I have an array built into every app I do, on server or in the browser, called
snarkySlogans. When I need a bit of text to test with I just choose a random snarky slogan. They are little truths that have occurred to me over the years. You're free to steal this code, they do come in handy at times. There's a snarky slogan to cover that -- "Only steal from the best." Another one I really like: "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."
#
Why did we need all those programming languages?
#Imagine building blocks to assemble your own social web app. A toolkit you could plug into your bot.
#
Next year I have to go to
FOSDEM. This year's conference is going on right now in
Brussels. If you're there and reading this -- say a hello for me. I realize the
piece I wrote yesterday about the future of the social web is equally relevant now for FOSDEM. My prescription: carefully
start over with a simple peer-to-peer service and build on that foundation. I would use
websockets. You will have to deal with issues of centralization, and at each point decide how much you're willing to trade off ease of use and performance for decentralization. I think you can go pretty far without stripping the gears of users, but there has to be some amount of centralization, identity and storage, being the two biggies. Please read the piece, it's short,
bulleted style, highly opinionated, and based on my experience with systems like the ones they're working on. (Who does he think he is? Just a software developer, working hard for a feature-complete web who thinks we've been stuck in a few ruts for a depressingly long time.)
#Added a note to the
storage docs page for wpIdentity, explaining that while most files we serve are private, there are examples of files we manage that are public. It had been a while since I reviewed this page. I also see now that we have to have a way to identify the app that created an object, and for that we'll need a way to identify apps. I knew that was coming sooner or later.
#Feb 4 is the midpoint of winter. Almost half-way home.
#
Yesterday I
reported that I had remapped
pagepark.scripting.com to the
github repo for pagepark. But then later in the day it stopped doing that. Why? I have no clue. I moved it to another server and now it works.
#The best description for the web I've ever heard is
small pieces loosely joined. That really gets to the essence of it. The pieces stand on their own, up to a point, when they are joined to other pieces. And you can un-join and re-join them. I see a lot of things that say they're part of the web that can't do the arbitrary joining that's central to what the web is.
#The great thing about the OG Web was that you could have an idea one day, have it deployed two days later, with a really ugly table-based UI, and everyone would know about it within a few hours. Then the reviews would come out, and a few hours later we'd know if it stuck or didn't.
#As all our former allies pay
homage to Xi in Beijing, I was thinking well at the least the whole world speaks our language, and that'll take a few generations to change, but then I realized I bet the Chinese have been preparing for this, and of course they have.
#You're on the right track when all the questions have answers.
#More important than code is the right place for the code.
#I've learned a new self-management strategy. At the beginning of a day's programming work I set a specific goal that I feel I should be able to accomplish very quickly, in an hour, perhaps -- but probably less. If I get it done by the end of the day I will feel like I really got something done. The feeling it can be done quickly has to do with a lot of factors that you don't take into account so that in your mind it's simple but as you implement it you hit deal-stoppers. It makes you feel bad, if you're into being productive and brilliant as I am. But I know from experience that solving
any problem in a day, at the end of the day, is a
good feeling. There have been a lot of days when I don't move the needle even the smallest distance, and a fair number of days when I reject what I've been building, and basically move backward by days. We're always grappling with the
mythical man-month approach to programming, when reality is very different.
#
Zeldman found the
Google and HTTP post I wrote many years ago. Thankfully they haven't completely broken HTTP yet. I like to think they can't because so much of the web would break if they did. People might not notice the
Not Secure message they post in Chrome for sites that use HTTP (like
my blog for example) -- but they would notice sites disappearing. There are so many reasons not to deprecate HTTP but the most important, no one owns it -- which is why the web is such a safe place to build. Google does not have the right to break the web. But they figure no one will object because users don't care about the web. But they do, they just don't understand that their online freedom comes from the web, like our freedom in America comes from the Constitution. Once it's gone (something we're finding out about now) we'll know why we should have cared. I've been appealing to historians to care about the history of technology, but they don't listen. Somehow they must think that tech will always remain exactly as useful as it is now. That it has never been free of platforms (it has) and the platform vendors will never cross the lines they imagine but don't actually exist? Well they can and they do, but since the historians don't study the history of tech, they don't know about it, and they don't listen to those who do. We have to build our own systems, our own news flows because the ones we depend on are owned by people who are not our friends, are not trustworthy.
#
"There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky." I put that at the end of a
post the other day and as they say in journalism, he buried the lede. "Only works in" means silo. And it always results in stagnation because big organizations suck at shipping new ideas. For that you need a lot of people with laptops and a net connection and lot sof spare time to be able to replace small pieces, and join them up to the network, try out new ideas. When you're in a silo the owners place severe limits on what you can do. If you think you found a benevolent one, the exception -- there is no such thing. You're waiting for a "some day" that will never come.
#An idea I read in
this blog post is one I hadn't considered, is super important. AI is going to be part of programming forever. There's no way to go back. This has made StackExchange obsolete, because it basically aggregates everything that was there, and it was worth it because you can find things you never could find before, and it takes no time to search because it isn't really searching, it's gathered the knowledge and gives it back to you exactly as you asked for it. And when I write a piece of software using ChatGPT it presumably learns everything I learned, so it gets better and better, just like StackExchange used to, but (and here's the punchline) the knowledge is owned by a few companies, with no obligation to share what they learned. Very different from the old method, though I'm sure StackExchange wasn't obligated to share everything, the users would have found out immediately and they would have quick competition that were so obligated. (So StackExchange would change.) We get so mired in the question of should we do this -- well we're doing it, time to start looking at the next set of questions.
#DNS fix:
pagepark.scripting.com now redirects to the
GitHub repo for PagePark. Somehow I lost the pagepark.io domain, but I don't really want it, so it's kind of ok. But there are some broken links. I recall there was a nice site with menus and stuff that was built from the GitHub repo but archive.org isn't able to
find it for some reason. Moral of the story, don't buy so many domain names thinking you're really clever. But of course I still do. Someday they'll all be gone, of course. Will they have a ceremony for the last domain to be turned off, kind of like the
last Blockbuster was. Does anyone remember Blockbuster.
#
Toby Ziegler: "They'll like us when we win."
#I was looking at some of the first posts in in 1998 in discuss.userland.com and came across
this post that talked about my decision to stop doing the Mail Pages, now that we had the discussion group.
#A lot of online discourse is us vs them. If you find yourself doing that, that's a sure sign that you're not working on the web.
#
Jim Ray
responded to my Saturday
post about AT Proto. First, I've done
more than kick around with ATP for the few years, I have written apps, some of which
are still deployed. But I would rather continue to develop on RSS because it's not a silo, it's part of the web and imho that's where we should all be meeting. Planting seeds inside a big company's silo is not safe. If they want to shut you down, you will be shut down. They have all the power. And as long as they don't support the data format you use because of its severe limitations, you won't be able to publish on Bluesky. Imho you have no advantage using it over the web, which already does
everything you need to do your own Bluesky, with none of the missing features. As long as Leaflet docs can only be read on the web, you might as well just use the standards of the web instead of betting on Bluesky's reinventions and good intentions. My opinion. And thanks for engaging in discourse, please encourage others in your community to do it too. I get my best ideas from listening to others. That's why I watch what's going on there.
#Interesting
thread between Jake and Ted Howard about Frontier.
#
They should host games on ChatGPT.
#
They couldn't have chosen a more ideal liberal state to own. I don't think any of this is an accident. Next time they will kill two, American citizens of course. And we'll protest. And then 25. It's starting to sink in that this is not just a bad dream and it's
not going to end. (I was wrong, according to
ChatGPT, Minnesota is only the 17th most liberal state.) We're always looking backward, that's a mistake. Accept where we are right now, and be able to visualize what comes next if we give up.
#Michelle Obama was
wrong when she said "when they go low we go high." Sometimes the truth is pretty damn low.
#
- Nominated for best picture of 2025, ranked by Metacritic rating.#
- 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. But important point -- politics can be constructive, it doesn't have to destroy things. 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 build my confidence to know it came from inside the biggest most dominant tech company at the time. What an odd combination. 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 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. #
I've been
following Bluesky since inception, even tried developing for it and found it was nothing new with its 300 character limit, no links, titles, etc. Basically you can build the same apps for Bluesky that we were able to develop for Twitter. I've also been following
Leaflet, an attractive writing tool that works on AT Proto, the format that Bluesky is promoting, basically a reinvention of the web but inside a silo, which means -- perhaps confusingly, that Leaflet uses the same basic format that Bluesky uses, but Bluesky can't do anything with Leaflet posts, because of the limits that Leaflet doesn't have. So -- they formed an alliance with two other products that are writing tools for AT Proto, and came up with a format that they will all implement called
standard.site (nice name and very attractive site). They probably hope that Bluesky itself will use that format, at least to let people read their documents in the same place they display the more limited Bluesky posts, in user timelines. If that happens it may be a good thing for the web, if services outside of Bluesky can post these documents from outside. But it would be imho more powerful if they created a format based on something like RSS, which is already well-known to developers, and would mean something outside of Bluesky and probably would be taken more seriously by the Bluesky people. There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky.
#My first rule of platforms: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." I thought that rule was pretty new, but it actually appears in a
1996 blog post.
#
Just watched
Darkest Hour, a biopic of Winston Churchill, as he became prime minister and had to decide whether to surrender or fight Mr Hitler as they called him. I had seen it of course when it came out, but it's especially appropriate to our times. I'm glad the NATO's are resisting the US. We have to work together to keep democracy alive, not just in our own countries, but around the world. If ever there was a time when
working together mattered more than it does today, I sure can't think of it. And that all of this revolves around the technology we played a part in creating, that makes it all feel so much more real.
#AI assistants could if they wanted drive all of us crazy in different ways. Advertising squared.
#
Something ChatGPT is good at. Give it a
photo of the Statue of Liberty and ask it to remove the cement platform and change the background to pure white, then make the background transparent, reduce it in size, and paste it into the right margin of a
blog post.
#Wouldn't it be something if the leaders of European democracies said if democracy and self-government around the world are to have any hope the American government has to stop attacking their own citizens. We see where this is headed, they might say, and there will be no coming back from this for the US, if they turn the country, which still is the leader of the free world, into a police state. What if the European leaders said out loud and in public the things the Republicans and most of the Democrats refuse to say. The inverse of what JD Lance says about their governments and their people.
#I hear Canada will be
importing EV's from China. Now I'm going to have EV-envy a few hours drive away from home. They make better cars in China, I hear -- than we do in the good old USA. Too bad, it didn't have to be that way. And isn't it tragic that China is less politically toxic than the American citizen who made the
car I drive now.
#Apple's 1984 ad, with the benefit of hindsight, said "a new generation is going to take over now so get ready." We live very much in those times again. Now every time I use ChatGPT to do something that I never would have been able to do before I realize wow we just did "that" again. The same feeling I got when I first saw the 128K Mac at the Apple office on
Bandley Drive in 1983, about the same time as Apple people
saw the ad at their sales meeting in Hawaii in October. The Mac had an exciting but rough start, but by the turn of the century it was obvious that something completely different
had happened.
#
Happy to say the Knicks won last night in convincing 2026 mode after I doubted them in Tuesday's
post (perhaps they read my blog?). And after I
asked if Greenland was the
Sudetenland of our time, Trump did his famous
TACO thing and said hey I was just kidding, so we don't have to ask if Canada will be this generation's Austria, or Poland? Now I have to say the Knicks beat the Nets, often referred to as the Knicks' "cross-town rivals" by sports announcers who know nothing about New York sports. The same team Kevin Durant said was the new cool NBA team from NYC (it wasn't and isn't and it turns out no one cared what KD said, certainly not basketball fans from the city).
#
Isn't Greenland the Sudetenland of our time?
#
The ads I like on TV these days are the ChatGPT ads that show you how it makes your life better. In the first ad two college age people, brother and sister it turns out, are on a cross-country drive and have a great trip planned. You can tell they love each other, and have a casual familiarity and trust and laugh a lot, teasing, as the itinerary scrolls by too fast to read more than two or three lines, but you can see they're going to have a better trip than I've ever had and I've done a lot of cross-country trips with friends over the years. #- The other ad, again with the young college-age people, this time a date, probably not the first date, at his apartment, and the guy is making dinner for his guest, and again, the plan scrolls by. He's making something nice, but not too much, and like the last ad, they're confident, young, full of life, and since they've used ChatGPT for just this purpose, they're probably going to have a great meal, and they'll go out again, for sure. #
- This is the perfect advertising for this stage of their business. They are the leading product, the Coca Cola of AI systems, so they don't need to compare themselves with anyone, they are the standard -- and now they take the opportunity to define it. It's about friendship, love, looking good, getting the girl, etc. But it's wholesome and American. I bet they run the same ad in Denmark, only the kids speak Danish and have blonde hair and they go to places in Denmark and eat simple but good Danish food. #
- I don't think Google or Facebook did these kinds of ads as they were rising to dominance. Apple did, Microsoft didn't. This will also change the press coverage they get. Journalists like to pretend that ads don't infulence what they think, but good ones like these do. #
- BTW, if Microsoft had done ads introducing themselves to the world as the future tech behemoth, they might have gone folksy -- like Smucker's jam. "With a name like Microsoft, it has to be good." You probably don't even think about it these days the name is so familiar, but MIcro + Soft is not the most inspiring name for a tech product. But then ChatGPT is a pretty awful name too. Four syllables, too many. Three is ideal. Imho ymmv. Doesn't matter now, everyone has learned to say it. And they need those ads to cement the bond with the people of the world. #
Screen shot: Twitter did what I have been begging all the others to do. Get rid of the character limit and allow for simple styling, links, optional titles, the ability to edit, basically the writing functions of the world wide web. You can also put a nice Medium-like picture at the top. Twitter was started in 2006 which according to my records is approximately twenty freaking years ago! I mean geez how long does it take?
#I got a
text from
Matt recommending
Claude Code, saying it's as new as ChatGPT was when it came out.
#I'd like to see a social network that had an AI filter that only showed comments that were responsive to the question raised by the post they're responding to. BTW we need some technical terminology for socializing online. When I reply to a post, what do we call the post I'm replying to? Remember there's a human quality to this too, you're not just talking about something on a computer, but an actual person.
#I took a couple of falls on ice the other day, during one of the many snowstorms we've had, and both times my watch, after a polite pause, shook my wrist, asking if I just took a fall and should it call in an emergency? if you don't do anything it makes the call. In that sense, your watch could beep when someone is gaslighting the other person. If it was you gaslighting them you'd see your avatar on the screen. Of it's them, you can show it to them.
#
I've been trying to stay out of politics here lately (did you notice), but I don't get how Americans, no matter who they voted for, can watch what's happening in Minneapolis and not feel like we have to protect the people there from the thugs who are attacking them. And of course that's exactly how we're supposed to feel. I watched a video of a woman, a disabled army veteran, being dragged from her car by the ICEs, and hearing cop car sirens in the background, imagining, hoping -- they were coming to stop the attack. We never did find out. How can you stand for this if you're an American. Forget about Democrats or Republicans, what about you? Where did you learn to ignore the feelings you must have when you see people, fellow human beings, attacked with such cruelty? Snap out of it, if you have any empathy left, or any love for our country. Tell your representatives to step in and stop this, and no excuses, Democrat or Republican, I don't care.
#Why now? Because there are probably still enough in the military who believe in the rule of law and will obey an act of Congress.
#
- In 2019, I did an overhaul of XML-RPC, and created a reference implementation in JavaScript, both client and server (Node.js). #
- The missing links from yesterday's podcast.#
A brief
podcast with the fascinating story of how XML-RPC came together in 1998.
#
Last night's email didn't go out at the appointed hour, and I didn't get a chance to look until early evening. So last night's mail went out at about 6PM Eastern. Hopefully today's email will go out at roughly midnight tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. Still diggin!
#Is there any circumstance where "Sorry for the inconvenience" isn't the wrong thing to say? Maybe I didn't even notice, or if I did, maybe I didn't care. And what if the results were more than inconvenient? What if someone died! Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll say. I like
still diggin the best. It says yes we suck, and we know it, but we're trying to suck less.
#
- This is a continuation of a piece I wrote in August 2025.#
Yesterday I wrote a this.how doc about getting WordLand to run on sites that don't run on WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed. What this means is that their sites are accessible through the fantastic wpcom API, and with that API I have been able to build a very nice writers' workspace for WordPress sites. I call the ones that are left out the WordPress.org sites, though I know that's not an entirely accurate way of describing it, but neither is "self-hosted sites" because you could have a hosting service that doesn't install Jetpack. WordPress could be used for things that are quite different from the way it's used today. Important point. #- I sent links to that post to two people, and encouraged them to pass it along, as a way of starting a discussion -- how are we going to get WordLand running on those "other" sites. And we need names for lots of things, but first we have to get the software working the way we want it to, then the naming will be more obvious.#
- Jeremy Herve has already written a response (as I asked him to). As always, very helpful. But I want to push back on the way he frames the project -- as if it's up to me to do this work, and that I dispute. It think it's up to us. WordLand isn't just a product, it's a challenge.#
- To make WordPress a fantastic platform for developers who want to build on its ability to write and read and link together writing and reading on the freaking web. That's why it's so important to understand what the web is and what it's capabilities are. We've been missing some of the big stuff since the big silos took over. I want, before I hang up my hat, to fix that. #
- I'm going to outline here how we start, so it's documented so more people will see it too. #
- I have written a package, MIT-licensed, with an awkward name for historic reasons called wpIdentity. It started off as just a simple way to use WordPress identity with FeedLand because it made sense to do it a couple of years ago because Twitter was destroying the utility of their API, and we needed a new way to do identity. So I stopped everything and implemented both email identity and WordPress identity, or more specifically, wordpress.com identity. This leaves out all the wordpress sites that you can't log onto this way. Not a good situation, I don't like it because I want WordPress to be one large happy family of users and developers. So that's what I'm seeking to instigate here. #
- Then wpIdentity grew and grew. At first it supported all the endpoints in the wpcom API, and made it possible to build WordLand, which itself only communicates to WordPress via wpIdentity. And later when I needed user-specific storage that is not part of the WordPress API, I built a very nice little storage system, it's efficient, highly scalable, and (I think) well debugged. If you read my initial Think Different piece you'll see it gets a mention in this part. Storage, we will find out, is the big missing piece in the web, has always been the missing piece, the thing that keeps us from having a real developer community of web apps. How do I know? Because I'm a freaking developer. I don't work at a company that can insulate me from this need. That's why I see this need and so many others don't.#
- Now here's something else that's cool. I didn't stop with wpIdentity, I made a JavaScript function that simplifies the wpcom interface for people writing browser-based JavaScript apps. It radically simplifies it. I didn't invent this way of doing it, someone at Facebook did, as far as I'm concerned. We may not like Facebook the company or the boss man, but they have employed some brilliant programmers over the years. I think this idea came from the developers of FriendFeed, but I could be wrong. What they did was take the interface code every app developer has to do, and made that the API. I remember when I first saw it in 2013, it blew me away. It took me a full month to build support for Twitter in my app, but it only two days to do it in Facebook. I did one of those for WordPress. It's part of wpIdentity. Here it is. Please if you're a contributor to wordpress.org -- study that thing, because we're going to be working on that code -- together. This is where the "we" part of it starts. But there's more.#
- You don't have to read the code of api2.js to understand how it works, there's an even easier way to do it -- wpEditorDemo. It's a simple browser-based editor that does what WordLand does, without all the flourish. Bare bones. Also MIT-licensed. Nothing but what's required. You can try it out if you have one or more qualifying sites (either on wordpress.com or having Jetpack installed). The project we need to do is this -- make wpEditDemo work on any WordPress site, no matter where it's hosted. And that's going to be done by extending api2.js. That's where the differences will be encapsulated, and above that level, in wpEditDemo and WordLand and all its competitors, nothing changes. This project may be complicated or simple, or somewhere inbetween, but imho this has to be done. And this is the first place I want to join the open source community for WordPress. After talking with Jon, I became optimistic about this happening sooner than later. #
- I zoomed through all this and more with Jonathan on Tuesday. This is what I want to talk about at WordCamp Europe later this year (I have submitted an application). I wanted to show Jon and a few other people I met in Ottawa in October how the pieces fit together. But zooming is the right word, Jon was ahead of me at every step, he just understood what I was showing him. I was blown away -- because this had never happened before with the architecture I had built. Not because it's so complex, it isn't -- it's all about simplifying things, with lots of factoring, finding a repeating pattern and then locking it down in code, so no one has to ever worry about the complexity again. I think it was hard for people to see because they aren't expecting it. #
- That's where I'm going to leave it for now. I suggest if you have a response or comment, please put it on your blog and send me a link. We're going to create new ways to link blog posts together, but for now we'll do it by hand. #
- PS: Hat-tip to Matt Mullenweg for building WordPress, and for having the idea that Tumblr could be rebuilt on top of WordPress. When he announced they were going to do that I knew I was on the right track. We were thinking about WordPress the same way. #
- PPS: If people have a hard time understanding how I could do this -- remember: 1. I've had a lot of time. 2. I understand WordPress at a deep level. 3. I'm good at building and selling APIs, I've been fairly successful at it. And even better, the WordPress community has been a very good caretaker of this work. They support a remarkable amount of it, and it all still works, and they often wonder why the rest of the world doesn't love it like they do. I feel the same damn way. ;-)#
PPPS: And thanks to Steve Jobs for thinking differently.
#
PPPPS: And to VW for thinking small.
#
I've been watching
Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a
headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS. Jake worked at
UserLand, but never at the
kernel level, which is exactly where he and his (virtual) AI buddies are working. He knew Frontier well, he was a developer at MacWorld, where they used it as the CMS to manage their website. Then he came to work at UserLand where he worked on the CMS itself, and over time became a full contributor to the work we were doing in RSS, XML-RPC, feed reading and podcasting. He's a musician too and the nicest guy to work with. He just got the
REPL for Frontier running. I'm so proud of his accomplishments, and totally looking forward using the new Frontier for server programming, which is all Linux for me these days. And I also look forward to having Manila and Radio UserLand running on modern hardware, esp so I can demo these apps for my friends in the WordPress community. There's a lot of stuff happening here these days, glad to say I'm working with some incredible people and totally excited about what comes next.
#
It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well -- it doesn't have one. The web was like the
Declaration of Independence, but like a democracy it takes care and a bit of sacrifice to keep it going. It's always been possible to rebuild the web, to take back our freedom to create new webs out of the web that TBL discovered. It just takes determination and dedication to working together, a higher cause than piling up billions of dollars that the billionaires have absolutely no idea what to do with. I think the world order based on democracy depends on us digging out of the hole we're in, in the technology. Think about it.
#BTW, I haven't posted a
screen shot of where I write
Scripting News in quite some time. Nothing has changed, but a whole other writing enviroment, targeted at WordPress instead of
Old School, and it has a different feature set, look and feel.
#
I had a fantastic meeting today with
Jonathan Desrosiers. I gave him a tour of all the software that makes up WordLand and FeedLand. It was the first time I had done that with anyone from the WordPress community. It started off with a simple story about how I knew I was on the right track when
Matt announced they were porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress as an OS. Which is exactly what I'm doing with my collection of software. Every bit of writing should be a WordPress post, and they should be linked together in arbitrary graphs. It was nice to review that with a serious developer, Jonathan is one of the
core committers of the open source WordPress. It helped me see all the different things we can do, and now hope we will do. I feel I understand this community, as a time-traveler from the past I think I understand what we should do next.
#
Textcasting: Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text.
#
If I were making a
Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding
features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other. Comment
here.
#BTW, look at all the links in
my writing. Shouldn't every platform that says they're part of the web let users add links to their writing? Of course they should.
#If you run a FeedLand instance, we have a new
recommended index for your database. It's also part of all new installs. The code will still work without the index, but it might make it a lot faster.
#I just posted something new on
Scripting News, and thought -- that should appear on the new WordLand I'm working on, even though it's not a WordPress site. It did appear.
Screen shot. The beauty of RSS. It's supported everywhere, so we might as well depend on that.
#I had to do some work with
Concord today, the open source JavaScript outliner Kyle Shank wrote for me in 2013. I used ChatGPT to help. It knew all about Concord. Amazing. If only through ChatGPT etc, my work will survive. That means a lot to me. I take the opposite view that some artists take. I like that it's learning about what we did with our lives. Bob Weir died yesterday. That didn't go unnoticed here.
#I wonder sometimes if we’re the last generation of humanoids on this planet for a variety of reasons. The future imagined by The Matrix is looking more likely than ever.
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What’s happening with ICE is like January 6 four years later with billions of dollars behind it and many months of planning and studying history for prior art.
#As I listened to the
mayor of Minneapolis speak I thought he was going say "get the fuck out of Minneapolis" but of course he couldn't say that and then he said it.
#I'm doing little demos of stuff I'm working on in WordLand, here's a
narrated demo that shows how instant updates are going. As often the recording level is too low, so turn up the volume if you want to hear the comments. A productive Saturday session.
#John Johnston, a longtime friend of UserLand and my newer products, asks how WordLand connects with FeedLand. Two ways. 1. FeedLand has an API, still working on it, but it will be public. 2. FeedLand has an outbound
websockets interface, which is already public, so any can use it as their feed reader, and get notice of new items and updates to existing items as soon as FeedLand has the info. And if the site uses rssCloud, as WordPress does and has since 2009, the notices are instantaneous. So to the extent people thought RSS is a slow protocol, it's not. It runs at the speed of the internet. And FeedLand is all about RSS, as you know.
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I get ideas when I go for a walk or drive somewhere in my car. This was one of those times, but it was not a comforting idea. I live in the mountains on the west side of the Hudson River near
Kingston. On my drive to town yesterday I went through the small town of Woodstock, and I was thinking about how ICE is occupying Minneapolis, and wondered why wasn't I more concerned about it personally. The answer -- it's far away from here, and Woodstock, while it is a famous place, is on absolutely no one's radar. But then I remembered the astounding amount of money we allocated for ICE, far more than could be used for border enforcement, so obviously this all is a prelude for an American secret police and here's where the disquieting idea came up. Of course ICE will operate in every city and town in the US no matter how remote or small. But first they have to perfect their act, this is a form of training to teach the skinheads of America how to be part of an
SS. Experiment first in a few cities before deploying, gradually, everywhere. We're all going to have to submit to loyalty oaths, and we will all be forced to denounce our neighbors as illustrated in
Lives of Others, which if you haven't watched it yet, now is the time when you have to, to get an idea what it was like in East Germany before the wall came down, and where we're headed. It still may not be too late yet, but it's getting close.
#Trump is president the same way people who do vibe coding are developers. I always thought he'd be much happier playing president on TV instead of actually being president. And people would think about this stuff more rationally if it were a TV show like Pluribus or Severance. Why did they
really do what they did? Or the way we talk about the Mets or the Knicks and their various foibles. It's funny people have a clarity about fictional stuff that they don't have for real-world things like war, health insurance, the cost of eggs and gestapo tactics.
#A little fix that would make social web a lot more useful and less hate-filled and abusive... Make replies visible only to the person being replied to. If they feel the reply should be public, they can RT it.
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Today's song: 
I'm working on a feature for WordLand II where you can flip a switch to see the OG Metadata for a post you're reading, by clicking on an icon that looks like the flag on the side of an old fashioned mailbox. I remembered there was a desk accessory on the original Mac that used this approach, and I've wanted that icon for a long time, and today I thought to ask ChatGPT to look into it for me, I had previously been relying on Google search, and it found what I was looking for and a lot of great history sites with details. I'm going to document the thread including some descriptions written by ChatGPT which I will label. Everything not labled like that is from me. ;-)
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