I've been trying to stay out of politics here lately (did you notice), but I don't get how Americans, no matter who they voted for, can watch what's happening in Minneapolis and not feel like we have to protect the people there from the thugs who are attacking them. And of course that's exactly how we're supposed to feel. I watched a video of a woman, a disabled army veteran, being dragged from her car by the ICEs, and hearing cop car sirens in the background, imagining, hoping -- they were coming to stop the attack. We never did find out. How can you stand for this if you're an American. Forget about Democrats or Republicans, what about you? Where did you learn to ignore the feelings you must have when you see people, fellow human beings, attacked with such cruelty? Snap out of it, if you have any empathy left, or any love for our country. Tell your representatives to step in and stop this, and no excuses, Democrat or Republican, I don't care.#

Why now? Because there are probably still enough in the military who believe in the rule of law and will obey an act of Congress. #

A brief podcast with the fascinating story of how XML-RPC came together in 1998. #

Last night's email didn't go out at the appointed hour, and I didn't get a chance to look until early evening. So last night's mail went out at about 6PM Eastern. Hopefully today's email will go out at roughly midnight tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. Still diggin! #

Is there any circumstance where "Sorry for the inconvenience" isn't the wrong thing to say? Maybe I didn't even notice, or if I did, maybe I didn't care. And what if the results were more than inconvenient? What if someone died! Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll say. I like still diggin the best. It says yes we suck, and we know it, but we're trying to suck less. #

If you don't have one of these Keurig things, you're really missing out. #

I've been watching Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS. Jake worked at UserLand, but never at the kernel level, which is exactly where he and his (virtual) AI buddies are working. He knew Frontier well, he was a developer at MacWorld, where they used it as the CMS to manage their website. Then he came to work at UserLand where he worked on the CMS itself, and over time became a full contributor to the work we were doing in RSS, XML-RPC, feed reading and podcasting. He's a musician too and the nicest guy to work with. He just got the REPL for Frontier running. I'm so proud of his accomplishments, and totally looking forward using the new Frontier for server programming, which is all Linux for me these days. And I also look forward to having Manila and Radio UserLand running on modern hardware, esp so I can demo these apps for my friends in the WordPress community. There's a lot of stuff happening here these days, glad to say I'm working with some incredible people and totally excited about what comes next.#

Demo: rssCloud makes feeds as fast as the internet. #

It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well -- it doesn't have one. The web was like the Declaration of Independence, but like a democracy it takes care and a bit of sacrifice to keep it going. It's always been possible to rebuild the web, to take back our freedom to create new webs out of the web that TBL discovered. It just takes determination and dedication to working together, a higher cause than piling up billions of dollars that the billionaires have absolutely no idea what to do with. I think the world order based on democracy depends on us digging out of the hole we're in, in the technology. Think about it.#

BTW, I haven't posted a screen shot of where I write Scripting News in quite some time. Nothing has changed, but a whole other writing enviroment, targeted at WordPress instead of Old School, and it has a different feature set, look and feel. #

I had a fantastic meeting today with Jonathan Desrosiers. I gave him a tour of all the software that makes up WordLand and FeedLand. It was the first time I had done that with anyone from the WordPress community. It started off with a simple story about how I knew I was on the right track when Matt announced they were porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress as an OS. Which is exactly what I'm doing with my collection of software. Every bit of writing should be a WordPress post, and they should be linked together in arbitrary graphs. It was nice to review that with a serious developer, Jonathan is one of the core committers of the open source WordPress. It helped me see all the different things we can do, and now hope we will do. I feel I understand this community, as a time-traveler from the past I think I understand what we should do next. #

Textcasting: Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text.#

If I were making a Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other. Comment here.#

BTW, look at all the links in my writing. Shouldn't every platform that says they're part of the web let users add links to their writing? Of course they should. #

If you run a FeedLand instance, we have a new recommended index for your database. It's also part of all new installs. The code will still work without the index, but it might make it a lot faster. #

I just posted something new on Scripting News, and thought -- that should appear on the new WordLand I'm working on, even though it's not a WordPress site. It did appear. Screen shot. The beauty of RSS. It's supported everywhere, so we might as well depend on that. #

I had to do some work with Concord today, the open source JavaScript outliner Kyle Shank wrote for me in 2013. I used ChatGPT to help. It knew all about Concord. Amazing. If only through ChatGPT etc, my work will survive. That means a lot to me. I take the opposite view that some artists take. I like that it's learning about what we did with our lives. Bob Weir died yesterday. That didn't go unnoticed here. #

I wonder sometimes if we’re the last generation of humanoids on this planet for a variety of reasons. The future imagined by The Matrix is looking more likely than ever. #

Bob Weir is gone. #

Today's song: Playing in the Band. #

What’s happening with ICE is like January 6 four years later with billions of dollars behind it and many months of planning and studying history for prior art.#

As I listened to the mayor of Minneapolis speak I thought he was going say "get the fuck out of Minneapolis" but of course he couldn't say that and then he said it.#

I'm doing little demos of stuff I'm working on in WordLand, here's a narrated demo that shows how instant updates are going. As often the recording level is too low, so turn up the volume if you want to hear the comments. A productive Saturday session. #

John Johnston, a longtime friend of UserLand and my newer products, asks how WordLand connects with FeedLand. Two ways. 1. FeedLand has an API, still working on it, but it will be public. 2. FeedLand has an outbound websockets interface, which is already public, so any can use it as their feed reader, and get notice of new items and updates to existing items as soon as FeedLand has the info. And if the site uses rssCloud, as WordPress does and has since 2009, the notices are instantaneous. So to the extent people thought RSS is a slow protocol, it's not. It runs at the speed of the internet. And FeedLand is all about RSS, as you know. #

I get ideas when I go for a walk or drive somewhere in my car. This was one of those times, but it was not a comforting idea. I live in the mountains on the west side of the Hudson River near Kingston. On my drive to town yesterday I went through the small town of Woodstock, and I was thinking about how ICE is occupying Minneapolis, and wondered why wasn't I more concerned about it personally. The answer -- it's far away from here, and Woodstock, while it is a famous place, is on absolutely no one's radar. But then I remembered the astounding amount of money we allocated for ICE, far more than could be used for border enforcement, so obviously this all is a prelude for an American secret police and here's where the disquieting idea came up. Of course ICE will operate in every city and town in the US no matter how remote or small. But first they have to perfect their act, this is a form of training to teach the skinheads of America how to be part of an SS. Experiment first in a few cities before deploying, gradually, everywhere. We're all going to have to submit to loyalty oaths, and we will all be forced to denounce our neighbors as illustrated in Lives of Others, which if you haven't watched it yet, now is the time when you have to, to get an idea what it was like in East Germany before the wall came down, and where we're headed. It still may not be too late yet, but it's getting close. #

Trump is president the same way people who do vibe coding are developers. I always thought he'd be much happier playing president on TV instead of actually being president. And people would think about this stuff more rationally if it were a TV show like Pluribus or Severance. Why did they really do what they did? Or the way we talk about the Mets or the Knicks and their various foibles. It's funny people have a clarity about fictional stuff that they don't have for real-world things like war, health insurance, the cost of eggs and gestapo tactics. #

A little fix that would make social web a lot more useful and less hate-filled and abusive... Make replies visible only to the person being replied to. If they feel the reply should be public, they can RT it.#

Another incredible use-case for ChatGPT. When it first came out Font Awesome was a total godsend. It took something every developer of graphic apps had to struggle with, and said basically "I can do that." They had a growing set of standard icons, it got better with every version. But some special icons haven't appeared in Font Awesome. There was a great icon on the original Mac, for a desk accessory, I don't remember which one. It was a flag, like the flag on a mailbox. If you put a piece of mail in the box you raise the flag, that way the postman knows to stop. When they pick up the mail they flip the flag down. On the early Mac it took an app that was wide and short, and made it wide and tall, revealing the ideas and data it kept for you. You can still have the icon, using ChatGPT. Have it generate your own icon using SVG. You get something every bit as good as a Font Awesome icon. So you can be creative in a new way. Whether this is art or not (of course it is) is beside the point. It's progress, evolution -- a way for users to make perfectly specified feature requests.#

Remember when OG metadata was new? 16 years ago. It's one of those things that's widely forgotten, but still widely in use. I just wrote a post on Bluesky that demonstrates. That could be a new feature in WordPress, or the decision whether or not to display it could be up to the reader app (in this case Bluesky). If it were up to the reader we might need a way to signal that to the reader from the CMS. In the new WordLand, we use the image as an icon. It's completely wrong to use it as an OG Metadata image in Bluesky -- realllly embarrassing (screen shot). #

I considered my Blogger of the Year award for 2025 very carefully, and yesterday did a podcast about my choice, David Frum, who is doing an outstanding job of adapting his work to the podcast medium, as it was intended to work. What finally made my decision easy was his last episode of the year, where along with fellow Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Warzel, they considered how podcasting works, and what if anything they should do to conform. The answer is -- don't conform. It isn't up to any single contributor to turn the tide, instead their only job is to be true to themselves, and learn from others and share what they've learned. Be a human-size blogger. I thought perhaps this represented my opportunity to speak to them, and help understand that there are tech people who want to work with them and enhance their freedom, rather than consume it. But we need their help to do it. They've settled on Substack, without realizing they're just hooking up with the same people who screwed them before (ie Twitter, then all the techies who have dinner with Trump). As they say -- doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is not particularly smart, and Frum is smart. I don't care if he roots for the Red Sox (I'm a Mets fan), right now we're on the same side. We love the United States, and what it has done for us, and for the world, and we are falling apart. It's not time to stay within our communities, it's time to do whatever we can to save the country we love so much, working together. #

Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the slurry-making machines. #

BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004.#

Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto -- watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing. #

Must-watch narrated bodycam video from Jan 6 Capitol riot. Maybe the saddest moment in American history, so far. #

Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! :-)#

Podcast: Blogger of the Year.#

I did a long video demo yesterday with a narrative about where WordLand is going. The audio quality sucks. And at the beginning I said I wasn't going to narrate, but I couldn't help myself. Turn the volume way up. WordLand has become a new kind of feed reader, it's totally building off FeedLand, I love the idea of apps building on other apps. It's exactly the kind of software we predicted, long before MCP's, with Frontier back in the 80s, 90s and 00s. #

Just heard an ad on WNYC-FM saying we should share news with them. That's a milestone. First time I've ever heard NPR say our purpose was anything other than giving them money. They could go even further -- support blogs and podcasts that cover the NYC area.#

I've tried a lot of different kinds of Keurig pods, but the best -- with the richest taste is Peet's. Just ordered a whole bunch more to try out. And btw, when I looked up Peet's on Google I found that it had been bought by Dr Pepper for (sit down please) $18 billion. I hope you didn't pass out. I always thought of Peet's as a hometown favorite, the underdog, but my lord so much money. No wonder the coffee is so good. #

I never was very good with PhotoShop and other bitmap image apps. Now I use ChatGPT, I just tell it what I want, like remove this bit and that bit, and it just freaking does it. This is how computers were meant to work. That's how I did the Peet's logo in the image in the previous post. And btw the people who are down on ChatGPT being used for graphics and videos are full of shit about it not having value. Some of us don't have the skill yet still would like to illustrate our ideas with images and videos. For those of us, the AI apps are a godsend. They're also pretty good I hear at providing medical advice. I've been using it for that pretty extensively. At my age health is not something you can ignore, and it helps to be informed. And with the healthcare system these days in the US being so limited, you don't really get to have a relationship with your doctor as we did in the past, so guess what, I bet ChatGPT is saving some lives. So if you don't like being seriously wrong about new tech, you should start seeing the advantages, not just the belief that it cancels freedom. If it does, and so far I don't see it, there's a lot of good that that compensates. There are always tradeoffs in evolution. #

Follow political news on my FeedLand news site. #

Do you feel powerless to communicate online unless it serves the interests of the people who own the networks you post to? Why not own your own means of distribution, managed as a co-op, and only responsible to you, as a member and customer. No VC, no billionaire, no government control.#

On Bluesky: I can't tell you how tired I am of copying and pasting the same text into five different silos. When will this ridiculous system that claims to be the web, get its shit together and start acting like the web (ie interop). #

Today feels like the day the war in Iraq began. Wars are easy to start, hard to end. They actually called Bush a "visionary" on MSNBC, they were so in awe of his courage, but that would end soon. And this time, no doubt Trump started the war with the approval of China and Russia, which will be left alone by the US in their conquest of Taiwan and Ukraine. Leaders of smaller countries must be wondering where they can hide from this. A very depressing moment. I've lived through two voluntary wars by the US, first Vietnam, then the post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now this war. #

The war in Iraq started in March 2003. That was also the month I arrived in Cambridge after driving cross-country from Woodside, CA. Because I did most of my blogging on scripting.com, I still have a good archive of how I experienced both those things. It's also the month we got the Harvard weblogs going, but they have not stood up so well. I wouldn't have predicted then that my personal blog would survive the system we started at one of America's great universities. #

BTW, I used to have a tradition in the early days of this blog to write new stuff about an important idea on January 1 each year. At some point I stopped doing that. Now I realized that unintentionally I have just written such a piece, below. There's a lot of good stuff in that piece and in the places it links to. See the web is still useful. You won't hear these ideas on CNN or MS.NOW or in the NYT, WP, or from any billionaires either. I'm not saying I'm right, I've definitely been wrong before. But I think I'm mostly right. ;-)#

Liked The Staircase on Netflix. I had watched it before but had forgotten all the different conflicting stories. It is a bit irritating, but I think that's an important part of the story. #

Loving my Keurig-style coffee maker. I've been stocking up on all kinds of pods. Favorite so far is hazelnut -- flavored, not real -- but really tasty. I never thought I'd want to try out all these different kinds of coffee. I wonder if I'm getting an espresso machine next. #

All the Scripting News OPML's for 2025 in one GitHub folder. An example of user-owned storage. The protocol that connects our services won't know or care how we're storing stuff behind the API. A great prototype is imho the WordPress wpcom API. #

A note to Josh Marshall, David Frum, Jay Rosen and Heather Cox Richardson, just a few of the political pundits I read. Now you all have seen up close the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley, also known as DOGE. They do this with investors' money. This was a preview of how they will govern, after Trump, when Silicon Valley is fully running the world. We need to get some tech background in your writing. The history of tech is very much the history of politics as we go forward. We had a merger, and you can and should incorporate our history in your understanding of US history. #

I'm enjoying the break between years, always get a lot of thinking and writing done in this period. Not much more to say but that's all for 2025. Bring on the next year. #

If you've had trouble unsubscribing from the nightly email, I fixed a big problem there this morning, so please try again. If the problem persists, here's a place to report. #

Manton Reece explains why Micro.blog uses Markdown. I use Markdown because Manton does. It's for interop. #

If I had billions of dollars I'd divest. And if my country did a good job of investing in education, health, voting rights, stuff like that, I'd just give most of it back to the country. Thanks for the education, and saving my life with medicine not just once but twice. Thanks for being such a cool country. If only we lived up to the promise, but now we'd certainly need to come up with another way of distributing the benefits to the country and its people. #

2016: Your human-size life. #

No one got any sleep in these parts last night, was like a non-stop tornado, but I did watch a couple of artsy movies that were really good. And this morning power was out and internet, and I thought for sure some trees had to be down, but only one was, a huge one, and I had to walk to the post office to use their phone to call a friend with a big saw and truck, and I wondered how he'd get rid of the tree, and this is how. First he chopped it up into bits with a saw, and then used the same plow he uses to get rid of the snow to push the tree parts off to the side of the road. And when I got home the internet was back on and I'm going to spend most of the rest of the day sleeping, maybe or drinking a load of coffee and trying to stay on a normal schedule.,#

I'm doing some really excellent work on WordLand II, which is almost starting to get useful. We should be doing a lot more than writing posts next year. It's helping that a few of us are using Instant Outlines in Drummer to coordinate work. I work so much better this way, but it's not something you can do on your own. #

"I don't have time for this." That might be the name of a podcast. I just ended one with that exact phrase, and it totally fits the way I feel about these rambling diatribes by the time I'm about to sign off. #

When you're buying a house, the most important thing to check is the roof. Get two inspections. Get three. A house with a good roof will keep you dry. A house with a shitty roof isn't really a house is it?#

The biggest contribution ChatGPT et al could make to software development, beyond what it has already done, which is enormous -- is help us come up with a new general purpose programming language which is a lot easier for human programmers to work with, esp over time. I work in one of the most complex environments imaginable -- browser apps talking to server apps in JavaScript. We could do so much better. And now we have a partner that knows all about all our languages, unlike any human being. Instead of having a lot of disconnected bubbles, it would be great if programmers could come together on a new language that make it easier for us to manage lots of software projects. #

I rated Common Side Effects as Loved, the second highest rating on Bingeworthy.#

Joni Mitchell wrote a sad and lovely Christmas song. #

I asked ChatGPT to put together a subscription list of student newspapers at American universities. Added it to lists.opml.org. #

It is Christmas Day, and last night the emails did not go out. I think I know what the problem is and if it's correct the emails should go out very shortly. Lucky that it's Christmas themed! Ho ho ho. (Actually on a second check, it appears they did go out. Glad to not have to deal with that. Whew.) #

Just realized I'm like a Black Lab. I always have to have a ball to chase, and really like it if someone says I'm a good boy. I think it really is that simple. Maybe it's different for other men, but I think a lot of us are just that simple. #

This time of year every day feels like Saturday. I love it. Why can't we always live like this?#

I got a Kuerig single cup coffee maker and it's perfect. Exactly what I needed. The coffee is great and hot, and one cup is what I usually want. So now I can have a cup of hot coffee when I'm up late and want to stay up for a while longer. Or if I have to be extra sharp for some development project I've been putting off. #