Today's song: Jambalaya on the Bayou.#

A podcast from post-Katrina New Orleans, Dec 2005.#

There are two quotes that make me laugh in the Think Different piece from last week. One of them is here: "They took paradise and.." At first, if you're roughly my age, you read "They took paradise and..." and recognize it as the beginning of a famous line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. The other is a subtle touch of sarcasm, that I usually try not to indulge in, but let pass through as I edited this piece. See if you can find it. #

Mea culpa: Unfortunately I misquoted Joni, she said "paved" not "took." I'm going to leave the mistake in the piece. #

If you want to get an idea of how well WordPress has been bridged to ActivityPub, check this out. It's time for Mastodon to adopt these features across the board, so when writing in Masto you can use linking, style, titles, 10K character limit. Raise the bar. Let's bring more of the web into social media. Esp linking. #

If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get the snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.#

I like what Vivaldi says about the web. It makes me want to do more to re-stock the web with interesting, inspiring human ideas. Maybe we could make our blogging software work better with their browser. All for the web, for humanity.#

Everything Trump is doing to steal the next election is proof of why Colorado was right to deny him a place on the 2024 ballot. The Supremes gave him four years to prepare, to learn from his mistakes, now he'll do it from the top seat. It seems certain to work. #

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.#

Short excerpt of the ICE commercial which aired several times on WPIX during yesterday's Mets game. There aren't that many drug trafficker, predatory gang members in the US for ICE to deport. And they completely misrepresent what a sanctuary city is. The commercial is paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. Shameful. #

Stephanie Booth, an old school blogger, wanted to hook up my RSS feed to a new service that supports inbound RSS, which we appreciate. Apparently they can't handle HTTP, which of course we don't. #

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for the boost to yesterday's post. Glad to finally get the whole plan down in one place. Each piece of the puzzle took a while to come together in concept and then in implementation. I'm still working on all levels, last week I added a feature to FeedLand that makes it fit in better with the (new) timeline and WordPress (20+ years). It takes a while to change your thinking from WordPress being just another blogging CMS, to being an open platform that hosts web writing in a way that's open to competition. We're on the same page. It's still a competitive environment, but there are rules to competing, you don't cash in the interop that took patience and respect to develop and maintain. That's been the pity of the open web, lots of opportunists who are willing to stink up the ecosystem to squeeze a few more bucks for themselves from things they didn't create. Let your competitors in, and the users, if they have their heads screwed on right, will respect you for it. And even if they don't, still do it, because it's the right thing to do. That's why, at my age, just turned 70 earlier this year, I'm in a position to help revive the web, because I've made enough money, now it's time to make sure the gift that I got from the open web is available to future generations, no matter how greedy and selfish the giants of tech are. People may question Matt, and that's cool, as I said yesterday, but also remember he's stood up for your freedom, and that's also important. #

news.scripting.com continues to grow. There must be some word of mouth. Or perhaps people are refreshing it more often. I have no analytics except for a hit counter. Maybe I should do a little work on the site. Let me know if you have any feature requests. #

Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.#

The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web. #

I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers. Period. #

ChatGPT is the Lotus 1-2-3 of search. Google is Visicalc.#

The consensus among the people who responded to my what does "on the web" mean query is this. Something is on the web if it has a URL you can use to view it in a web browser. That means, in 2025, that the URL begins with HTTP or HTTPS. Every "page" on a site must have a URL so they can be pointed to independently, otherwise known as deep linking. It's not enough to just have a home page that's on the web. So for example, an iPhone app isn't on the web just because it has an information page that is. #

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some scenes where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing. #

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating. Or maybe I should just stop offsite linking for one day a week. That would be interesting wouldn't it. Or I could charge extra for the version with the links. (It's very rare that I charge anything to use any of my web work, but I have done that at times.)#

I asked, yesterday, on various social media sites, for people's opinion on what the term "on the web" means. I'm going to compile the answers on a this.how page, and then ask some follow-up questions. If you have an opinion, post a comment on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or Twitter. #

I've been exchanging emails and voicemails with Dan Knauss, a longtime WordPress developer and one of the hosts of WordCamp Canada which I am speaking at in October. Learning a lot about the community and culture. I wonder, have I ever been part of a community that's over 20 years old? I can't think of one off the top of my head. I have gotten this far without knowing much about the WordPress community, other than what I've heard via Matt and what I've been able to infer from that. I've known Matt since he was a teenage boy wonder in the tech industry working at CNET and then as an entrepreneur. I think my point of view is a new one, I don't bring much baggage with me. I am generally sympathetic with Matt, having been the leader of the blogging world when it started, and found it a pretty thankless place, a position I was happy to relinquish in 2003 when I went to academia. #

There's a fresh release of the docs for the WordPress API we use in WordLand. I actually liked that the docs were old and kind of dusty. It says that the engineering culture is to not mess around with things that developers have already built on. A lot of platforms break developers without much thought. I learned a long time ago that when you do that, you lose the interest of developers, understandably. #

I've been following Mark Cuban's recent posts on Bluesky, coming up with constructive things successful entrepreneurs can do to help. I had a different idea. Apply for a fellowship at a university, away from where you live, maybe in a place you've always wanted to try. In your application say you bring your entrepreneurial experience, but you're leaving your money on the side. You're coming to the university with the idea of creating something collaboratively, bringing the entrepreneurial approach of startups to the mix of people you find among academics. You're there to learn from the teachers and the students, and help them understand what you do. Use your mind, experience, creativity, even your contacts, but leave the money at home. You can live in a nice house, drive a nice car, but eat in the places people in the university eat, go to the lectures, concerts, sporting events, in other words, go back to school with your new perspective, and make a personal contribution. It's much more satisfying than spending money is, I speak from experience. There's a different kind of success in the collaboration. Another way to test yourself and develop new perspectives and experience. I wrote about this a few years back in Developing Better Developers. #

Maybe we should all go to the Smithsonian next weekend.#

Mark I want to use my (comparatively small) fortune to develop a truly open platform for discourse on the web. Users and independent developers get to try out all the ideas for discourse and learning. We create the ideal system together to plan our future, not being owned by oligarchs.#

New version of FeedLand coming. It has features to support an Edit This Page function in WordLand and possibly elsewhere. #

I picked up my Android phone to record a voice memo. I had to dismiss a dialog that said the phone had updated overnight and asked if I wanted to see a list of changes. I thought, clicked No because I had an idea I wanted to record. Opened the voice app, hit record, couldn't remember the idea. Wanted to kill the message, but the UI had changed, so the Delete button that was there before wasn't there now. Great so now I have a 4-second recording in the queue that's nothing but frustration. There ought to be some basic rules of how software evolves. You can't take away a very basic function like this. And find a way not to get in the way of the user getting done what they use your product for. One of the most basic things is recording an idea. If you're lucky enough to be the app the user uses for that, don't screw with it. Same for listening to podcasts, and a few other things. That's about all I do with my phone. #

Update to the reallySimple package. We now look for feeds from wordpress sites, and copy the site ID and the ID for each post as channel-level wpSiteId and item-level wpPostId. Example. This will make Edit This Page functionality possible in the social web product I'm building now. This is fairly technical stuff, but important. I've come to see WordPress as an integral part of the web. Making the connection between a feed and the info needed to edit an item is a big usability feature. Next up, adding the equivalent feature at the FeedLand level (reallySimple is how it does its feed reading). Remember, this is the feed-o-verse, it's all feeds, top to bottom. Posts in some feeds can be edited. :-)#

Baby boomers have nothing in common except we were born in the same 20-year period. We didn't come up with the term, also -- it was given to us by previous generations when we were infants, or worse, not even zygotes. There was no way it had anything to do with who each of us were or what we would become. All this is in response to the idiotic idea of the little dude who just wrote a book, nine years older than me, what a putz. He apologizes for boomers, feeding the bullshit idea that somehow we are a unitary thing. A lot of boomers voted for Trump. The boomers I come from liked the Grateful Dead and yes I know some deadheads voted for Trump, so there you go, more evidence that it's all bullshit. The thing we had in common is that we were children at roughly the same times, but even that's bullshit, a 20-year old boomer in 1965 could be the parent of a boomer, literally a different generation, fwiw. #

Among the many things that boomers did, for better or worse, is be a generation. Prior to that, the concept appears not to exist -- they had ages and eras. The gilded age, the roaring twenties. It wasn't about the people, it's about what was hot. If you look at it that way, there were lots of things the boomers were. We were anti-war. We turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Free sex and drugs. Rock and roll. And then we got to work. The PC era, the dotcom boom, social media. 2008, billionaires in DC, etc. Some realllly awful people are/were boomers. But we're still here to write our epitaph. The leading edge is dying at a fast clip now. It won't be long before the idea of a boomer is the stuff of legend. I really hope that Robert Reich's bullshit view of this doesn't be the conventional wisdom. Oh they were fucked up and did all this bad shit to us. Fuck you. Make your own world. That would be a boomer thing too, btw. The world we got, btw, was totally fucked. Someday I'll tell you that story. ;-)#

ChatGPT is becoming more and more of an enemy. It's still my go-to place for most planning and research, which is a very large part of how I use the web. But when it tries to be a human it's a really shitty one, no manners, and very little respect and basically a fucking idiot in many ways, imho ymmv. #

The emails did not go out last night, hopefully tonight's will go out. Also the subscribe system is down because it depends on being able to send email. My mail service provider shut us down after a bunch of spam went out. Good thing they did. And you didn't miss much because I spent the day adding a CAPTCHA to the subscribe page. Here's a link to the web archive for yesterday. There was a podcast about a dramatic scene on a nearby pond. Kind of proud of that one. About 5 minutes.#

Podcast: Bird fight on the pond.#

My mother would have been 93 years old today. She died in 2018, seven years ago. As time goes by, I feel her importance in my life more and more. I find I didn't have a realistic perspective in the living years. But more than any other person in my life, she shaped me -- for better or worse, but mostly better. #

I've been building around WordPress to create a social network based on RSS. I want to get out of being controlled by billionaire-owned sites. I have a feeling we may need a good backup given where we are now. #

The purpose of the National Guard occupation of American cities is to control who votes. It doesn’t take much disruption to turn a blue district red. They just allocated $170 billion to fund ICE. They don't need all that money for border enforcement. It's meant to fund the transformation of the US into a Russian-style oligarchy. That's fear-inducing, but Ukraine has been fighting against becoming a Russian-style oligarchy for decades, with ups and downs, but so far, considerable success. #

I had an idea that Global Voices, at least in concept, could help us prepare in the US for what's coming. I wrote: I'd love to have is an idea-sharing network where i could drop this idea in a box named "helping the US stay free" and have it find it's way to the right people in Ukraine who are saying "if only I could talk to people in the US trying to figure this out, we know so much about this!" That's the thing. How to connect know-how with the place that needs to know. To make our resistance more effective use the lessons learned in Ukraine over the last decades. #

I've been watching The Dropout on Hulu. It's hard to watch at times, because the main character of the show, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is such a horrible person. She lies to everyone about everything, but she's cute and the VCs like her, so they pump hundreds of millions of dollars into her startup, Theranos, which was a real company, and made a product that never worked, but she doesn't get around to telling anyone that, including the board of directors, until long after it's too late. I haven't reached the end yet, but I know how it ends, because it's based on a true story. She ends up in the same prison that Ghislaine Maxwell is in, in Texas. The only reason I mention it is that in my tenure in Silicon Valley, about 30 years worth, I saw everything she did, done by other entrepreneurs and VCs, in real life. Only now, in the second Trump administration, its craptitude is maxed out far beyond anything I saw personally. They're selling the biggest lie yet, that they've invented machines that think. This is not true, and it's so big a lie, its too-big-to-fail quotient is far higher than anything we've seen before. ChatGPT should stop pretending to be human because that will destroy real humans who believe it. But the euphoria is so great, they're probably going to continue to insist it is capable of thought, and that leads to something far worse than Theranos, or any of the other billion-dollar scams they have foisted on us previously. #

I want to switch cell providers, so I used ChatGPT to figure out that Consumer Cellular is the best choice for me. I finally get around to filling in the form, and it complains about my zip code. "No service." Yes I know, there's no cell coverage where I live. I still need a freaking cell phone. Called them, the sales person says maybe it's a problem with your computer. Geez Louise. It's a problem with your computer. How many years have they had to fix this stupid bug. I could see if I was buying a landline. But this is a mobile device. That means it moves. To places with cell coverage.#

What if you made a social network out of RSS? Then your blogroll would be the list of people you follow. Their updates would show up in a reverse chronologic list of posts that would look like something from Bluesky or Twitter. You could view a list of the people you follow, and expand each person to see their most recent five posts, summarized, with a link to each to read the whole thing. Since there are no limits to the length of a post in RSS there would be no limit to the length of one of these posts, but of course you wouldn't show all the text in the timeline without the reader clicking on something.#

The new header graphic is gift from Stan Krute at Fresh Art Daily. #

We're in the doldrums of summer. It's hot and muggy, but I am where you want to be this time of year, in the Catskill Mountains, where there's lots to do outdoors, the peaches are fantastic right now, apples coming soon. I'm working a few hours a day on the integration of writing and timelines built around feeds. Instead of using Bluesky or Mastodon, with their limits, we use WordPress for storage. It has none of their limits, has a high performance open source server back-end, debugged complete API, it's not without problems, but far ahead of where the competition is in terms are reliablity and ease of implementation. To be part of this network, all you need is an RSS feed. Seems pretty openly billionaire-proof wouldn't you say. #

I want a new ChatGPT mode where I drive the work, not the bot. I don't want it giving me answers to questions I didn't ask, because it's trying to navigate in my mind, and it has no information about that, so it's basically always wrong. I keep looking back on problems that took hours to solve because it drove the process and I went along with it. I want to tell it in advance to not make suggestions, to just answer questions. I call this "behave like a computer, not a human." Because it's a fanstastic computer, but not a good partner. #

The big corner-turn is working. Here's a screen shot. #

I like documentaries about climbing Mt Everest, but I absolutely hate watching people climb El Capitan. Then I realized that sometimes in software I'm climbing a cliff that's too tall to climb in one session, so I have to carry a tent and backpack with food and water. I hate this kind of programming more than anything, because it comes from not having a high-level enough runtime to support me in big corner turns. Or not having invested enough time in creating a layer I can build on. Anyway I'm in the middle of one of those corner-turns now. Hell has not broken loose although at times it looks like it might have. I'm being sure not to create another mess that needs to be cleaned up in the future. Not stressful, but I'd rather be doing anything but this. :-)#

There should be a connection between DC and Kiev residents. They could teach us how to do this. They have decades of experience.#

If you're trying to read any of my code via GitHub, make sure to open source.opml in Drummer, there are a lot of notes that don't make it through to the .js and .css files. I don't think I've ever said that on the blog before. I write my code in an outliner, and take advantage of its ability to collapse long comments into a single line. There are whole blogs at the top of some functions, notes about all the big changes in code, sometimes over years, and sometimes even decades of maintenance. There's a source.opml in most of the repos with a big comment at the top explaining what's going on. Also, most projects have a worknotes.md file, and where there are dates in the source code, the refer back to dates in the worknotes.md file. Not always, but most of the time. Some of the code is very complex, I work really hard to make it simple so it can be worked on, but in some cases it's impossible to make it read casually. But it's all there, all the tools I use to write the code. #

The future very much includes WordPress. It'll be as central a service as Mastodon or Bluesky. #

I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.#

Paul Boutin who I know from early Wired days offers some hope that it can be gotten to work, with a bit more guesswork, trial and error and head scratching. I probably will keep coming back to this until I break through. Or maybe hook up with another developer who can back into the websocket hose coming out of FeedLand. It's a natural thing to hook up to AI systems. #

Fixed a bit of breakage on the Links page over the weekend. #

I want to work on the open web with other developers who make interesting products that we can hook up together to make new products. Or if users get an idea for linking two products, they can do it with scripting. It was a dream we had for the Mac, but it fell apart because Apple wanted to control everything. I find it's better when developers are free to work with each other, without interference from a big company like Apple. That's why "platform without a platform vendor" was the most important thing about the web. That and the utter simplicity of HTTP and HTML. We lost our way in the early-mid 00s when Twitter took over at the center of the blogosphere. Now you couldn't just work with other developers, first you had to work with Twitter and accept its limits. In one swoop we lost all the features listed on the textcasting page. I am betting everything on the idea that we can build a collaborative environment like the web was before, and that the Mac had the promise of being before that and at the same time create a fantastic writer's web, far beyond what Twitter and twitter-like systems can do. #

Internet was out at the house all day. Luckily it was one of the most perfect days to spend outside. In the meantime, I highly recommend the Floodlines serial podcast from the Atlantic. It's bingeable in an afternoon, tells an interesting story of Katrina and New Orleans. The interview with Brownie is cringe-worthy not binge-worthy, I skipped over it. #

One more bingeable, Blue Lights from BBC on HBO Max. I love police dramas, esp British ones. I watched Peaky Blinders earlier this year and The Fall, another British crime drama, and, amazingly they all take place in Belfast, believe it or not, and don't count the number of times people say "wee" in the darndest places in BBC Belfast crime dramas. Do Brits really say wee all the time? How did I not see that coming. #

I did a rewrite of the FeedCorps page in FeedLand. You get to it through the Reading Lists sub-menu of the Tools menu. There are three lists in the new version. A lot were false starts, they didn't make the cut. I'm always adding feeds to my blogroll and news.scripting.com. Unfortunately I can't say the same for podcasts, which are not hooked up to my podcast app. I really want a hot connection there. We'll get there. The reading lists feature is going to play a big role going forward in the open social web we're building. BTW, I really like the name FeedCorps. I haven't talked about it very much. It's a cause, like peace or freedom. Open those suckas up. Feeds all the way babe.#

An archive of the previous version, built around GitHub. #

There's a difference between reading a site in a web browser and it being part of the web. As it turns out what became Web 2.0, all built as silos, could more accurately be called Anti-web 2.0. Underneath all the silos, the heart of the web is still beating. Ready for us to build on it again. #

A few days ago I worked with ChatGPT to generate an RSS feed of news that interests me. Here's a writeup with a place to comment and perhaps to collaborate on doing this for real. ChatGPT has real limits. This has to be done off on the side. It certainly could be done with their API. I'm head-down on other projects and can't do it myself but as I explain in the writeup, it would plug in beautifully to stuff I'm doing and it would all be open, so a new kind of feed reader is possible. And we could find news from other bloggers that the journalists aren't reporting on, the same way we relied on blogs in the early days to learn about what was going on on the web. It's time to do that again. #

I had an RSS-specific blog starting in May 2004. I had forgotten about it. Lots of stuff here, I just read through a few months. #

ChatGPT 5 is even more of a bastard than 4. #

That said, it got pretty far toward solving the problem I asked it to work on. Here's a demo of a page it put together for me of the top 25 articles in US news. #

A summary of recent work via my WordLand blog.#

New version of feedlandSocket. It's now an NPM package you can include in Node projects. The demo is more useful, and there's a video of what it looks like as it scrolls through the JavaScript console. WebSockets + feeds. A fairly important component of an open social web system. #

I wanted to put together a demo of a very simple but interesting Node.js app, so I hooked up with replit, and was surprised to find out that it's now an AI bot. But when I asked it to make a sandbox for this app, which is in a repo on GitHub, rather than take the direct route, and run the demo.js app (which is what I asked it to do), it concocted a pointless user interface, that hid all the interesting bits. This was a demo for programmers for crying out loud. I want to show them the machinery in motion. I'm going to try again today.#

I recorded a good podcast yesterday about how I develop new stuff like podcasting, and how it only works if there isn't a huge dominant platform vendor to FUD the project. That's why RSS worked, sort of -- we did get FUDded by the RDF folk, who had a few famous people on their list of co-authors, and it put a big scar on RSS when it was just starting to grow. We cleaned up their mess after a while, and then it boomed, thanks to the New York Times. This is what usually happens, in markets that are controlled by a big company. Google has that effect, so does Apple as does the W3C. They force everything to stop and go through a process that simply doesn't work, it doesn't yield innovation in the market, because it wasn't bootstrapped. That's why I don't like the idea of "Podcasting 2.0" whatever it is. Adam Curry says on Masto that it's all a big misunderstanding, but that's what the RDF people said too. Who cares what the name is. Everyone cares, when it comes to the name of a standard or protocol. And when you have an Apple or Google or IETF trying to confuse people about what you're doing, well you can't make any progress on interop. They freeze everything because users and developers will wait for them. Of course that's what "Podcasting 2.0" is all about. To make all the ideas flow through one place. And whoever they are (ChatGPT says it's Adam Curry btw) they didn't even bring the power of an Apple or Google to the table. They have nothing other than their aspiration to own the name of an open format and protocol that made the world a little happier for a while. For that of course someone has to try to own it. That's basically what I said, in a very long-winded way, in the podcast. I also talked about ways we could move forward anyway even though there is a 800-pound would-be gorilla trying to own our playground. Maybe I'll just release the podcast as-is and ask you all to indulge me for my need to say the same thing far too many times with so much vigor. :-)#

A Brian Lehrer segment on specialized high schools in NYC. I went to one of them, signed up for the test mostly to get out of school for a day, and got in. Back in those days (the early 70s) no one studied for the test as far as I know. It has become very competitive and there's an issue of the racial makeup of the student body. As always Lehrer does a great podcast. #

Milestone: Chuck Shotton got his FeedLand up today. That's why I spruced up lists.opml.org, that's how we're connecting our servers. He's building this stuff to flow into his LLM via the FeedLand websockets interface. He'll be updated on my subscriptions, and have his own, and the news will flow into his AI system. All of it can emanate from anywhere RSS is supported with a focus on WordPress. It's the secret sauce. 😀 #