Michelle Obama was wrong when she said "when they go low we go high." There is a difference. We always try to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is pretty damn low.#
Random ramblings with past experience dealing with tech power.#
As I think about next steps for building out from WordPress to create a network of users and their writing, I wanted to review how XML-RPC came to be, when I did a podcast, I found real gaps in my memory. #
Then just a minute ago as I was browsing around the discuss.userland.com archive I came across this post entitled
How XML-RPC will Evolve. This was in November 1998, five months after XML-RPC for Newbies and the Frontier implementation were released. #
It was a few years before the W3C came out with their equivalent of XML-RPC, and as promised, Frontier supported it. #
In fact, what a coincidence -- I worked on that project with Jake Savin, and we're once again working together on a project that's related to what we were doing then. It's also interesting that there are people to play the role that the three Microsoft people played, inside the WordPress community. And there is no one that can make them wait, as the Microsoft team in 1998 was stopped by their huge organization. But they were lucky to have me, someone completely outside their management structure, to decide to go ahead and release it.#
One thing you can be sure of is it'll take more time for them than it did for you. Also it'll be more complex, and take more work to support. And you never will be able to fully support what they come up with, by design. So you just say Yeah! Let's do it, and in the meantime go ahead and develop the market. When people ask about the threat, we're on board. I had learned this from the experience with Apple and AppleScript. Take it in stride, don't assume they win just because they're large. Just take the bullet. And know that even if you do everything as best as you can, there is a cloud over your future. #
Matt once said to me it was political, referring to RSS. Yes it was, everything about cooperation is political. Even if everything goes smoothly as it did with XML-RPC, it's all still political. Yes, I really liked working with the Microsoft people, and I would have worked with them no matter where they came from. But it really helped with my confidence to know it came from inside the biggest most dominant tech company at the time. Just like going to Harvard was political. Same thing, I would have done all the same work if I were at a smaller school without such a strong rep, but we were able to get more done because we were based there. #
And btw, Carney's story at Davos about dealing with the BigCo country follows exactly the same pattern. We didn't give Apple or the W3C awards, but net-net they were about as impetuous as the country Carney was talking about. What he said there could have been a Davenet post from the 1990s.#
PS: I think perhaps just for fun we should create an XML-RPC implementation of the wpcom API. I have just the thing to base it on. #
PPS: At some point we're going to want to make it as easy to set up a WordPress site as it is to create a new Bluesky account, because the two things will be basically the same thing. Either one will get you access to a network of bloggers. #
Last update: Sunday January 25, 2026; 12:13 PM EST.
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