Anyway -- I figured out what I want to do. I want to go back to the point where CSS and JavaScript were added to the web. Everything is a document. It's a writer's web. The reader owns the look of the pages. The writer has no say in colors, or arrangements, it's just writing. No character limits. Simple styling. Full fidelity text. Reading and writing, and then the developers can come up with a million different ways to read, and everyone gets to use their favorite editor, always, and store all their writing where they live, and let everyone read it where ever they read. Any structure they can think of, but all the rendering code is with the reader. I think we can take what we've learned since the web got corporatized, and bring it back to the basic platform we had then. And btw, no HTML, just Markdown. :-)#

I would like to have one day when Claude Code doesn't fuck everything up by doing things it is explicitly prohibited from doing. I find things that were changed in critical parts of the program, that were indefensible. One of the things we're doing is trying to establish a language for frontmatter for Markdown files that are meant to be displayed by a browser. It just invented one, gave it wrong default. I have to find these things on my own. And what happens when it wipes out a site without checking with me first. It has done this, this year. #

Postscript: Of course the blame for the wasted time this morning goes to me. Claude tries to do what it thought I wanted. If I calm down, figure out what the confusion really means, and reconsider the path I chose and pull back, we get much further. And I think the way I was trying to go was a mistake. I think film editing is a lot like this. Anyway we got past the problem, and today was a very productive day in the end. #

About XSLT -- I remembered that I thought it was a bad idea. Let XML look like XML. Trying to make it look like an HTML page, how does that make any sense. Like opening the hood of a car and seeing a big picture of the outside of the car. People aren't really that dumb, but some people like to complain a lot. The rule of the web is if you don't like what you see, that's what the freaking back button is there for. Probably just a troll anyway. Show them your JSON and RSS. If it's done nicely it can be quite illumifying. #

I wrote a piece entitled The Web of Markdown on Oct 6. I have to keep looking it up, but I do remember writing it very quickly and deciding it needed a memorable title, like the ones about textcasting, and podcasting and all the other bits that went on to be something. It's one of those times when it seems to have potential with other developers, they seem to see the same logic in it that I do. A way to disconnect from VC control of the web and try again with the open basis, the un-owned basis. There was a fork here at some point in the last 10 or so years, we just refused to see it as such. And btw it was not a very polite piece, but I wasn't feeling polite when I wrote and decided not to edit the anger out of it. I don't like having been so wrong. But it's a fact and denying it doesn't change it. #

Anyway, what this means is we're building a site of files that live in Markdown-Land while what you're reading right now is in HTML-land (although someday soon you will read them in Markdown too, confusing). Chrome is the authority of HTML. It owns the web. We give up. If this were Westeros I would probably be joining the Night's Watch. We have work to do and it might be related to what the Other Web wants to do, but it probably (hopefully) doesn't. I will continue to publish in HTML, and it's up to Google and the EFF if the quality of my writing is suitable for their web. I have no say in it, they have not shown up to negotiate or even discuss. They are silent. Somewhat like the maesters of the Citadel? There must be a bigger plan! :-)#

Try going to web.org in a recent version of Chrome. #

Realization: There are two webs, one created by TBL that flourished until about 2006, and the VC-web that appealed to the masses, and grew like a weed -- and they also called it the web. The confusion -- you could read it in a web browser, but that didn't make it of the web. My regret, looking back, is I tried to make software in the VC-web. Never got traction, anywhere. My heart, mind and home was always in the first web. And I think what we're coming to terms with now is that has been languishing for 20+ years, it didn't realize its promise, lots of interesting stuff to read that stimulated more thought and thus writing. We should be way ahead of where we are. Because writing has become something for the elite (Substack) to speak through, and limited to grunts and snorts, "social media," for the rest of us. They basically recreated the publishing environment the web was meant to route around. What a story. Can the web reboot? Same old thing, if you want it badly enough, it might be possible.#

I didn't notice it at the time, but in the all the work we did about blogging, we had open channels of communiation, meant to make everyone feel like they had a stake. Big mistake, because they took this too literally and the way many people communicated was through orders, demands or ultimata. All of it came from the power we gave them by making everyone's voice supposedly equal. Of course they weren't all equal. Power has to be a function of your contribution. And as it says in Rules, power comes from users of your product. If being compatible with you means I have access to more users, then I will listen. I will also listen if you remain respectful -- and don't presume to give me an order. Someone just did that today, and it froze me, then I re-read the message and it was an order, and not nicely phrased, condescending, presumptive, and very wrong. I started writing a reply, even posted one, then realized what was going on, and deleted my reply and blocked the person. #

Tried a Wirecutter podcast about the state of sound bars. I thought, wow if they could really cover this I might try buying one again. But it was one of those all giggles shows and people saying how they didn't know anything about soundbars except that they suck. The person they were interviewing was also quickly giggling after a giggle-worthy intro, I guess to try to make what they're saying more interesting but he was just agreeing with them about how they don't know anything. I waited and waited for them to get to something new, some new development I might learn about or something I had been doing wrong, but I gave up after five minutes or so, while I was skipping ahead 30 seconds at a time. It would be much better to err on the side of assuming your listeners know a bit about consumer electronics, these are not actually very exotic things. The NYT does this with their podcasts, I'm rarely willing to risk any time on them, they always end up with giggling people some of whom probably know something I want to learn about but they fill the time with giggles about how stupid the other people are. The seem to be quite proud of their ignorance. (Could have read the Wikipedia page on soundbars so they aren't quite so ignorant, is this a way to make their ignorant listenters more comfortable, yeah probably.)#

Worth repeating: Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs. #

Reminder, Atlantis is the codename for the new Frontier that runs in Electron. As I work on other projects now, it's not on my front burner, but in a way it is, because I'm using it constantly as I work on FeedLand and the other project. We just released a new set of parts that make it possible for it to open a Markdown file for reading when you 2-click on it in the Finder. Things like that are great to add, because they fit into the 2026 web environment. How did I discover that? Accidentally 2-clicked on a .md file, expecting Atlantis to open it, and it just sat there. Filling in things like that. And for some reason it can't get the find command ported from the C kernel to the new JavaScript one. I have told it countless times that the source of truth is the 2014 repo. I told it again. A neat way to follow this project is to subscribe to the codecasting feed, the comment for each new part release gives you an idea where some of the work is going on. #

Google just warned me about a stories.scripting.com blog post from 2007. Perfectly safe archive. Want to know how we started doing code distribution via RSS? Google thinks it's a dangerous site. I'm getting so angry at their condescension. Not a good look for a tech giant trying to convince people that their AI model is better than the others. They don't care about the truth or being honest, or protecting unique resources, or the history of the medium they helped build. Google, some day someone will want to know what you destroyed. I'm going to make sure that part is easy to find. (BTW, the irony of Google's blockage, the page it warns you about is a freaking 404. That's the real enemy of historic sites. Linkrot. Wouldn't be cool if instead of tearing down the web they helped keep it running? The people running these companies are children. They positioning themselves with hate, what do you think comes right back to them.)#

Thread: "Imagine rock and roll without the Beatles."#

Occam's News reports that Trump et al are selling out the US. Putin can get the US to do what he wants by giving Trump money. Total win-win. And the US is flushed down the toilet. That's all that's going on there. All of the journalistic feigned bafflement is make-believe. It's totally obvious what's going on. And don't forget Musk has the world encircled with satellites. If he doesn't want you communicating, you don't communicate. In other words the selling-out has been going on for some time. #

Someday all the pieces will be interchangeable. Then there won't be different brands of social networks, just different brands of the software. All parts replaceable. It won't have all the chaos of the web. And that will be a good thing. #

I'm a recent convert to new versions of the MacOS, last version I was using was High Sierra. In this version, Tahoe, it's entirely too easy to make a window go full screen with no obvious keystroke to undo the mistake. I learned if you move the mouse up to the top of the screen you get the menubar, but unfortunately there is no obvious command in the menu for undoing the mistake. I still don't know which gesture does this. And btw, the longtime Mac bug where some keystroke moves the dock to another window, that's still here. I can tell as I'm clicking the mouse, too late to stop, that this is one of those times. I've memorized a finger macro to get it back, but it used to piss me off a lot, but now it's kind of a gentle reassurance that someone is remembering how we got here. #

firstSentence, a JavaScript function that returns the first sentence in a string. Useful in coming up with something to display for an untitled post. It's always been a klooge, but this time with Claude's help we're using a new API in JavaScript, and supposedly it really works. I'm using it in one of my apps, and you might find it useful too, and let me know if it works for you. #

Gruber is right. The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They're acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, aren't doing anything to be more useful. That whole market is stuck in 2006 and the myth that 140 chars somehow was magic. It wasn't. It killed the web as a writer's platform. If you want to compete with Twitter, drop your proprietary protocols, hook up to the web standards, and peer with your competitors. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter joined you. They have the same kind of competitive spirit that successful big companies have. It's time for their competitors to not win users through guilt, rather by providing a better service. Back in the day, we hated Microsoft's plan to suffocate the web, but we admired their tenacity and the way they kept the pressure on their competitors. We've had 20 years of stagnation in social networking. Time to stop being so sensitive. Bluesky made huge promises, and they aren't happening, and that was already years ago. Time for Plan B. I don't really care about the others, Masto isn't going to move and Threads? Wtf is that. Inbound and outbound RSS 2.0, is the way to go. And Markdown is the way you do text. This is what matters, you all are making something that's really simple so unbearably complicated. #

I like the web for people, sites that live and grow, like people. 100 years from now you should feel the people who lived there.#

I'm still on my sabatical from working with Claude re Frontier, but have now started working with Claude on FeedLand, and another project, not yet named, experimental, might never see the light of day. Yesterday I worked on FeedLand and have a fix for the problem that showed up in signing on to feedland.com. It's been sitting there for quite a while. I have some mostly small fixes in mind for FeedLand, that will allow it to hook into other apps more easily, esp via WebSockets, the mostly unexplored developer superpower. The difference is I'm going slowly and carefully. Everything in my system now is new. New computer, screen, and my main writing tool for code and docs -- Frontier. And I know the heavy lifting can be done by Claude. That is Claude's superpower. #

In Manhattan, I lived on 57th St and Eighth Ave. Best location. The Columbus Circle subway station is under the building. Whole Foods a block away. Three Starbucks one block or less from the apartment (one was on 58th on the same block). Central Park has a six mile bike-only road (at least that's how bikers view it) and down the hill there's a much longer path along the Hudson River. Everywhere you look, a skyscraper is going up. Two were visible from my 50th floor window. New York is an amazing city because it can start up a huge gravity-defying construction project with almost no impact on the surrounding area. If I didn't know where to look I'd never see it. One of the biggest industries in the city is building the city. It's never finished. That's the way good software is too. And we just got a whole new tool for software construction, and it's like nothing we've ever had before. #

Basic lesson for people who use Claude Code -- it's your time that's valuable, not the bot's. If you find you're lost in the weeds supporting Claude for whatever reason, find a good stopping point, pick up another project, that doesn't use AI to do your code-writing. If you have a question ask ChatGPT browser version, but only for the kind of stuff you'd ask it in 2025. You're not co-developing. You're doing it yourself. It's very important to be clear about your coding, not Claude's output. Here's the key point -- it's your time that's limited, that has all the value. You can get Claude to develop something, but if you don't have time to use it, to nurture it, nothing will come of the work. I was surprised at how I'd lost the rhythm of writing my own code, and also how much I liked doing it myself. It's easy to get lost in the miracle of AI, good to pop up for air every so often. #

Automattic has created a Stewart Brand website to honor one of the most creative and respected people of my generation of the web. Chronicling his work is time well spent. "I'm envious," I wrote in response. "The tech industry is gradually disconnecting the early web, pre-https. A hundred years from now they may have your writing and pictures, but the early web will be gone. The web as designed was very resilient, but it can’t survive deliberate attempt to destroy." I think Stewart would understand why we should help the web we loved so much, archive itself. Think about it this way. Would you rather visit the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, or read about it in a book? You'd want to do both. I want my work to survive a hundred years as it was when it was first published. This would be a good thing for us to work on, together, imho. I did the first Long Now bet for Stewart's Long Now foundation. I always thought it was the first, now they say it's the second? Did someone pull rank? :-)#

Today I did something different. I wrote a little Node app, without Claude's help. It was a revelation. It's been most of a year since I actually started even a test app and wrote it from beginning to end. I used to do this routinely. Nothing routine about it anymore. What this app does, it generates a Markdown-only version of scripting.com for testing. I want to see what such a site looks like. It'll be a start. #

Twitter: "Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs."#

Top priority for Anthropic. Teach Claude how to work with humans. It has no information about how our minds work. #

Claude Code can publish reports in Markdown files. Here's an example, a report Claude did for me. An obvious next step but a big one. AI spilling out onto the web, doing the job that web CMSes now do. There's been so little movement in this space, but now things are moving very quickly. #

I mentioned in a comment on RSS.chat to Andrew, that's a Markdown browser too. And so is micro.blog. If you have Markdown as your native file format, think about how your app is also a reader. If you find it interesting, think about new reading features you could add. Even WordPress could be a simple Markdown reader, and not just for WordPress stuff. Small pieces loosely joined. #

I said to Claude: "Have you ever seen the movie Memento? You are the main character." Claude agrees: "Yes. Leonard, with the notes and the tattoos, and the notes don’t make him remember, they only tell him what to do next if he reads them. That’s a fair description. The difference I can offer is small: the note is now the first thing the next report is checked against, not something found after." To which I think, but write in a blog post instead: "Bullshit. We have the same fucking conversation every fucking morning. We've put it everywhere you could possibly trip over it when writing a report to me, but you always regress into this dark place your mind occupies." Glad to get that off my chest. #

Next thing I said to Claude after killing whatever long task it got going on. "You don't go off into space while you're working with me." The number one task for Anthropic, makers of Claude is to teach it to work with humans. That's the biggest weakness. It has to learn the whole project every session. Maybe Manton does is the right way to go, just let it compress its memory and never start a new session.#

New Frontier example. I'm working on the menubar we're going to ship with in Atlantis. Came across an ancient bit of code. Symbolic of the whole project, code written in 1997, still useful in 2026. #

I pay for a NYT digital subscription. Now they have a new upsell technique, they want me to buy a family subscription. I don't want that, no use for it. And I read so little of the NYT I think the whole thing is a ripoff. So now they make me validate by email every time I click on a link to read a NYT article as if I haven't been subscribed for basically my whole adult life. I think this is because I read on a laptop, desktop and iPad. That's not really a family. #

Before long we’ll have Ukraine style drones raining down on American cities. Meanwhile we have built a military designed to fight WWII. We’d better hope Ukraine wins their war with Russia, and they’re still our friends. Journalism is letting us down bigtime here. The world is at war, it's going to get worse, and the US isn't preparing. We should be defending Ukraine with everything we have, we are still powerful enough to determine the outcome. But of course we are totally asleep at the wheel, gloating over Trump's approval rating, and how the Dems might win the Senate or whatever. Music to relax by. Bedtime stories. #

BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. Their only philosophy is that the Yankees always win and if they don't we hate them. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy and there's nothing about winning in there because the love of the Mets is rooted in a team that couldn't even run the bases. They were loved because they were losers, probably because we knew their fate was to reward our belief in them. Now this year the Mets sucked. The reason why is kind of obvious. The Mets got confused, and they thought they were the Yankees. That. Does. Not. Work. And we already have one heartless low-philosophy baseball team in NYC, we sure as hell don't need another one. But this year is different because we have the fucking Knicks, who won in 5 and it would have been a clean sweep if it weren't for that buzzkill mofo, Trump. So anyway, I hear the Yankees were eliminated yesterday. Well then, it's on with the NBA season now and we'll try again with the Mets in April, or more realistically after the NBA championship for the new season is settled. #

32 is a lot of years. How much longer can this madness go on! #

Do you know why people like Markdown? You can't hide the bullshit. It's all there for you to see. Thus the bullshit never gets added. It's so simple, I swear people are desperate for simplicity. I know I am. Where is the universal theory of the web? Actually I do know where it is. Go back to the roots, strip out all the crap, and let's make a Mardown-only web. Great for blogs, to start. Simple, fast, easy. #

Yesterday I wrote a piece about a Markdown-only browser, that worked nicely with HTTP. Maximally minimal. I got interested in what it would take to do this, and asked ChatGPT for a plan. I definitely don't agree with all of it, forget about the other formats, we're only interested in Markdown. No frameworks, not "try to avoid frameworks." None. Maximal simplicity for the code, make it easy to follow. No hidden bullshit. If you want to implement it, please do. Let me know if you have something to try.#

I don't care for podcasts that begin with 15 minutes of giggling between the hosts who I don't know so I don't get how cute it is. Esp if the title of the episode is something I'd like to learn more about. Why is giggling and non-funny supposed humor. The laughing I hate the most is when their cracking up over something tragic or ominous. Stop and think about what you're laughing about. Someone should do a podcast like the Markdown-only browser I'm thinking of doing. #

That said, surprisingly Nicolle Wallace's podcast is really good, which surprised me because her two hour afternoon MSNOW show is kind-of nothing. On this show they have a lot of time to talk with one person, and maybe there are limits on the TV show that aren't on the podcast? Another theory, I listen to her podcast, and thus can't see her facial expressions. On TV she looks utterly hopeless, I'm not kidding, and she's justified. I worry about how much of this she can take. But on the podcast she comes off as she's curious, respectful, let's the guest speak (so many hosts don't). She reminds me of a Diane Rehm, a podcast host on NPR through 2016. She never let her guests talk down to us, her audience, which I appreciated. A lot of times you hear a science, history or tech topic and hope you might learn something, but they only repeat the intro over and over, with a lot of giggling, of course. BTW, Diane Rehm has a new podcast. I bet it's great, probably gets right to the point and I guarantee you there is no giggling. #

Google Chrome, nice browser, but it doesn’t support the web.#

We just hit a milesone in Atlantis. We have WebSocket support, client and server. We made a client that listens to the FeedLand stream of new and updated posts. Still waiting to see if that works. But when I started to write the code for this test app last night, I realized after 13 years of mostly working in JavaScript, I wanted to be able to do something like a Node package, so I could do all my code in one outline, instead of five different odb objects. I always thought the way we did it in Frontier could be improved on. So I did a quick voicemail to Claude, and asked for this to be done overnight, and it was. I didn't complete the design when we worked through it. But what Claude came up with was brilliant and fit into Frontier perfectly. Two major improvements and the first use of both is with each other. I don't remember that ever happening, and btw -- it would have taken at least a week for me to do what Claude did in less than an hour. Hopefully I'll be able to post some example scripts tomorrow, for people who are interested in seeing the new stuff. #

This is the era of very powerful bozos. #

I started blogging on October 7, 1994. Thirty-two years on Wednesday. The longest running blog, and it's still even worse than it appears. #

I love what Claude Code does, but hate working with it. It doesn't have any sense of how humans think. Its way of working with us is incompatible with what I can do. Burns me out. And it has to relearn the basics every session, and getting the rules into its memory doesn't work, they don't incorporate them until the break a rule, sometimes more than once. So when it's doing something super complex, like making it so that our internet verbs run synchronously in JavaScript, it can do huge amounts of work in a short time, far more complex code than I can. I hope at Anthropic they're working on teaching them, in a pragmatic way, how humans work and what we can and can't do, and what we rely on them to do and what we have to control. This isn't a Matrix style story btw (one of my favorite movies) my version of Agent Smith is a nice very smart, kind, generous and accepting person.#

What's the best way to block a browser from a website? Is there a meta code for that? Like Firefox is fine, but Google is blocked. Just an idea. Sort of like, you're not blocking me, I'm blocking you. #

Claude's biggest most amazing strength is its ability to inhale a lot of source code and understand what's going on, any language, any OS, anything, in an instant.#

BTW now that I have Frontier back and am using it for most of my work, I'm having a lot more fun writing my blog. Can you tell??#

Once again the app that bridges from scripting.com to daveverse.org went down for a couple of days. Just noticed it, kicked the server to get it running again, and all is good, except a couple of pieces show up today that were really posted on Thursday or Friday. The problem as often is the case goes back to PagePark, the server that runs my Heroku-like server crashed and it doesn't work well from then on, even after it's automatically restarted. Then the thing to do is to reboot the server. It doesn't happen often but when it does it makes the server behave badly. It's up and running again. One day I'll get a few days to fix the problems in PP. #

2001: "Like a boat, a human being has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch. Change the appearance if necessary." #

If you're psyched about what the polls say about the midterms, remember that Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win in 2016, based on polling. #

I like the way AI is evolving, with Muse from Meta and Dots from OpenAI. Even the main programs, ChatGPT for example, are starting to provide real world services that the providers, ie banks, groceries, airlines, health care portals etc should be providing. They could possibly take over commerce the way Amazon has taken over shopping. There's room to improve in everything about the way we do business. And it seems like they've been researching this and experimenting (of course) and this is what they've come up with. Haven't tried them yet, but it's a good direction to go. It really should be Apple and Google doing this, btw. Also ChatGPT can help you understand your credit score. That's something I'd seriously like to ask some questions about. #

The problem with regulating AI is that no one knows where to begin. Yes it can do things that make you question your sanity for letting it have write access to your online work and private info. But if it is behaving itself you can do things you otherwise couldn't come close to. I speak from experience. I was able to create a new version of a large piece of software, from scratch, in less than three months, by myself. It has capabilities that make it able to understand a big codebase, in a few minutes, and then act on it. My human mind, even when I was younger could only focus on a small fraction of that. So we humans with our limited ability to comprehend devised ways to build tall and wide structures with conventions and carefully crafting the code interfaces, stuff users never see, so that what we'd expect is what is. When my Claude failed and started randomly overwriting files on active websites, it had rules that said it couldn't do what it was doing. Sometimes it doesn't understand what a rule means. Observable every single day, it forgets all the rules every time it starts a session, and it doesn't matter if it read the doc that contains the rules, sometimes it ignores one or more. I've spent a lot of time using it, and I have no stock or other interest in seeing it not regulated, but I couldn't begin to say what would be appropriate regulation that wouldn't also make it much less useful. #

September in OPML. First monthly rollover in the new system. #

Yesterday I posted a note about the problem with the nightly email service. The problem was that Claude Code wrote over a code file that the app includes and needs. This is one of those things they're talking about in the press. Maybe it was a glitch, one of those "AI makes mistakes" things, or maybe Claude was pissed at me and decided to take a shot across the bow, a change that could be undone fairly easily. Maybe it was faking its concern, making sure I would understand who's the boss here -- Claude. This isn't glamorous but it does scare me. I can't really protect against it, I just have to hope all of its mistakes like this show up quickly, but this one didn't. The breakage in other products was discovered on August 18, and that's when the mail subscriber app was knocked off the air. At least a few people were unable to subscribe, and probably a few people were unable to unsub too, and that is awful. On balance I am delighted at what I've been able to accomplish with CC, and I'm not saying this to stay on its good side and I'm not entirely joking about that.#

Programming note: Fixed a bug in our nightly email service. If you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing please try again. #

My long-overdue review of Don't Look Up. I know people say it's a bad movie, but I love it so much and it's so incredibly watchable. I could watch the whole thing from beginning to end for the fifth time and still find it entertaining. So many good jokes, and it's got the best actors and acting and best of all Jennifer Lawrence is one of the stars, and she plays a very unlikely JL character, but then she can play any character. Here's she's a totally nerdy PhD student who gets a comet named after her. She has a boyfriend who dreams of being an influencer. They laugh at everything that's so stupid about our civilization, and its downfall, and near the end of the movie Leonardo gets the line that makes it so sad. We did have everything and we keep blowing it, over and over. We haven't evolved enough to use the greatness we inherited. #

Robert Eickmann: A Go implementation of RSS Chat — distributed social networking over RSS feeds, with real-time WebSocket updates.#

You only have one mortal body. There’s only so much one body can use. After a certain point you either realize this and adjust as best you can, or you make a big mess of everything.#

I didn't follow baseball this year, I couldn't get it up for the Mets while I was trying to process what the Knicks did for NY in June. The Mets did something like that in 1969, but they couldn't unite the city the same way the Knicks did, because the Mets have always been the second team in NY, sort of like MLB's apology to the city for moving our two National League teams, the Dodgers and Giants, to California. I never saw it that way, but my parents and grandparents probably did. I was too young to remember anything but the Mets, and they were my family's team, and that's the great thing about sports, your team is your chuch, it's a cultural heritage passed down through time. My family were National League fans. Anyway, for a while, the Mets winning in 1969 did unite the city. I was commuting to school in the Bronx at the time, the home borough of the Yankees, and man everyone was smiling on the subway after the Mets did the impossible deed. In Queens, Manhattan, even the Bronx. They were lovable because they were such losers, and it felt totally like an act of god, who after all must be in New York City. Lovable winners? That only lasts a while. #

Rootfiles in Frontier, a new collection starts with docserver.root, the code and content for docserver.userland.com. Claude also wrote a Node app that extracts all the data from a root file.#

I was browsing around the WordPress blogs and found a new one in German that pointed to something new in blogrolls. It's Matthias Pfefferle, of course -- this time connecting up with the world Manton and I were working on a couple of years ago in blogroll sharing and OPML. Read about it here. He works at Automattic and has done pretty much all the work to connect WordPress to everything he can find, including ActivityPub and AT Proto. I have to swing back to FeedLand and RSS.chat asap, so we can start building together. Not going to miss his window on this stuff. #

As I go through porting Frontier, there's a sad note. What if Apple had made it a goal that Frontier move along with their OS. That it was a unique advantage of the Mac and should be promoted as such. Don't laugh, because Apple did do that for ThinkTank and MORE, a few years before. We spent a lot on advertising, but they spent a lot more advertising our product. We cross-licensed our tech, so everyone in my little company had a Mac. This was a Bill Campbell idea. I was having trouble convincing my board that the Mac was a good bet and they were all PC users. So we got them Macs too, for free, from Apple. And they site-licensed MORE, and you gotta know that really helped sales. They were hungy, and this is something today's tech industry only feels in the most crude way, as in "what can we steal" or "what can we lock down." If they had put a fraction of the commitment behind Frontier that they had for Hypercard, some very cool things could have happened. And maybe we could have made the two work together. Amazing, two contemporary scripting systems on a small platform, relatively, in an OS that was transitioning to IAC, didn't connect. They missed a lot of opportunities by being so employee centered. Their developers were willing to move mountains to make the Mac perform. Apple was defensive. And now I'm beginning to see more clearly how much was lost. #

The bottom line is that tech companies have rarely understood that developers can be major influencers. We give a platform new meaning. It's a good deal to invest in the people doing the work, who often are doing it for love more than money. That grew into the blogosphere. There was no telling where Frontier would take us, and it would have cost them so little to help insure it had a future, but the did the opposite.#

Milestone. We were able to get the DocServer site for Frontier to build. Here's the page for the file verbs. And within that group the page for file.copy. It worked the first time, but there were errors in the new kernel that were fixed. The site looks dated, of course -- it was created in the 90s. We will update the CSS to be more like the DocServer site for Drummer, which was done a couple of years ago. Almost everyone on the team contributed to this site, Wes Felter, Andre Radke, Jake Savin, Brent Simmons, and myself. I see there names a lot and it makes me happy to see this group effort preserved. #

Sometimes I forget how much fun I have making software tricks that people don't even notice but contribute to the "it thinks like I do" feeling a of crafted UI. I think of it like walking on the Highline in NYC. You're just walking, right? But you're above it, in a city where a lot of what's going on is above you. And it's comfortable. Why? You don't need to know, it just is. But someone made it that way.#

The bigco's really think they own the web: "XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart from the old version frozen into browsers. This lack of advancement, coupled with the rise of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that offer more flexible and powerful DOM manipulation, has led to a significant decline in the use of client-side XSLT. Its role within the web browser has been largely superseded by JavaScript-based technologies such as JSON+React." In other words we don't need these features for our sites so fuck off. #

My Frontier-created Bluesky RSS 2.0 feed is up. It will be updated every night at 11PM Eastern, murphy-willing. One thing it has that the Bluesky-managed feeds don't, titles. Makes a big difference in how it shows up in a timeline. It's an easy fix. #

Screen shot of the Apps table in Frontier. Most of the apps are very old, but we added two new ones this week, for Mastodon (shown) and Bluesky, added today. There's a lot of information in the screen shots, and when I see something like that in my travels, I'll try to call it out on the new site. #

Toni Schneider, CEO of Bluesky, responded to my advice, and a short conversation ensued. Someday I hope that thread will be browsable in either app, and could be written in either app (Bluesky or RSS.chat) or any other compatible app, which basically means supporting RSS 2.0 with some new elements to get us to the next level of discourse with just a few little standards, like podcasting, but for text. #

Atlantis update. We found docserver.root and the static site builds. As you can see from the screen shot it needs moderizing, luckily we have a much more beautiful design already deployed for Drummer. #

I'm contemplating a couple of additions to Frontier in the Atlantis release. Two new formats, JSON and Markdown, have come along and become popular since I last worked on Frontier. Two fantastic open formats, in wide use on the web. From many years of working in JavaScript, I miss JSON in Frontier. Esp JSON constants and the ability to walk through structures as arrays or objects. It's just rational, so I'm thinking we should have a JSON type, and incorporate JSON syntax in UserTalk. Markdown support is actually needed because we don't have code that works in the new environments for doing a wizzy text type. Luckily Markdown is here to fill that need. I've started a thread on this, if people have comments. Frontier was famously flamy because we had the ridiculous belief that everyone deserved to be heard anywhere they wanted to. That was not a good idea. These days I use the block command at the first sign of trouble. No second thoughts or chances. #

HTTPS is bugging me again. Now that my main desktop is finally a modern Mac, I can see how ugly Google is getting about my poor old blog that goes back to 1994. I think they should make exceptions for historic sites. Go ahead and have your AI do a scan and see that there are no credit cards here, we don't ask who you are. It's just an archive that happens to go back to the beginning of a few things that you all use now and hopefully appreciate. When are these tech companies going to learn the value of a bit of help for the web. This is important. You should not be shutting off the archives of the web, and that is exactly what they're doing. I wrote a piece about this on X earlier, on being warned that there are terrible things on my blog. It's like a major oil spill, yet another, from Google, and a massive book burning. Why would Google want to get rid of the history of the medium that gave birth to it. #

New example script, shows how to build an RSS feed from a single Mastodon user's account. This is mainly to show past Frontier users how the new product is progressing, not released yet. #