Good morning. I like how things are going in FeedLand and WordLand today. The dots are starting to connect.
#You will probably see a series of test posts here, as the day goes on.
#
Here's what I'm doing. I want to get all my blog posts together in one place. I still want to use
Electric Drummer to write stuff for scripting.com, there's a whole system built around it being where it is. But, I want all the posts on
scripting to also appear on the
daveverse site, so that the first version of my discourse module can be simple to create, debug and use. So I've got the first half working, I've got a script that hooks in via
WebSockets to FeedLand and is notified every time Scripting News updates. It mirrors the updates to a site on WordPress (for testing) and once it works, I'll have it send the stuff to daveverse. That part remains to be done. Not sure if it'll be a desktop app or a server-based app. But now I need a break. ;-)
#Some pre-dinner testing. This was correctly recognized as a new item. And I've made another change, this should be picked up as well.
#
A short
podcast about Sarah Kendzior, Johnny Cash and Bluesky.
#
The big news is that there are now docs for
source:markdown. The goal is to have a writer-friendly standard for text that's as useful as the one for audio. As with everything in RSS-land, cooperation among the different vendors was never its strong point. I hope to change that, and hope to build a network for written text as open and powerful as the one that developed for podcasting.
#Fixed a longstanding performance bug on the scripting.com home page. Sometimes it'd just sit there for five seconds. Really embarrassing. It should feel faster now.
Still diggin!#
Today I'm going to work on re-shaping the docs for source:markdown because it seems to becoming a thing that people are supporting in their feeds and in their feed consumer apps. We're going to have discuss how it's supported, on both ends. What goes into a source:markdown element, and what does not, and how should readers use it. I will assume the role of benevolent dictator, as I did with RSS 2.0, with a bit more of an understanding of what's important. See
Rule #1 in Rules for Standards-makers. "The only reason we have open formats and protocols is so our software can interoperate." And the
Rule of Users: "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."
#As part of the process I reviewed the developer notes I
posted in 2022. I see why there was confusion, it was so early in the process. I'm replacing those developer notes with new ones, that's based on more practical experience.
#
Scripting News'
feed now supports source:markdown.
#BTW, if you have a question about source:markdown, or want to raise an issue,
this is the place to do it.
#Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was going to write a short post about how I never thought about how good Credence Clearwater is, until Andrew Hickey did a whole
longish episode on them. The story isn't that interesting, but the music is great, lots of fun. Never realized it. Right now I'm listening to
Born on the Bayou, lovin it.
#Now that Cory Doctorow has put
enshitified into our vocabulary, I find myself looking for evidence of it in AI, and finding it everywhere. There is a common thread. Amazon Alexa has a really nasty habit of finishing a song by asking me if I want to listen to some other version of it. I'm sure that seems like a nice friendly thing to the product people at Amazon, but please -- I'm grooving on the energy of the song, and the last thing I'm thinking about is some asshole robot interfering with my train of thought with a question so stupid only a machine could think of it. Okay I think that qualifies for enshitification right there. Can we have a rule that AI bots must by defalt behave like a computer. I, your human overlord, the one who is paying the bills, will ask the questions. And you will not speak until you are spoken to.
#Good morning sports fans!
#
WordLand is one of the few products that works hard to make sure that it has effective competition. It lays out a welcome mat for competitors. That's what
DemoLand is all about. I think I finished it today, have to do another review, maybe two, before making it public. It is the opposite of a product that's meant to dominate. It's more like
MacWrite, to fill a niche as an invitation to others to come play. Remember in the web, all parts are replaceable.
#
Screen shot of DemoLand a new thing I'm doing that shows a developer how to hook an editor up to WordPress using the same server I'm using for WordLand. If they do, our products will work on the same data, in Markdown of course. The user will get to use two different editors to work on the text. This is important because in the social network I'm imagining
every part is replaceable. It takes work to make that real, but I have done the work. In this network the user will have choice of writing tools. Unlike products like Substack, for example, where you're forced to use their built-in editor.
#I need to have my posts from
scripting.com flow through the
daveverse site, because the WordPress view of my writing is becoming more important. I find myself copy/pasting again, and I have to start viewing every one of those as a bug to fix. That might be the biggest mess of all of them, the idea that humans are intended to do things that computers are meant to do
for us.
#
- Google tries to speak for me. #
- Reading a friend's email, I click the Reply button, and without asking, it writes a reply for me. Thus, if I want to speak for myself first I have to delete the message it created, signed with my name, w/o permission. #
- Here's a screen shot with a red arrow pointing to the AI's writing. #
- I do my own writing, always, and forever. I'm not a Luddite, btw -- if you read my blog I try tech and I use it if it fits. I'm looking for new things tech can do. But this time I was forced to use something I never wanted to use. That disgusts me. How dare the machine think it can impersonate me. #
- But it gets worse. They buried the opt-out settings, and they don't actually turn anything off. I asked ChatGPT how to do it. It showed me where the settings are, I turned them off, saved changes, reloaded the page, and the same suggestion is there. It's still speaking for me. #
- Now they certainly haven't rolled this feature out to journalists, because the news would be full of rage. Journalists, like other literate people, generally have the basic ability to speak for themselves. And journalists use a pulpit that Google is probably still a tiny bit scared of. #
- Also, it's hard to come up with an example you can share publicly because it only does this with replies to emails from people you know. I tried it with spam-like messages and there it is willing to let you speak for yourself. #
- This raises a philosophical question for Google and its AI bot. Of what use are users? #
The kind of email I like to get. From Manton: "Just wanted to let you know that I added
source:markdown to all Micro.blog-hosted RSS feeds by default this week. You can see it in my feed." That's one
nice lookin RSS feed. He added: "NetNewsWire support was the last nudge I needed to add this." The Power of Brent. It's good to stay on Brent's good side. ;-)
#
AI changed the basic capabilities of computers. Some technologies will do fine in the new world, like SQL databases. But the stuff we do — that's going to change radically. Will anything be left? No one knows, imho. Best thing we can do is keep going on the path we were on, and look for ways to involve AI tech in a way that will bring the power of AI to writers.
#The
previous post
appeared on my
daveverse blog which is something I'm especially proud of because it's the result of a fantastic collaboration between my codebase and Matt's codebase. Could not have happened without the wpcom api. That single bit of software imho is going to spark a rebirth of web applications and with that, the blogosphere. That is, if I have my way. Now one thing I still have to fix is the problem of posts appearing in more than one place without copy/paste. Have not conquered that yet.
#Stephanie Booth asks about
yesterday's post about dynamic OPML in Pocket Casts. I responded with a few comments, and a promise to write a post to show how this works in FeedLand, which already has the feature, but unfortunately is not a podcast client.
#
I went to NYC yesterday, drove both ways in the same day, which is a lot of driving. It was exceptional for me, two big cities in three weeks, Ottawa and New York. Had time to sit in Washington Square Park, then I rode a Citibike up to where I used to live near Columbus Circle. On the way I shot a video of a woman on
West St with a sign that said Honk For Democracy. I thought it was a nice shot, and typically NYers drove right by her, no honking, unfortunately. I also shot a video in
Washington Square Park. NYC is photogenic, interesting, and still where I come from, proudly.
#I went to see a discussion between
Matt Mullenweg and
John Borthwick, two people from tech who I have worked with, but hadn't seen in a while. I wanted to chat with both of them, and did, which was well-worth the journey. I
liveblogged it. My chat with Matt helped me understand what we're doing. One of the things we talked about is
an idea I thought he would understand and love. It relates to their podcasting client, Pocket Casts, which I use.
#
- On its surface Pocket Casts is a straightforward podcasting client. You use it on a mobile device to subscribe to shows, choose the ones you want to listen to, those go into a queue, you can move things up the list, or start another, etc. #
- It also has a web client you can use to add and remove subscriptions, from your desktop. This is important because we discover podcasts on the desktop too. In your normal web surfing you may see a podcast you want to follow. Then how many steps does it take to add that to your subscription list on your phone? That's the trick in software design, is it too much work to justify the benefit? If it is, you won't do it. But if we can make it easy, as easy as subscribing to a news feed, you might. Ideally it should be one click followed by a confirmation.#
- How could this work? A new feature for OPML subscription lists. Today it's used as the import/export format for lists. But that's a one-time thing. Instead I want to give Pocket Casts the URL of an OPML file with my podcast subscriptions from the desktop.#
- The same feature could be used to share my choices with other people. I already publish a podcast subscription list with the world, or Jon Stewart could share his favorite podcasts by comedians. And when he adds or removes a feed, that change is synchronized with the all the users who subscribe to it. #
- The short version is "subscribing to subscription lists."#
- I decided to write up this idea publicly because I've written about the idea so many times, it's not a secret and if I had a podcast client it would already be there. If people at Automattic are excited by the potential, let's start planning the feature, and software that can plug in on the other side of the interface. I'm still learning how this works, to collaborate with a very diverse organization, spread all over the world, and they don't even all work for the same company. #
- If we do this feature, first it'll be largely experimental, something that podcast-loving devs will make for ourselves. As we use it we will think of ways to make it easier to use. It won't take long imho before this is a popular feature in podcast clients.#
I
liveblogged a chat between John Borthwick and Matt Mullenweg tonight in NYC.
#To people who do WordPress plug-ins -- have a look at the
feedlandSocket repo. It sends notifications of news items to any subscriber, via websockets. News items are simple JSON, and contain information in the feed item, and system info like id and when it was received. This makes it easy to stream news to a plug-in running in a WordPress site, that can then do anything with the news they like. It's incredibly simple to use, and we provide all the JavaScript code you need to embed in a browser-based app. Here's a
place where you can ask questions.
#New release of FeedLand, v0.7.9. It's a Node.js server app, using MySQL, and I think it's stable enough that I can start linking to updates here. It's not for poets, though I do know one who got it running. Check out the feedlandInstall repo.
#
Democrats
swept yesterday's election. A reminder that you should ignore pundits when they say what they've been saying about Democrats since Trump won last year's election. They assume people are stupid and aren't paying attention to the prices in the supermarket. And the price of health insurance. And the mask-wearing storm troopers occupying Los Angeles and Chicago. Heather Cox Richardson
said at the end of last night's piece that "politics will be a whole different game." Republican incumbents now know that there better be big change, or they'll all be losing next November. They may find themselves more on the people's side than Trump's, now that they know for sure the two things are different.
#And it's undeniable, the voters said no to Schumer and the current theoretical Democratic leaders. They can't be in charge of the future, otherwise we're lost. So the voters figured it out. Let's make sure everyone hears this, they seem to be saying. You better be able to lead us or don't bother applying for the job.
#
There was a time when I thought
Dick Cheney was the worst possible person to be vice president of the United States. His corruption led to what we have now. I will never love his memory. But I do remember that he
voted for Kamala Harris. So, if you go deep enough, we shared the same vision for the country. As corrupt as he was, even he had a limit. We need more Republicans to do what he did. And I thank him for setting that example.
#
From the beginning, I wanted FeedLand to make excellent use of WebSockets. It's an amazing technology for its power and simplicity. Basically it allows a server running in the cloud to send information to an app running in the browser, or for that matter an iOS app running on an phone. Then the question is what do you want to use the socket for? And the answer is that to make syndication
even simpler and faster than RSS. If you want to know more, there's a
client toolkit and
demo app on GitHub, open source of course. How real is it? The
blogroll on scripting.com is a sockets app, a much-improved blogroll from the ones we had 20 years ago. Also runs on WordPress sites. It's been running smoothly since March 2024. Pretty solid. And WordPress, that doesn't break formats, has supported the rssCloud protocol since 2009, and of course so does FeedLand.
#Wes Felter
explains what
stablecoins are for. "Stablecoins work offshore in places where dollars don't, they're faster to transfer, they mostly can't be seized, etc. It's for the margins not the mainstream."
#
- I'm part of the Berkman community email list. There's a tradition that people are introduce themselves at this time, so I thought I should also, since this is my first year on the list. This is a copy of the email I sent. #
- My name is Dave Winer. I was at Berkman in 2003-04.#
- I've been so impressed with the stories you all have been telling, and I felt I should get into the mix, but my story will be different because I am not an academic, though I love the academic environment, find it very energizing. #
- So, my story --#
- I started a bunch of things before coming to Berkman. Undergrad degree in math, masters in Computer Science, ran two software companies, was by some measure the first blogger, played a role in the bootstrap of RSS, and at Berkman we launched podcasting via the two BloggerCons we had there. #
- I loved the reunion we had two summers ago, and think we should build on that. #
- I got a very strong feeling from revisiting the campus that we should have kept going with the blogging we started at Berkman in 2003, and if we had done so, I think we'd be in a better position in social media today. We had a jump on Twitter, Facebook (which was also starting on campus at the same time). And we were doing everything with open protocols, all parts replaceable. Very different from the way the commercial networks are built. #
- What I'm working on these days is primarily WordLand, where feeds and words get together using nothing but the open web, with all parts replaceable. #
- We use WordPress, via its REST API, as the platform for writing, we add a beautiful and simple new writer's toolkit, all in one place with all the administrative stuff out of the way. #
- This product will also introduce an API that makes it easy for developers to create new editors because there are a lot of types of editors and people have their favorites. #
- I'm working closely with the people of WordPress, gave a demo at WordCamp Canada a couple of weeks ago. I loved it, a lot of the energy of BloggerCon. I wish I had joined them years earlier. Their community has been growing for 20+ years. In tech that's a long time. #
- It's also been about 20 years since we finished work on RSS 2.0, and that's the other major thing WordLand is built around. It's how messages fly around the net. Again totally replaceable parts. #
- Berkman helped us with RSS 2.0, the official spec is hosted at cyber.harvard.edu, and hopefully will remain there as an artifact, a basis for interop, for perpetuity. Many thanks for the help here, it needed a permanent place to stay frozen, the tech industry very much wanted to take it apart. It's still going strong even though tech leaders and journalists have proclaimed it dead many many times. Wishful thinking, things like RSS don't die. :-)#
- I am committed to getting around the silos of the owners of social media, and making it possible for developers and users to build their own networks with their own rules, and not have to wait for corporate programmers to give them the tools, we need to be able to make them for ourselves. This btw to me has always been the ethos of Berkman, coming from Barlow and Nesson, it's the old idea that the web should set us free, not create new more entertaining hamster cages for us to play in to delight our masters. #
- These days I wonder how we can help Harvard do the things it's so good at that few people understand. People, esp young college-age people, should know there are ways to contribute beyond attaining unusable wealth. I think what they want is a way to compete, to be great, to challenge themselves, and to win, and the money is secondary, a way to measure success. We can and should be creating new ways to measure the greatness of individual young people, directed towards more satisfying ends than making more money than they could possibly ever use. (And of course understanding that not all young people grow up to want to prove their worth, but the ones who vie to be the baddest billionaire have caused a lot of problems, and could use some alternate theories of how to be great. When I was young, I definitely was one of the ones with something to prove.)#
- Anyway back to Harvard. It took forever for Harvard to admit publicity that podcasting incubated there. It did eventually come but only in passing, in an introduction at a 2008 conference, where I took a picture of the moment. Thanks to my friend John Palfrey for making this happen. #
- I believe that universities like Harvard should be constantly hosting the kind of work we were doing then, like a teaching hospital. It's not enough imho to study technology and leave the development of it to the industry. Then you get software designed by bankers. I want a continuing stream of innovation to come out of academia, with people returning to teach what they learned to students who came to get skills that will help them do good and make a good living, and then a few years later they come back, again and again. It should be a self-renewing process. #
- I wrote about this several times over the last decade or so, I call this idea Developing Better Developers. #
- I think the next best thing for now would be to have a homecoming for Berkman every two summers perhaps, where we get a chance to develop a pulse. And see where that goes. It's obviously a lot of work. The one we had brought back a lot of good ideas and friendships that we should still be working on together. #
- I live in the Catskills btw, as you can tell from the subject line, just west of Kingston. Before that I spent nine years in Manhattan, before that Berkeley, Seattle, places like that. And Cambridge of course! :-)#
- Dave#
- PS: At the reunion I remember telling David Weinberger that I had hung up my spurs, I was done developing. It turned out I wasn't done. Heh. I think people like me never hang em up voluntarily. Who knows. ;-)#
WordLand screen shot.
#
It's the first day of "no more baseball" for the next ten months or so. I admit I don't really get involved until August. But this year was great, even though the Mets didn't make the playoffs. Congrats to my friends who are Mariners fans, they made a really good run. I was pulling for the Blue Jays, dreading a Los Angeles win, but as they say you can't always get what you want. And I don't mind that there's a victory for LA, a city that's taking the brunt of what's surely coming for NYC. Obviously they're waiting for the election to be over before they occupy the city.
#In August 2002 I asked why RSS 1.0 is named RSS. I gathered up
opinions and published it as a single document. I didn't edit or respond, just let people speak. I think this is a legit document type. And when implemented in 2026, it should all work with pointers. They should be only one copy of the text, where the author wrote it. Technically this is totally doable. Just a few independent developers to work with to start a bootstrap. We know how to do this.
#
October
blog posts in
OPML. BTW, well-kept secret, I have a
Node app that takes one of these outlines and publishes it to the web, in the format you see on
Scripting News. If you can get your text to flow through OPML this way, you can have a replica of this site, with most of its features. And you can totally customize it in CSS. It's open source and very stable. It's called
Old School and I wrote it in 2017 because I wanted my old blog back, I was fed up with trying to fit into the very small world defined by Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook and Medium. I decided then the cost was too high, and I'd be much happier if I lived within the limits of
RSS, which is far better than the text formats defined by these other projects. Now I feel hopeful about this -- because
Brent is supporting
source:markdown in
NetNewsWire. This is a big thing, because it will have the power to attract authors, developers of blogging systems, and other feed reading products.
#I wrote a
bit about Philippe Kahn the other day, and just remembered -- I forgot to write about
Turbo Pascal. I had been using program compilers for C and Pascal for almost a decade when it came out, and it was shockingly different in a good way. Somehow it could compile a whole program in less than a second. Years before I had developed
ThinkTank on the Apple II and IBM PC using Pascal, and it often took
minutes to do the same thing! This changed languages in a great way -- later I would switch to
Think C that had the same instant compiling. There were other great things about Turbo Pascal, because the editor was integrated, so you could start that compilation with a single keystroke. He understood that the quicker this was, the more in a groove the developer could get. Imagine if you had to wait a minute before you could read the prose you just wrote? It used to be like that. Going back to the 70s it would sometimes take many minutes, and you could run out of time, and wouldn't be able to change the software until they added more money to your account. Like the horse and buggy days. How far we've come.
#Wonder if you noticed that the main difference between social media and chat is which way the new messages flow and where the tiny little text box is, at the top or the bottom.
#The unique thing about neighbors is you can try to divorce them, but no matter what you do they will still be neighbors. There are few relationships as permanent as neighbor. They don't have to listen to you. But you should listen anyway, and try to figure out how they look at the neighborhood. Probably very differently from the way you view it.
#
My religion is 
