The
real reason the Dems lost in 2024 is they ran the most inept campaign in history. You could argue about who was to blame, but that is, net-net what happened. They were so bad they made Trump look better! And that is hard to do. :-)
#
Feed discovery
23 years later. "You can see how these things got ratified in the early 00s -- in the most web way imaginable, by individual users seeing the benefit, adding it to their sites, and quickly the entire feed world got an upgrade."
#If you develop a feed reading app and have suggestions for the
new howto, please post them
here.
#Every time I go to the supermarket I'm reminded of how scary the times are. People want to just
live their lives, never has that been more understandable, but food prices are a constant reminder for everyone there's good reason to be scared. And if you want to really feel it, imagine what happens if we somehow let Trump flood the economy with dollars. Talk about a recipe for disruption, this time, of our lives, not just some kind of PC or network or game software.
#
Ben Werdmuller wrote a
new perspective on RSS. It's great, just what we need. RSS is
of the web, and is the simplest most obvious way to get all the twitter-like systems connected.
#
One thing I realized I should point the
ActivityPub folks to. I implemented
Inbound RSS for WordPress. I was going to request it as a feature from the WordPress community, then realized I could write it fairly quickly with the system I already have built. After all, FeedLand already supports Inbound RSS, that's a lot of what it does, as a feed reader, esp along with the websocket interface it has. I already have complete code for writing to a WordPress site, that's a big part of what WordLand does. WordPress does a fantastic job of outbound RSS, but why not inbound? If Substack, for example, supported inbound, we'd all be using their mail distribution systems, and sharing revenue. Here's the
source code, MIT license, so
party on, Wayne.
#Idea: I could probably hook WordLand up to GitHub pretty easily. It's really good at Markdown, btw.
#I've found that the twitter-like social networks I'm part of have slowed down to almost nothing. Have you experienced something similar? Here's a link to my accounts on
mastodon,
bluesky,
github,
twitter. Tell me what you see.
#
That's not 63°F, though at first I thought it was.
#
BTW, a frequently asked question, where can I get your
blogroll list to import into my feed reader? Answer --
here.
#I should have demo'd the
blogroll stuff at WordCamp Canada. Next time I will show products people can use right now.
#Doc always has a link on my home page. That's because I have the
best blogroll ever. It's hooked up to a feed reader via a technology called
websockets that came along after the heyday of blogging. If you want to see its heart beating, go to
scripting.com, in the browser, open the JavaScript console, and watch the updates flow in (
screen shot). While we weren't watching the web got some really badass new features.
#
Pluribus is not, at least so far, equal to
Breaking Bad or
Better Call Saul. Some parts are confusing, some are poorly edited. They try to have a shocker or cliff hanger at the end of episodes, but they aren't very shocking and the cliff turns out to be something so obvious that you could swear they already told us that. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were
exquisitly crafted TV. The incredible shots they took, many of them were works of art all on their own. Maybe it was the combination of factors. The skill of
Vince Gilligan's team, combined with our admiration for
Rhea Seehorn, and the gravitas of Apple TV and one of the other great shows of our time,
Severance. That made the conclusion obvious, by lineage this must be the
best show ever. It's always that way, in sports for example. You could assemble a team of superstars, and they don't even make the playoffs. Because it's the whole thing that makes it so hard to beat. But! I am hooked, I love the show, it's hard to imagine anything could get me to not reserve Thurs at 9PM to watch the latest episode, all I ask is no more humans eating dog food. Please,
that was too much. It's sad however that there are only two episodes left in this season, but then comes all the holiday releases, and this year it seems most of it is on streaming services, not in theaters.
#A note to Doc re
this post. We have WordPress more or less doing what we do on Scripting News. Thanks to
Scott Hanson for persevering on this
project. He's using the Baseline theme. I don't think it's ready yet for Doc, but it's close. The idea is to support most of the features of WordLand in a WordPress rendering.
#
A frequently asked question. How do we make this stuff work with Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. Answer:
we don't.
#
If we really want tech to get
back to basics we need pubs that function as product reviewers, like we have entertainment
reviewers. There's so much software and so many isolated bubbles of developers, when there's a development that shakes the world less than ChatGPT, I might not hear about it for ten years, or might never hear about it. In the 80s we had lots of pubs that covered all kinds of products at a user level. There were 15 popular word processing apps, for example -- all made a decent living, and remember there were a lot fewer users then. Three spreadsheets on the PC and two on the Mac. It was possible because we had PC Week, MacWEEK, MacUser, MacWorld, PC Mag, PC World,
InfoWorld, Dr Dobbs, BYTE, Popular Computing, Creative Computing, and I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Some great
writers, and insightful reviews about what it's like to actually use the stuff. I had a product reviewed in the NY Times if you can believe that, and at the same time InfoWorld did a similar review. If you want to rock, we need good, thoughtful reviewers, with no conflicts, and enough time to put into each product.
#People seem to like
Telex which makes developing WordPress user interfaces easier, via AI. Software is gradually adjusting this way, putting the AI where the problem is. For example I wanted to do a Google Form a few months ago and the best Gemini could do was tell me what commands to choose. But now if you go to
make a form, using the Forms app, it
offers to do it via AI.
#People using
feedland.org -- may notice that some old items will appear in your timelines. I just installed a version of
FeedLand on that server that does a better job of figuring out if a feed item has changed. There will be fewer false positives, which makes the software considerably more efficient, and means that you don't have to see things that didn't change. It should settle down fairly quickly, but it may be a little chatty for a while. Still diggin! (Also these changes will come to feedland.com as well.)
#
I've come to see WordPress as an API with a widely deployed and stable implementation behind it, where the user is in control and developers can build apps without having to get into the storage-selling business.
#When they say AI is just
autocomplete on steroids, that's like saying a human is just a product of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur on steroids. It may be true, but it doesn't say anything useful. It's also like saying that a computer is just a collection of on and off switches.
#Funny thing about yesterday's Supreme Court decision, if Texas goes ahead with their gerrymandering plan, it probably will backfire on them, cause them to lose a few seats instead of gain them. The
news reports generally leave that out, probably figuring the sports fans who can understand the gambling on football and baseball couldn't understand that gerrymandering is a bet that you know which voters will turn out and who they'll vote for
a year in the future. In fact
NPR reports it as a victory for Repubs. Right now it looks very much like it is not.
#
The
nightly emails didn't go out last night. It was easy to fix, a server needed to be rebooted. The problems cascaded from there, long story, but in the end I had to move one of my virtual-virtual servers (two levels of virtuality) to another virtual server. Upgrading versions of Node is a tricky process that I have never mastered or understood, and every time it takes almost a full day to do it. Something I hope to someday be able to find the time to sort out. Not today, though -- I have a fun project planned out. Really looking forward to doing the work and seeing the result.
#They should make a version of bash on Linux that also accepts ChatGPT commands. As always
they is someone other than me.
#
Today's song:
Old Folks Boogie.
Sooooo you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill.
#
There's a question going around in WordPressLand as to whether there are any RSS apps. Yes, of course there are. Have a
look at
daveverse, in the right margin. That's a feed reader. All the feeds I follow personally. When one of them updates it goes to the top. You can see the five most recent posts by clicking on the wedge next to the title, and from there, you can go to the website by clicking the link. That's available as a
WordPress plug-in.
#On Saturday I
reported a problem with WordPress feeds that created a problem for the software I was working on. It's Tuesday now, and
it's fixed. This really feels good. Thanks Jeremy! The WordPress community is special. Never seen a big product like WordPress respond so quickly.
#I asked ChatGPT to
write an email to Sam Altman for me. It's about a possible way to compete with Google.
#
- Theories on what's actually going on. #
- It's a love story between Carol and Zosia. You can fall in love with a person with no sense of self. They plotted to have Helen killed, and waited until Carol's "f*ckable" judgment turns into real love. They get married and everyone lives happily ever after.#
- Alternate theory -- the original people are still in their bodies, suppressed to keep quiet. Inside they're screaming to be saved, as pissed off as Carol. They want their bodies back. They have the ability to write messages on their skin, so what Carol saw at the end of the last episode was a corpse with the words HELP ME! visible on the body's belly.#
- Another alternate theory about the end of the last episode -- it took a moment for Carol to recognize her own body, possibly dead, and realizing this is all a dream. It's another version of The Matrix, where this is the fake reality that we've been seeing. None of this is really happening. (Like the end of the Bob Newhart show?)#
- Also is Plur1bus like Saul Goodman, in that if you say it a different way it has a message encoded? The 1 instead of an i seems like a clue.#
We've forgotten how important
links are.
#
I was able to use my Android phone to get on the NYC subway a few days ago. Turn the phone on, point it at the reader on the turnstyle, and just keep walking. It's that fast and a lot better than with the
MetroCard. Sometimes things
do get better.
#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."
#
Turns out we can influence the RSS feed we emit from a WordPress site by editing its theme, so it appears we should be able to get WordLand to work for linkblogs without resorting to a special feed.
#We used to have great multi-cross-blog debates. That's the kind of distance that makes discourse civilized. I post in my space, you post in yours, and link the two when appropriate.
#
I had to learn to be a developer if I wanted to make new media types out of computer networks, but soon it may not be necessary. We've been stuck in a rut of online sameness for a couple of decades now. One benefit of AI is the exclusivity that programmers have had, for all of history, is being broken. Thank goodness. It's way past time. (I hope.) It's also possible we're in the process of inventing
The Matrix. Ooops. That's what makes life so interesting, you don't know if the future is boring or exciting. But in my experience it's almost always unforeseen.
#Good morning and welcome to December. The November archive has been
safely stored on GitHub along with the
rest of 2025. And now we will resume our normal schedule of winter weather in the Catskills, so please dress warmly and have a good song to sing.
#
Hypothetically, if someone were building a headless version of
Frontier with help from ChatGPT, they might be thinking about how to build a web app that was a really good shell to start with. If such a person asked what I thought, I would say without a doubt that would be
Drummer. The reason is it was designed for that purpose, because I needed many of the features of Frontier for my work environment, and as you know Frontier was built around the outliner, object database and verb set, back in 1988. Anyway, I also
wrote a doc in April of 2020, that went through all the features of Drummer as a scripting environment. It's as if it were designed for such a hypothetical project. I wrote a
new intro from the point of view of 2025. It might be interesting to write another intro in 2030, knock wood, Praise Murphy, I am not a lawyer and (as far as I know) my mother loves me.
#
I love getting
comments like this. The
issue I posted about yesterday turns out to be a bug, and apparently it's going to be fixed. So I can go ahead without worrying about a workaround. This is the
best outcome. Usually with most vendors if there's a bug, they don't acknowledge, and then they might get around to looking at it someday. This is what I call
working together. Scott Hanson found the thread where they were discussing the feature in question, starting in 2011. I added an
update from 2025. This stuff feels like time travel, and it's also incredibly reassuring to find that solutions to issues that were relevant 14 years ago are still relevant today. That's the stability that platforms require in order for developers to build with confidence. This is something that many big tech companies (cough Apple cough) either don't understand or don't care about.
#
This week's New Yorker Politics podcast is an
interview with Jeopardy champion and host
Ken Jennings. Great stuff if you, like me, are a longtime Jeopardy fan. We used to watch it in our Flushing kitchen in the 1960s when
Art Fleming was host.
#ChatGPT aggregates people the same way polls aggregate voters. Ignore individuality, unable to hear new ideas, allowing journalists to write the same horse race stories every year. It would be better if they found a way to report originality, they can set an example for AIs.
#
There are a bunch of useful
demo apps in the
reallysimple package, which also is itself fairly useful. I used all these tools in implementing FeedLand and WordLand, so I'm pretty sure they'd be useful to other users and developers. The
feeder app, one of the
demos, is used to generate the
Links page on scripting.com, and provides utilities to the
scripting language in
Drummer.
#
- Happy belated Thanksgiving. I was so busy yesterday, didn't have the time to do my usual Thanksgiving gratitude post. And I do have a few things to be thankful for this year. #
- First I want to thank all the non-technical peoople who read this blog every day. This has been one of the very nicest things about writing this blog, going back to 1994, there have been quite a few people who skim the technical posts, of which there have been many these days, as I am preparing to try to shake up the world of discourse on the net, hoping to get it back on the track it was on before the silos came along and monetized us. Ultimately, if it happens, we will all benefit, techies and non-techies alike. #
- I thank you all for your patience and indulgence. #
- Most of the non-tech readers I hear from are women, btw. My mother for example was a regular reader. For whatever reason, pleasing women is about 1,000,000 times more important to me than pleasing men. Possibly because I had a gutsy mother who programmed me that way. Almost nothing makes me happier.#
- Another thing that makes me unreasonably happy is to be back in touch with most of the developers who worked with me at UserLand on Frontier. Starting wtih Jake Savin, and then André Radke, Brent Simmons and Wes Felter. And esp with Brent, who went on to write NetNewsWire, the hugely popular feed reader for Mac OS. This means so much to me. I spent years bouncing ideas off Brent and listening to what he said very carefully. I also strived to pass on through each of them my values of software, computer networks, and our responsibilities to users. Each of them are different, have different strengths, but they are all lovely human beings. Reconnecting this year wasn't in any way a goal of mine, it just happened that way. #
- Another thing that makes me absolutely optimistic about the future is to discover the compatibility between the vision of the web that I shared with many of the early web developers, again going back to 1994 and the following years, and today's developers of WordPress. We occupy different spaces in tech, I'm a web developer who works in JavaScript in the browser and Node.js, and they work in PHP and their own platform, but as I opined yesterday, you can use the web to connect all flavors of things, by design. I used the criticism that Mastodon and WordPress are like apples and oranges, an American idiom that usually connotes incompatibility, but on the web, you can connect apples and oranges. Differences are negotiable, you have to remember that -- and taking advantage of the web that way is what it was created for. Like the internet it was built on, the web makes it possible for very different things to work together, and in doing so makes it possible for people to work together too. #
- I know I've thanked him before, but it's worth doing again -- thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for his very timely invention of the web, which set users and developers everywhere free, only to have the siloers re-emerge fourteen years after its advent to give power back to the bankers, with the predictable, disastrous results. Our political system suffered a massive virtual oil spill thanks to Twitter, which we have yet to begin to clean up. As a result health care is in a very precarious state. It has been used as an instrument of war. Who could have imagined that a cutely-named system like Twitter could do all that damage, but it did. #
- TBL gave us a taste of freedom. Many of the WordPress community leaders are too young to have had that taste, but they still believe in it. And that's probably the most important thing to be thankful for. And maybe it's not the only tech community that has that inspiration at its core. And maybe that feeling extends beyond tech?#
- We build bubbles to contain us, to make the communities we're part of smaller and thus more manageable. But if we do it right, we can be part of the Macintosh world and the WordPress world, and build the proper interfaces to our work so we're also part of the web. That's where the magic comes from. The unforseen connections that "just work" the first time. That's where I've chosen to work as I approach the end of my career -- on the intersections that route around the silos and return the power of the web to the people. #
- BTW, maybe this idea can connect to the story of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Heather Cox Richardson, three of my current-day examples for how we can use communication to get back on track to a world with purpose and a heart.#
I love shows like
Succession and
Severance, but I hate their official podcasts because they’re mostly outlets for the actors to praise each other. I don’t know who the actors are! I know the characters they play. I want a podcast where
Carol and Zosia speak about the crazy shit they did in the last episode. I don’t mind if the showrunner plays herself. She really is God, in this context. She could explain why she had this character do this crazy shit or done other crazy shit. i don’t know or care about the actors. If they’re any good they disappear. Whodat?
#
I saw a post from my friend Matt Mullenweg where he said they're working on WordPress for the next generation. I like that idea.#- I'm doing the same, myself -- only I'm one generation ahead of Matt. So the improvements I'm working on will likely end up benefiting people his age and younger (he's 41) more than people of mine (I'm a boomer).#
- I want to leave them the web we had in the 90s and 00s, but doing a lot of the new things we've learned how to do since, without the silos. #
- Everything built on the web, everything replaceable, choice for users. And all the writing features of the web show through. #
- When this done, the writer's web will be as open as podcasting, something I had a hand in developing. Any time you want to switch platforms, you can, and lose absolutely nothing. #
- It's not decentralized, it's uncentralized. Important distinction. #
- The storage system for writing, by default, is WordPress, thanks to their fantastic wpcom API, which very few people know about apparently. They opened this door in 2017, I didn't discover it until 2023. My chin dropped. All of a sudden storage for writers was openly available through a simple API. #
- WordPress is of the web. You're not locked into hosting with any specific company, and you can run your own, and it's a lot easier to install and uses less resources than Mastodon, which right now is the only social networking software you can install on your own server. We can do a lot better. #
- So this would be my "State of the Word" from the point of view of the web. Let me know what you think!#
Taking care of WordPress for the next generation.
#- This appeared in a tweet this morning. #
RSS 2.0, the antidote to enshitification.
#
The web is open the same way water is wet.
#One of my
recent posts is getting a lot of traffic. Basic idea is that the new AI-enhanced Alexa spooked me so much I went back to the old one. It's in every room of the house. The more it acts like a human the more offended I am.
#
I'm starting to work on my new discourse system. I've been waiting to do this for a while, until all the pieces I needed were there, and they have been for a couple of months. I'll tell you about it as it starts to come into view. #- The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don't have to "go" to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.#
- A comment is not in any way guaranteed space on the other person's blog. Thus the spam incentive that all other comment systems have is not here. I think that's a huge part of the problem, and it's neatly solved. #
- And the people I imagine who will be appearing in my space are the kind of people that used to get quoted on my mail pages, in the ancient pre-silo web. Doc Searls is #1 on this list, he was a perfect contributor to the mail pages. He understood the idea before he even heard it. That was how quickly he grok'd this stuff. Same way my mother understood blogging, no one had to explain it to her, she already knew. I think NakedJen will be a fantastic contributor in this mode, and we won't need Facebook to tie us together. #
- See, I already know the people I want to come to the party and the place I want to party. I just have to get the electricity working, the usual things you need, plumbing, heat, etc. #
- In the future if you have a comment on this now relatively long post, you'll click on an icon, write your comment, publish it, with almost no overhead. You won't have to "go" anywhere to do that. It'll be right there where you're reading, just like a twitter-like system. But unlike Twitter commenting, our not-so-tiny full-featured text box will let you write, for crying out loud, instead of dealing with a programmer's idea of how you should write. I want all my writing features on my blog, and dammit, when I write a comment too. Why should the comment editor be any different from the regular editor, and why can't all my comments, everywhere, be readable on my blog. See how we're making a web here? It's not hard, you just have to keep factoring. Never stop. #
- How many different ways do I have to write? One. Just one. But I should have choice, because not everyone loves the same kind of editor. The web is about choice, pretty much everywhere. It doesn't matter what software people use because it's all done with open formats and protocols, every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. In other words we'll be using the web. #
Pocket Casts has come up with a
new feature called Playlists. I was able to figure out how to use it in a few minutes using their
web app. Questions. Is there an open format behind this feature? Can I create a playlist outside of Pocket Casts? Can I use a PC playlist in another app? Pocket Casts comes from Automattic so I would expect the answers to be yes, given how committed they are to the web, and how podcasting is
of the web. The most logical open format to use here would be imho
RSS 2.0.
#Yesterday I put up a
form asking for the addresses of people who have WordPress sites that have the ActivityPub feature turned on. Only got four responses so far. But it's good to see what people are doing. For example
Evan Prodroumou is using it, and his Mastodon posts are blog posts. I smiled when I saw this. Nicely done. Loop closed.
#The feed validator
operated by the W3C is kind of frozen in time, and imho has a very odd perspective on things. So I tried using
ChatGPT as a feed validator, and it was totally up to the job.
#Hello this is just a test. I'm creating a new post which will then be cross-posted to
Daveverse site. Both Scripting News and daveverse should show up in the blogroll on scripting.com.
#
- I've been using the term of the web, starting in a piece I wrote last Monday. Now it's time to explain more about what it means because I used the term in the context of Pocket Casts in an earlier post. #
- For a piece of software, being of the web means that it is built to share data with other apps, ones that receive data as input, as a feed reader consumes feeds, or generate output for other apps, e.g. software used to publish feeds. Or competitive apps, that do roughly the same thing another app does, and want to be able to receive the user's data, or better, share the users' data so they can use both apps (we shouldn't settle for less than this, imho). #
- Of the web means you're signed on to letting users move data wherever it makes sense to them to. #
- These days people use the term "web" to mean basically something you can view in a web browser. But that does not mean it is of the web. If Bluesky for example were of the web, it would mean you could add a feature to it without rewriting the whole thing. #
- This fantastic web is what the silos destroyed, starting with Twitter in 2006. They made the software simpler to use because all the feed reader developers were trying to wall off this part of the web for themselves. Going to WordCamp was invigorating for me, because the people I met there were very much of the web as far as I could tell. And they were young enough to not have been part of the initial web, they've never had the experience of plug and play between apps. I want desperately to develop a small web playground for us to explore all the possibilities. #
- There's a reason the web is called the web. Visualize what it's capable of doing as a web. It's not just a word, it's concept, a very important one. #
- PS: I looked around the web for illustrations of a spider's web but they're all too orderly too symetric. The point of a web in real life, the kind that spiders make, is they are chaotic and ad hoc. Like the web we make on the internet. #
I'm looking for WordPress sites that are set up to cross-post to ActivityPub. My daveverse site is set up that way which means that you can
follow it in Mastodon, for example, or any other ActivityPub-enabled site. The great thing about this is if you write in WordPress there is no character limit, and you can use links, styling, titles. So much more writing power. I want to see how other people use it.
#
I like it when people send me thoughtful responsive notes about things I've written. I think it's possible to set up a social network so that most of what you get follows that pattern. It has to do with incentives.
#Say someone is working on an open source project, no matter what role they play, they don't own the project. They can't sell it, or profit from ownership. That goes for whatever role a person is playing, if they're the project leader, or just helping out, or even not helping out. Now that's not to say the founder or
show runner couldn't start a business based on the open source software, but so could you.
We all own all open source projects and open formats and protocols equally, and that means we
don't own it.
#Next FeedLand release has the option of keeping items around for a certain number of days. Running on two servers for burn-in. I don't recommend turning this on now unless you're helping test.
#
- This week I had lunch with a developer who had been at WordCamp last month. He apologized for not being at my session, but I waved it off. I didn't go to many sessions myself, too many great discussions in the hallway, out on the patio or in the coffee room. #
- I remembered this was the rationale for how and why we did BloggerCon in the mid-2000s, to bring the hallway conversations into the meeting rooms. #
- We did this by using a university, its classrooms, and we put someone in front of the room called a discussion leader. #
- A good DL should know the topic they're leading and be able to start it off with a provocative intro, 5 or so minutes, and then a microphone, held by a student, is moves to a person with their hand up, and they can speak. Not a question. They have something to say. They are the expert of the moment. #
- The leader can cut them off and move the mike to the next person. (Works even better if there are two roving mikes.) When this works, it really holds everyone's attention. #
- This idea came from literally hundreds of hours in boring sessions with a panel of experts and people lined up waiting to speak, in the form of a question of course, and getting nervous and composing a speech in their head, and when its their turn they ramble on and on, so of course the good stuff happens in the hallway. #
- It is harder to do this kind of conference where the "content" takes care of itself. But the BloggerCon type, when it works is far more dynamic. #
- BTW, the best discussion leaders are teachers and reporters. #
The new
FeedLand release is ready. It's installed on feedland.org, not on feedland.com yet.
#
- Loving a series I just heard about, This Is Going To Hurt. #
- I discovered it the usual tedious way, scrolling through newly available shows on one of the streaming services with my iPad handy and when I see one that looks interesting, I look it up on Metacritic. If the rating is below 60, I don't look any further, but this show was rated 91, which is a very high rating. It's a British medical drama, the characters and story are fantastic, you can see that right from the beginning. They do show a lot of surgery details, I wish they didn't, I just can't watch that stuff. But I hold the iPad up to block the screen when it gets hard to watch, and I judge from the dialog when the gore is over. #
- Another thing I can't stomach are pictures of dog food, esp people eating dog food. If you have a similar phobia, episode 4 of Pluribus, which is as usual great, is hard to watch, but the segment where a character eats dog food is self contained. #
- There also a commercial for dog food that opens with a chunk of the most disgusting dog food, from a company that makes dog food that looks like human food. They're challenging you with a question, would you eat this shit? Well no! -- and I don't want to look at it either dammit. It's why I don't like the term dogfooding, ie people using their own products. As much as I love dogs, the people who use my software are not dogs, and my software is not dog food. #
- Also I want to add that I have a vague memory of actually eating dog food when I was a small child with a bunch of equally young friends because we were curious about what it was like. My memory is that it isn't bad. But the memory for me, now as an adult, is nauseating. I like eating human food, even though I'm sure in other contexts it's equally disgusting. #
- But do watch This Is Going To Hurt. Sorry it's only seven episodes, I would have loved it to continue for another few seasons. I have one more episode left to watch, though it totally could have ended after six episodes. #
Good morning sports fans!
#I'm continuing to work on the way FeedLand detects changes in feed items. This morning I did a careful study of the function that gets a guid for an item in conjunction with ChatGPT. It would be so much easier if RSS 2.0 required an item-level <guid> element, but it doesn't. That was the philosophy, all item-level values are optional. My notes are
here.
#
I'm working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, and if any have changed, we broadcast the message that the item has changed. I'm doing a complete review of this, based on actual data, and found there were a fair number of places we were calling a change, when nothing that mattered had changed. Now I'm debating whether or not a
pubDate change should be seen as an item change. My initial thought when we were working on RSS, was that the pubDate should
never change. In the real world of publishing I don't think the publication date changes. Right? Of course some feeds do change the pubDate because that's the
art of feeds (sorry for the sarcasm). But I don't think FeedLand should call that a change. Wondering what other feed developers do? So I asked ChatGPT. This is incredibly valuable
research. One thing I learned is that people use
atom:updated. It's true RSS 2.0 has no item that says when an item updated. Anyway net-net, the consensus is that a change in pubDate is not a change. I don't think I'm going to make it immutable though.
#The new
Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a psuedo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human, and this one should be first.
#
One of the reasons Mastodon doesn't get credit for being "on the web" is that there's been no buzz about the ActivityPub support in WordPress. Ghost has been beating the drum about their ActivityPub support for (many) months. I don't know if they're actually there yet, I've never knowingly seen something from Ghost on Mastodon. I sent an email to Matt this morning suggesting that we promote the incredible connection between WordPress and Mastodon via ActivityPub. In the early days of the blogosphere we had the same problem, there was no good way to see who was writing, so we started a site called weblogs.com, which ping'd each site that we knew about to see if it had changed, if so it went to the top of a list that was published at
weblogs.com. So if you wanted to find out what's new you'd just go there. It got more complicated over time, as the blogosphere grew at a very fast clip. We could do that for WordPress sites on ActivityPub by pointing to their site from a weblogs.com-like site. There's no shame in telling the world about the cool new technology you've made, esp when it will make life so much more interesting! But it can't do that if they don't know it's there. Let's do some promotion. :-)
#The news gets everything wrong about the nouns of our political system. They talk about Repubs and Dems, but the real power is with the people. Something that Heather Cox Richardson said so eloquently in this week's
podcast with Nicolle Wallace. I know I recommended it yesterday, but please do listen to this and don't forget it. When you're watching
MSNOW you're getting the wrong nouns. I think this problem could be solved by moving every show on
MSNOW to a different American city. The people on the panels should come to work in Detroit, St Louis, Phonenix, Denver, Charleston, Cleveland, Seattle, places like that. Get out of NY and DC. Really connect yourself to the whole country. That would rock a lot of boats.
#I love the
domain for MSNOW. Just before it came out, Jeff Jarvis wondered on all the social networks why it wasn't msnow.com. Well, because they found an even better domain.
#
Highly recommend this week's
conversation between Nicolle Wallace and Heather Cox Richardson. The contrast of their points of view is dramatic, the election wasn't a win for the Dems, it was a victory for the people.
#
I'm looking into the problems in feedlanddatabase I
mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like
socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about,
screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI.
#BTW, one of the areas of breakage is in our handling of source:markdown. What changed? There are now feeds I didn't create (ie "in the wild") that have source:markdown elements. This bug is 100% my doing. The feeds are fine. These are the kinds of bugs you like to find, and fix.
#A feed that
Aaron Swartz put up early in RSS times was a
feed of Paul Graham essays. The feed items have no guid or pubDate. The way FeedLand is coded right now for detecting changes, it sees all these items as updating every time we read the feed. Okay we have to make it a little bit smarter.
Done.#I'm preparing FeedLand to reliably do things we haven't had it do yet, at least not at scale. It has one important feature most other feed management systems don't have, dynamic OPML lists that I keep touting here. I have a product that can both generate them and use them on behalf of users. But it's a lot more fun if there are other products that can do the same. It means we can build networks of feed sharing apps, no kidding -- it's going to do new things for us the same way RSS did new things for us 22 years ago. Now it can be fun when there are more FeedLand instances out there. It'd be more fun if they were products like Overcast or Pocket Casts. Sometimes companies like Apple or Microsoft show up in these little projects, it has happened (Apple supported XML-RPC, for example. Microsoft supported Frontier in MSIE on the Mac.).
#
The Lever podcast does have
an RSS feed. A good way to find the feed when the usual hacks don't work is to
post it here, where it's a matter of pride for the braintrust to dig it up. Thanks as always. 😄
#
Over the weekend I flipped the switch on a new app that makes my blog available on WordPress. It seems to work really well. The WordPress site is
Daveverse. And because it's on WordPress it is also available on ActivityPub, at @scripting@daveverse.org, which means you can read it on Mastodon. It doesn't feel weird at all to be reading a blog post on a social network. I
posted on Bluesky that we would love to have the same connection with their social network. It might happen sooner than you think. There are people developing writing tools for ATProto, but they're kind of stuck since Bluesky has all those limits that exclude the
writer's web. It's so complicated, but out the other end, I hope will come a consensus that the social web should use more of the text features of the web. Further, the distributed nature of the web itself can form the backbone of distribution for the social web, that is if you think
RSS is part of the web. When it's all said and done, we will realize that TBL got it right when he designed text with titles, subheads, styling, links, editing, no character limits, etc. He probably didn't even have to think about it much, considering he was basically replicating the standard document features from word processing apps of the 70s and 80s, without the printing. That's how evolution works, and the last 19 years of distortion by Twitter and those that followed them, will be seen as a weird transcription error (I hope).
#An old quote falsely attributed to Gandhi. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
#I'm chasing down what appears to be a bug in
feedlanddatabase. Items that haven't updated are being reported as having updated. Fairly sure there is a problem here. Next up, will add debugging code so I can see if my theory is correct.
#
Follow this on Mastodon at @scripting@daveverse.org.
#
Here's a
screen shot of what the
Daveverse home page looks like. It's got all the stuff from scripting.com. It's not a perfect rendering of my Old School blog, I have more features, but it's pretty good. I'll be testing this out and thinking about it now, as we go forward. But here's the milestone: I have a WordPress place to hook into now that has pretty much everything I write outside the
tiny little text boxes. What I write in WordLand or Drummer, the two places I write for real. The rest of it is throw away nonsense, a waste of time. No one reads anything, everyone fighting for attention.
#I was going to tell you how much I like the Lever podcast, and wanted to recommend it, but they make it impossible to find the RSS url for the feed. The usual hacks don't seem to work. Since I'm subscribed to it on Pocket Casts, I thought I might be able to find the URL on their
web interface, and it's possible I might have
found it that way. Nope. It just points to the web page for the podcast, which did not have the RSS feed. I know they must have one. I was looking for a way to download my OPML file, would be nice if you could do it from the desktop.
#We ought to be thinking about a filtering system for feed readers based on instructions written by users, and shared on the web, to be parsed by our AI. Design your personal algorithm with an AI engine. Share the good ones with your friends, and have it work on the web, in any feed reader. There are ways to do that. If you're working on such a project,
let's hook it up to FeedLand. It does a lot of feed reading, and has a nice API for downstream feed readers. It's a good place for an AI-based filter.
#
- Spoilers follow. Like Doc, I have trouble getting into TV series, but not Pluribus, probably because it came from the showrunner of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two series that I have watched from beginning to end at least three times. #
- The star of Pluribus, Rhea Seahorn, was my favorite in Better Call Saul, as Kim Wexler. So I expected a continuation of those shows, and in some sense Pluribus is much like them, but the main character Carol, is nothing like Kim -- who is by far the coolest character in any of the shows, and that's saying a lot. #
- That's okay because the sweetest character yet in a Vince Gilligan comedy (all these shows are comedies btw, even though the plots are super heavy), is Carol's sidekick, Zosia, played by Karolina Wydra. She's basically the voice of the Others, but the illusion is so alluring, one character in the show has already (understandably) fallen in love with her. And we know that Carol has formed an attachment too, despite her best efforts to hate her. ;-)#
- BTW, this post is the first one that's cross-posted to the daveverse site. There still are some things to fix, but this is a nice piece of software. Basically implements what I've been calling Inbound RSS, not for a social web app, rather for WordPress (which in my mind is becoming more of a social web system every day).#
- I wrote this as a comment on Doc's blog. #
- Doc, I’m working on a discourse system that works better than comments, imho. One thing it does is lets me use the full fidelity of the web instead of forcing me to type in yet another Inadequate Text Box (ITB) with none of the features of my blog editor.#
- I’m working on a Unified Text Theory (UTT) for the web. Instead of scattering Stupid Little Text Boxes (SLTBs) all over creation, let’s come up with a nice text router, that means our writing can be in one place, but through the magic of pointers, can appear to be in many places. (Actually there's nothing magical about it, pointers are very basic computer technology, when I learned to program on a PDP-11 in 1977 it very much had pointers.)#
- It’s mostly a matter of GOST (an acronym for Getting Our Shit Together).#
- All this is a preamble to say that my comment on your post can be read here.#
- https://daveverse.org/2025/11/16/3096/#
- It’s also on scripting.com.#
- See how that works. You can’t really tell where it is, but if I make a change to it, somehow the change appears everywhere.#
- And I’m using my favorite editor to write. Not the dinky one provided by the web browser.#
- And of course this should be on my blog too. Damn. I’m still doing it. #
Before that in 
And then 
