even slowing down. I don't know how much that costs, but I assure you there's nothing micro about it!#
  • One of the reasons business people at pubs must be tired of this discussion is it's their job to get MACRO payments for their employer, not teeny little micropayments. As I envision it, I would probably spend $100 a month on various pubs, and maybe more and more over time. When fluidity is added to the economics, how can you help but pay more. It's only because of the attitude about this at publishers that we can't have more news (and they get more money).#
  • Right now I only pay three pubs -- NYT, WP and Consumer Reports. My money should be spread around a lot better than that.#
The scope of the Fediverse, 2022#
  • This picture is very informative.#
  • I asked on my Mastodon account what apps other than Mastodon and micro.blog are on the ActivityPub network. I had heard of many of these, but in the newbie fog, I hadn't retained the memory.#
  • I don't see any feed readers. #
  • We need to fix that. #

Last update: Thursday December 1, 2022; 9:58 PM EST.

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! :-)