Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Still looking for more great WordPress news sites.#
Question came up on TPM as to whether the blogosphere might reboot in Substack. The author concluded it can't, and I agree. Here's why. "One thing the blogosphere had that Substack can’t have is all parts were replaceable. You could use any blogging tool, and any feed reader and still be part of the world. Substack is a single company that has raised VC money. Vastly different incentives." And this has been tested. You have to use their editor to publish in their enviroment. They're unable to let you see their product as part of a toolset, it has to be the whole thing.#
You know how the AI companies are all doing browsers. Why don't they have a local url that I could put into an <a> element that pops up the result of a question asked of the chatbot. Something like this. When you click on the link you find out what the Mets did. #
I'm okay with Trump destroying the White House step by step. We're going to need a lot of new things once he's done. There's going to be a lot of broken stuff that needs fixing. Feces covered monuments. Probably a new cemetary somewhere for his victims. But you know how when the Mets were defeated by the determined Yankees in Shea Stadium in 2000, we tore down the old stadium and built a new one. Same thing. The old White House will have served its purpose. We shouldn't even build a new White House on that location, just like we shouldn't have built a skyscraper in place of the World Trade Center. I wanted to see a mosque and a synagogue, a new football stadium, perhaps. A nice park. A place for a camp fire. Anything but an indestructable office building. We have so many of them. But where are the spaces for kids to play and learn and be friends. No, in place of the White House, I want to see a gorgeous public library. A place of learning. And a softball field and a nice swimming pool. We can tell the kids that once a bad old man lived here, and we decided it'd be more fun to have a big playground instead. #
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Journalists report conventional wisdom thread on Bluesky. #
Monday, October 20, 2025
I wonder if any established open source projects are converting to having ChatGPT or other AI manage the process.#
On my drive to Ottawa and back, I never had to wait for a charger, and it never took more than 1/2 hour to fill the battery to 80%. The chargers are often in places with restaurants or supermarkets. And it's good for my legs to get out of the car and walk for a bit. #
Frontier's Simple Cross-Network Scripting is one of my favorite features ever. It made procedure calls over the internet almost as simple as procedure calls inside Frontier. #
I wish WordPress had a "home" social network. The community is all over the place, on Twitter, Slack, Masto, Bluesky, GitHub, and probably a few other places. I hope to have a social network that is built on WordPress and RSS. It would be open to the public, and anyone could start their own, by running an easy to install piece of software on a server. #
Took yesterday off, aside from a little blogging, which isn't work for me -- now on Monday, I'm going to do a few warmup projects, and figuring out which big item I should focus on in my post-WordCamp experience. #
Sunday, October 19, 2025
I have to remember to use WordLand to post to Mastodon, because when I go in that way, I don't have a character limit and I can use styling. We were wrestling with this question at WC, how to market the feature in a way that would get people to go to WordPress to write for Mastodon. It would also be cool if you could turn on the ActivityPub connection in WordLand, without having to wade through all the menus and dialogs. Imagine if we had a confirmation dialog like this in WordLand.#
I have a really interesting idea for Netflix. Do a MCP so I can ask ChatGPT to find a show I'd probably like on Netflix. Then Hulu would have to hook up too, and HBO and Apple and everyone else. That would fix a big entertainment problem because I've already taught ChatGPT exactly what I like in movies and serials by giving it all my favorite shows and why I liked them so much. This was the idea of Bingeworthy, which I never seem to find time to work on. I really just want the freaking functionality. Someone should buy Metacritic btw, their process, however it works, is really good at finding the good stuff. But please someone who believes in open APIs, it totally needs to be in the Chativerse.#
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Back home from my trip to Ottawa. Took the scenic route through the Adirondacks. Had an unqualified great trip. Should've gone to a WordCamp a long time ago. It's totally my type of people. I have a long list of things to organize, but for now it's time to catch up on sleep and rest, MLB and NBA, and make plans for the future. #
Friday, October 17, 2025
Evan Prodromou explains all that's happening in the WordPressOSphere in the realm of ActivityPub. #
Wouldn't it be great if there were a list of WordPress users who have turned on their ActivityPub plugin, so we know who to subscribe to on our favorite ActivityPub service.#
I'm back at WordCamp in a big room waiting for Matt Mullenweg to answer questions for the people here. Yesterday's presentation went really well, lots of smart people really interested, fantastic discussion after. A very nice web culture. I went with three slides to get started, and then talked, demo'd, answered questions, and listened to ideas. Told a few jokes. Got a few laughs. It got the job done, help feed the word of mouth on WordLand. #
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Monday, October 13, 2025
Sunday, October 12, 2025
I'm getting ready for a trip. And part of that is getting my laptop set up so I can post to Scripting News. If you're reading this, it worked.#
Saturday, October 11, 2025
I'm narrating development work on my Daveverse site. If you're interested, that's where I've been while I'm shaking out core bugs in the new WordLand. These are the things I want to stay fixed and never have to screw with again. It does actually work that way in products that go through a shake-out process. Drummer and FeedLand both work pretty well. Sure there are bugs and things I wish worked differently, but I and a few other people use them as everyday tools. I'm trying to get WordLand with its timeline function to be that way. A bunch of new hookups via HTTP and Websockets. #
Friday, October 10, 2025
Today's song: Oh My Love, by John Lennon. I was trying to remember this song. It kept eluding me. It's not one of his most famous. It's what you experience when you fall in love. Clarity. Endless possibility. At home in your life. For the first time. #
I know so many people around my age that were never told this simple truth that I heard Steve Jobs say in a video the other day. Paraphrasing -- the people who made the rules you think you have to live by weren't smarter than you. Once you accept this as fact, then if you can find the leading edge you can make it work the way you want it to. You can be one of those people. #
Thursday, October 9, 2025
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
WordPress news via FeedLand. #
The same energy that forced Biden off the ticket should get Schumer and Jeffries out of the top seats. Replace with people who can speak plainly about what's actually happening.#
I stop reading every piece that begins by wondering if the Dems or Repubs are "winning" the shutdown. Anything the Dems can do that has anything to do with governing is a win for all of us, including the Repubs, but esp the Dems. This is a new world, the old one is gone. Every day is a new reality.#
Fellow humans. If we're competing with AI, and to some extent it seems we are, consider that they have much better writing tools than we do. If we are to put up some kind of resistance to our cyber-domination, shouldn't we invest in better writing tools for bodied-intellects like us?#
I try not to run away from controversy when conventional wisdom is in the way of progress.#
The big deal with WordPress, as outlined in the Think Different piece is that the strong API makes WP into something quite different from what most people think it is. I think of it as an OS for writing on the web. Very analogous to what we use(d) PCs and Macs for before networks were everywhere. This came up in a thread on Bluesky about MicroPub which appears to be a redo of Metaweblog, with better identity system. #
The ActivityPub world, which MicroPub is part of (I guess), could benefit from reading Joel Spolsky's piece about Architecture Astronauts. #
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Why we all should love RSS. It makes the web higher level without taking anything away. #
Thanks to Tanya Weiman for observing that this blog started 31 years ago. Probably the longest-running blog on the internets. Still making trouble. And as they say, still diggin. You can always tell how long it's been by looking at the bottom of any archive page, where it's constantly calculating, down to the second, how long this blog has been running. #
Try as hard as I can I still have distinct flows and more than one place where I edit. I think that's a consequence of working on WordLand. I have to use it for serious writing, otherwise how would I know if it works. Maybe I can find a way to merge flows, but not at the moment. I still have to do some copy/pasting. #
Monday, October 6, 2025
I do all my shopping in ChatGPT. There must be a way to monetize that. For example, I want to buy a new backpack to carry my laptop and other mobile stuff. I should be able to set up anywhere there's wifi. I've got a modern MacBook Air, an iPad and two phones, one iOS and one Android. The main one is Android, I have to carry the iPhone because I use an Apple watch. I imagine there must be some improvements made in backpacks since I bought the last one, which was when I lived in Berkeley, in the late 00s. #
I've been evangelizing evangelism lately. Focus on goals and help others help us achieve them. It's a virtuous cycle, because once people figure out that they can get help by helping us, they will help us more. That is, when it works. #
Reason #29812 you know our current writing system is broken. When you want to post something that has more than the maximum characters they post an image instead of the text. I once wasted a few months making a writing tool for those kinds of posts, hoping that if it caught on we could have a shadow network that moved the actual text around the net between users.#
I did a video demo of pngWriter in Dec 2016. #
Sunday, October 5, 2025
In 2014 I wrote a manifesto about web writing. A decade later later, I'm still trying to get writing on the web to work again. It was on a good track before the rude interruption.#
Saturday, October 4, 2025
I test drove three different EVs today at an event at SUNY Ulster today. VW ID.Buzz, Rivian R1T, Kia EV9. I was surprised the one I liked best was the VW. It handled well, the others were sloppy, drive like the big cars they are. The Rivian had the best computer system, looked even nicer at first look than the Tesla. The Kia EV9 had a standard Kia computer system, far behind that of Rivian or Tesla. VW's computer was halfway between, it appeared they thought overall about the controls, but I was so impressed by the ride, and size, and the whole concept of it, and I always liked vans. I'm seriously thinking about swapping my Tesla for the VW. There are other disadvantages, I'm going to start reading up on it, until today I never gave it any thought, didn't think it would be a car for me. But I realllly liked it. #
Bluesky post: "The idea is to build a social network entirely out of replaceable parts. No silos, no centralization. Just the web." #
Friday, October 3, 2025
In yesterday's piece I suggested people start by creating a free site on wordpress.com to be their home on the open social web.#
People are surprised that I'm trying to build the for-real social web as opposed to the aspirational social web. It does require a lot of chutzpah. I feel that. Sometimes I put off doing things because while the coding is simple and straightforward, the immensity of it overwhelms me a bit. I don't remember feeling that way the first time around, possibly because we were doing it all step by step over approx ten years. Now it's all compressed into weeks. I know how to do it, and I've got or built the pieces I needed. But it just doesn't somehow feel right that the idea is actually becoming a thing. "This can't be happening." But we live in that kind of time. Who knows what monsters lie within. We may find out. Heh. Maybe that's where the goosebumps come from. #
With the advent of AI code development tools, maybe we should embark on a project to merge all programming languages into one syntax. To undo all the chaos and make humans more competitive with machines. The fact that there are so many development bubbles is a huge waste of resources. Makes us all net-net more stupid. #
Some day they will have AI actors delivering the nightly news and no one will notice.#
Thursday, October 2, 2025
New motto: Let the web be the web.#
Latest news from WordPress. Always looking for more sources. 😀 #
I have a problem in the development version of WordLand. Sometimes when I bring it to the front, there's an error deep in jQuery, an event has fired and the handler is pointing to a string or number, not a function. It dies, with no stack crawl, because it was responding to a focus event or blur or something like that. Something got overwritten. I have no idea where or how it happened, but once found it will be obvious. I've been trying to figure it out with Claude and ChatGPT and I can see it's going to take a few hours of concentration and learning to figure it out. But then I realized hey -- I bet I could use the Chrome debugger to find this problem. It has Gemini built in. It has access to the running code. I don't have to act as an intermediary, gathering data, pasting stuff into the AI bot. Now I'm looking forward to doing this. #
Someday soon you're going to read a post here, have something quick you want to say, click on a little icon, the editor opens, you write, post, and it's on your blog. I get a pointer. I can read it, and if I want, I can attach it to my post. The writing stays in your space, so you have an archive of all your writing. We let the web be the web. #
One of the things we can do to preserve freedom, is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us who communicate outside, the more people will be attracted. Your participation helps draw people out, where independent developers can create new tools for you without waiting for permission of big companies who own the network you're using. It's like voting. The more people do it, the stronger we all are. I've spent the last 31 years insisting on that freedom for myself as a writer and developer and sharing it with others. As people flocked to Twitter and Facebook, etc, you thought I was gone, finished, a loser. I know they think that about me. But honestly, I also knew the open internet would come back, because I knew its value, and I knew eventually the silos would reveal their real cost. They may appear free, but there's a price to pay. I hope you'll consider using the tools. If you want to get started, create a free site on wordpress.com. Just create it. That will be your home on the open social web. And btw, you don't have to agree with my politics to be part of it. That's kind of the whole point. ;-)#
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
A very small picture of the blogger's room at Dean For America in January 2004. A big chunk of political history happened in this room. I was there, in the runup to the Iowa caucus and on the night of the famous Dean Scream. Here's a picture of my digital camera in 2004. It wasn't cheap and as we know it was futuristic. That was possibly one of the first digital selfies. #
I started this site to hold some of the essays John Palfrey posts on Facebook, where they are out of reach of the tools of the open web. John is a longtime friend, for over 20 years, and we did some great stuff together in the early days of the blogosphere. I will happily turn the site over to JP any time he wants, and provide personal support if there are problems. I want him in my online web family, and Facebook simply does not make that possible. It's a silo, as we know and that means it's basically a world unto itself. If we want to solve the problems of the world, we have to step out into the open space where what we write is not so local or controlled. #
All the September posts in an OPML file.#
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
WordLand is not a blogging platform, it builds on a blogging platform. #
The stock market is doing really well, still. But a really important part of our workforce is being attacked by the government. I have no idea what's going on among the immigrant workers in the US. Maybe this is something one of the news orgs could look at. But it seems we must already be short on labor to do the things that keep our lives and businesses functioning. If so, why isn't that showing up in the market? #
One thing journalism could do for us is sponsor polls to find out how many people are scared about what's coming next and how scared are they? #
People are not symbols.#
Monday, September 29, 2025
Please read Stephanie Booth's three-part Rebooting the Blogosphere. She's doing great work organizing the ideas around what can we do better in the new blogosphere. #
"It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together." I didn't want to let that pass without notice. As the early blogosphere is coming back into focus, and given what we know about the before and after of Twitter, I'd say this was hard to see, I was too close to it, but now having gained some distance, and rebuilding the basics of the blogging with the tools of 2025, it has become clear. The age of the blog ended sometime after 2006 because people moved what they were doing in blogs to Twitter. It wasn't Twitter's fault, if the independent developers had been willing to pool resources to make certain things easy that were hard with blogs, we could have offered a good alternative that didn't make all the compromises on writing that Twitter did. That was unnecessary damage to the web. I'm now referring to that time as "the rude interruption" as in "before we were so rudely interrupted." I am energized by the blogging energy that's come out of the two podcasts I did last week to the ActivityPub world and the WordPress community. They may or many not remember blogging before Twitter, but they do viscerally feel that the web has unrealized potential. #
I watched Alien: Earth to the end, didn't like it, it was Noah Hawley, got great ratings. But I was wary going in. I don't like horror. I don't like seeing human bodies opened up, esp brains and guts. For those reasons I have never been a fan of the original Alien movie, I was bored and disgusted at the same time, and shocked once. As far as I can remember the movie had no plot and that one big scene. Anyway, Alien: Earth is another one of those "universe" thing, like the Marvel or DC universe, or Petticoat Junction and Green Acres. Aliens Earth had to fit into a pre-determined timeline. Good versus evil. Kids good. I hoped it would be great because Noah Hawley is the showrunner of the Fargo series on Hulu. It also defines a universe, but it's okay because they're cool or depraved or really stupid or cute in a Wisconsin way or from Europe, or twins. And there are aliens floating around there too, and Ronald Reagan even. And it was a completely different story from multiple different angles every time, and it had the same outrageous and dark and mostly intelligent tone that goes back to the original movie, which was the best movie ever of its kind, and gave us the Coen Brothers who haven't given us a dud so far. Noah Hawley disappoints.#
Sunday, September 28, 2025
There should be a Hall of Fame for open software, formats and protocols that have stood the test of time, esp those that have taken a beating from commercializers. Not for the people who did it, that could be a separate thing, so there are no fights about who gets credit for what, but for the thing itself. It would be a way for the industry to say "Hey sorry we didn't accept you at first, and we just want to acknowledge that, after X years of doing something hard, it worked, we're all using it now." To which the open format would say, "Hey thanks for the call out, and let us know if you did something cool with it." #
I now have a feed in the new WordPress News site. #
The OPML version of this blog, according to archive.org, goes back to Dec 28, 2005. It appears that it hasn't updated since June 8, 2010. On further investigation, we do maintain an JSON file for the site, it's just JSONified OPML. That works too. I'm looking for a way to direct posts to the WordPress news river I started last week. You can already easily use WordLand to do that, we have excellent category support, you're one click away from a dialog where you can choose from your categories while writing. You don't have to go anywhere to do that. The JSON file starts on July 18, 2017 and it's rebuilt every time I post an update to the blog along with the RSS feed. And 2017 was when I did my 180 degree turn back to blogging as I was doing it before we were so rudely interrupted by Twitter. #
The stuff I'm posting on the Daveverse site isn't getting into my Daytona search engine. I'm writing some real stuff there that should be included. I write on Daveverse using WordLand, it's proof that it's working as a comfortable writing tool and helps me think of features. I do most of my Daveverse writing on my iPad. Test posts are done on my desktop while I'm working on it, but sometimes they contain stuff that could be indexed as well. With enough time I could easily do this, but that's the problem, not enough time. #
Saturday, September 27, 2025
I'm writing reports about problems with WordLand using WordLand and I'm liking it. That's a good sign btw. And also I think it looks pretty great viewed in WordPress and in Mastodon. #
Automattic shipped a new product called Telex that's a ChatGPT for designing blocks in WordPress designs. Blocks are a simple result of design and programming that define the behavior of a part of a WordPress page. Having seen a demo, it looks really useful and is a nice small programming space, where a lot of users could actually control the process, and get something useful quickly. I've gotten pretty adept at teasing images out of ChatGPT, and at some point I'm probably going to need a commerce site, to allocate subdomains for people's feeds in WordLand. Still have to figure out how that works. #