Busy day working on new RSS-based project. Still diggin!
#
- I’ve been trying to come up with a simple test that lets you know whether some software is on the web or if it just can be made to appear in a web browser. So here we go.#
- If you can hook up a piece of the app to the a piece of another app then it’s on the web. #
- This comes from the basic feature of linking, which is the unique feature of the web. #
- Every other feature that makes the web the web in my experience allows two things to be part of each other.#
- Comment here. #
I just said this to Claude: "I want to show people that RSS isn't just for news and podcasting. It can be for mindless social media rants too." ;-)
#Bluesky is having trouble keeping their network running. As a developer I empathize. As a user, it's beginning to be a problem. I am using it the way I used to use Twitter, taking notes for future blog posts, sharing a few linkblog feeds, DMing with people I work with, and want/need to keep going. I know about its lock-in problems, but at this time there's no open alternative that has the same collection of users who are easy enough to find. So if it stays unreliable I have to think about what to do about that. Every time I get a
403 Forbidden, I stop and think if this is the time to write a post? This was the time.
#
Imagine you were putting up a skyscraper in Manhattan. I lived in an area of the city, called Billionaire's Row, for nine years where I saw quite a few huge buildings go up from my living room window on the 50th floor. Now imagine you used a different plumbing system in every apartment, over 140 stories, with up to 15 residences per story. Different wiring. All the rooms are different shapes. How could you maintain such a building? I think ChatGPT might be able to do it but no human could. We need patterns to allow us to understand big things.
#
- What you don't hear about AI is that it doesn't know how human minds work, what our limits are, what we can do that they can't. It has no memory. This was hard to believe, but you have to tell it to keep things in some kind of memory, usually a Markdown file, then tell it to read it from another file. These are things humans just do. I may have to say it two or three times, but you will remember it if you're a normal human.#
- I know there are places you can leave an instruction to read it when it starts, but sometimes it doesn't do it. It could never, in its current state, figure out how to make a product that people want to use. Nor would a human be able to easily read the code it generates unless you work hard at teaching it how that works, and if you have to do that, you might as well do it yourself. #
- It never looks for prior art, in some contexts -- but in others, it's encyclopedic about prior art. You might find a function named returnError in one place that takes a string argument, where most of the other instances take an object that contains a string. How do I, as a human, work in an environment like that? #
- The users who vibe code who think they know how to make code people will want to use are making the same mistake student programmers make, they come out of school only having done student projects, which have very limited objectives. The real world is far more demanding. The real world populated by humans that is. Just some random thoughts as I try to create usable code working with Claude.#
- Perhaps what's needed is a Developing Better Developers program for pseudo-humans. #
I wrote about Jeopardy, Firefox, Matt, Silicon Valley and the
writer's web in a
long comment on Doc's blog. Here's a quote. "What we really need is interop. If the source is free that’s great. But right now we have silos everywhere and I want WordPress, perhaps along with Firefox to help us boot up the writer's web."
#
I want writing to be as
open as podcasting. The pattern is ridiculously easy to apply. If this were on a a high school math test, it would be too easy, everyone would get it right. How do you make text work like podcasting? 1. You look for a brain-dead obvious
choice for text. 2. And then attach it to a
format that's really good for transmitting packets of text. And then write software that works really well with the obvious choices. The user retains ownership and control of their writing, pays for the storage, and can give access to the apps they want to use. They can also, for a fee, point a domain name to one of the nodes in their storage. This would radically change the economics for independent developers. Now we don't have to resell storage. Products can be developed on our kitchen tables. There is an explosion of interest in developing software. Think it through -- how are they supposed to deploy their apps on the web? We need a BigCo that thinks like an entrepreneurial startup. How many times have I written
this screed? Geez I don't like to think about that.
#
After last night's game I now remember why I was so relieved last season when the Knicks were eliminated in the semifinals of the NBA playoffs. It’s an exhausting sport. And the sad truth is the Knicks are getting beaten by Atlanta. Or maybe it's not so sad, because then, after they are eliminated, I can tune into the playoffs with a detached interest, and save my kvetching for the Mets, and there is plenty to complain about there, LGM. #- I almost never question a coach's decisions, because they have complicated jobs -- but -- why didn't they put their top defenders, Mitchell Robinson or KAT on the court with 12 seconds left in the fourth quarter with the Knicks ahead by 1. Instead they put in all these fast small players, as if they were planning on giving up a bucket and then quickly running down the court with what little time remained and scoring a quick one to win the freaking game. At least that's what I imagined they were doing. Why not just hold them right there and run out the clock and win the game?? It all happened so fast. (I asked ChatGPT about this theory and it says I'm wrong, they put in the small players because they can switch more easily, and that's likely how Atlanta was planning to defend their shooter.)#
- The Knicks were out of timeouts, so they couldn't stop the clock. So I guess kind of predictably, esp the way things were going last night, the Hawk with the Hot Hand, CJ McCollum, gets the ball, dribbles a bit, and nails the shot that wins the game and now the Knicks are down 2-1 in a series they were supposed to win handily. #
- I didn't and don't buy the idea that the Knicks are destined to appear in the finals this year, when you boast about it, or expect it, god has a way of goofing on you, making sure you don't get it. The Knicks don't have it, because as great as Brunson is, he sucks all the energy out of the rest of the team, and when he's having a bad night, there really isn't an alternative. It's not a good configuration. As in the Melo years, Brunson doesn't make it as the captain, imho. #
- Melo had the size and talent, but he's sweet labrador retriever type player, the sidekick of the engine of the team, somone like LeBron James, Steph Curry or Giannis Antetokounmpo. Look at how successful Melo was in the Olympics, where he could be #2 to LeBron's #1. #
- It's not just about skill and hard work, it's about does the team follow you. That isn't something you can learn, you either have it or you don't. And of course I will torture myself in this mode, wondering in vain how my Knicks will fare in this quarter, or that game -- until I get to retire from the NBA for the year, and instead get a big fat bellyache on about the Mets. #
I've written about
Firefox many times over the last 20 years or so.
#
Why Firefox? There's a moment now when the web could benefit from leadership. There's a chance to rebuild text in the web around the use of AI systems. But almost every company that could be a leader in this space isn't thinking about what they can do for the web, instead are focused on their corner of it. For a company like Firefox whose product everyone understands is at the center of what the web is, they keep avoiding this obvious role. The assumption I guess is they need revenue and there's no money to be made from selling browser software. But there is a lot of money to be made, imho, recurring revenue, offering services to users that can foster growth of the web, for which Firefox can lead in developing great features in an open way so other browser companies can share from their innovation. That's the Firefox I got to know in the waning days of MSIE when it was plagued by malware and we all needed, desperately, a good alternative. The one written by Blake Ross, Dave Hyatt and Joe Hewitt. We have to step out into entrepreneurial space, and I guarantee you there's money to be made here, recurring revenue and trust by users will be something that will be highly valued. But we all have to do it together, something the tech industry doesn't have in its DNA, and it's high time we got some of that.
#Let's say you're in Claude Code and you think of something you want to post on your blog. How many steps before you're ready to click the Post button and get back to work? I don't think there's a way to create something that works this way, you'd have to switch out of Claude or ChatGPT. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do it right there? (Update, I just worked it out with ChatGPT, apparently it is possible to do this.)
#
Yesterday I threw a
question out there. "If the web were a platform for writers, how would it work?" I left out specifics, because any specifics I provide might cut off interesting answers. There are three elements in the question: web, platform and writers. The answer must say something about all three. Another way of saying the same thing -- "You're using the web to make the platform to serve the writers."
#Had lunch today with
Neal Smoller, our local pharmacy owner. Brilliant young guy who's totally energized by Claude Code.
#
- I wonder how many people are working on clones of existing software with an eye toward making a much more evolvable and customizable version with AI at the core of the model. #
- You can make the same software easily, with Claude's help, and if you think about the things users want to customize, you can give them a toolkit for doing exactly what they want in prompts, as opposed to code, plugins, etc.#
- So you don't vibe-code it, you start with an app that's designed to be beautiful on the inside, easy to understand for a new maestro of software, but something they can evolve with prompts so they can be working on something else intently.#
- We provide beautiful code for aspiring symphonists to learn from. #
- I remember when I first got my hands on the Unix source back in 1978. I was blown away by what was possible. I had largely been a Fortran programmer up till then. The pieces don't fit together so well on their own, I learned, you have to move them into place and for that a lot of trying-things-out has to happen.#
- Why am I thinking about this? I have friends who are not programmers who are pretty close to where I was then, waiting to see how real software is made. And they can have that experience soon. I love where we are now in tech. #
- BTW, on its own Claude writes some really shitty code. ;-)#
If the web were a platform for writers, how would it work?
#BTW the "open" web has a chance to come back around the AI rewrite of all our software that's underway now. If we build the new systems entirely around web connections, with each part replaceable, we can have as much "open" as we want. Products like Bluesky will look like they bet on the wrong horse if we all have choice everywhere. It's not as strange as you think. Opportunities come along every time things change as radically as they are changing now.
#
- I gave the new ChatGPT image maker a whirl, it's supposed to be more thoughtful and realistic. #
- The prompt: “A turkey in plastic with supermarket label with text and fine print. The branding is Really Simple brand Turkey. The motto, ‘turkey for simple people.‘“#
A really simple brand turkey from ChatGPT.
#
I applied to speak at
WebCamp Europe but didn't make the cut. I did see that
Jonathan Desrosiers is giving a
talk about the web, and his pitch is right on. Please go listen to him if you're in
Kraków in June. I have been developing
software around the ideas of building the web, software that runs on top of WordPress, which imho should be playing a much bigger role in the web. I have a track record here of actually founding new tech ecosystems, but as time goes by people forget how this stuff is made, I think. I'll probably try again with WordCamp US and of course Canada again, I had such a good time there last year.
#I asked ChatGPT if the term
glass palace had been used to talk about pre-PC computer data centers.
Yes.
#How do you subscribe to a feed in Feedly? Had to ask Google. Click on
Follow Sources in the sidebar. It never occurred to me that Subscribe would become Follow. The screen that comes up when you click doesn't offer a clue of how to subscribe to the URL I have on the clipboard. I did enter the URL of the site's feed but that didn't work, and it brought up a screen where they want money. I think I understand what happened here.
#
- I'm creating new software in ways I never would have conceived of last year. I see solutions to one of the most significant code management problems we used to have, our inability to remember how our code works, unless the app is very small and they never seem to be. This is why you don't see much inspiration in app updates after a couple of years. Everyone has moved on and no one who remains can figure out how it works. But that has changed now, bigtime.#
- The next product I develop should be able to continue to evolve much more easily thanks to Claude Code. #
- "Hey Claude, people want this feature to be optional (or configurable). Here's how that should work." #
- In a human-based development organization, even if you ran the show, you might wait a very long time and it might never come. With Claude, I can have the new functionality before I know what to do with it. #
- I called my second company UserLand. The idea was that we'd develop software for users, always be thinking of them, and listening and give them more and more power to shape the way their computers worked. It was what I felt was missing from software in the 80s, a focus on the users creating their own future. So back then we designed the software for them. We were hoping they'd get to implement it too.#
- Now we're going to try again. 😄#
I'm doing a programming project with Claude and it's great, like a puzzle, finding out what works for me and building something I normally wouldn't have time to maintain, but -- Claude has nothing but time for stuff like that. I'm building it to pass off, a common code structure that we both understand and I know how to evolve because I design my code for evolution. And it's going well. But then I realized it's the same Claude I ask general questions of so I tried this. "I would love to pass off
wpIdentity to an open source development organization. The ideal would be the WordPress's community. Is there any precedent for this, one community acquiring a new product?" You can try typing that prompt in yourself and see what you get. One thing I learned is that the Apache Foundation was set up for this. And Claude is pretty firm that WordPress is not set up for that.
#
- A few months ago, some guys from Netscape came out with a way to get AI to pay called Really Simple Licensing or RSL. #
- I was really put off by the way they took the name that everyone knows came from me with no help from anyone. Maybe I could have done something about it, instead I found a way to have some fun. #
- With Really Simple versions of granola, spaghetti, ketchup, cola, ravioli, baby shampoo and books. And it's time for another one!#
Introducing the all-new Really Simple Coffee Mug!
#- BTW, I don't think RSL was a good name. Simplicity is not its main selling point, it's money! It's about making you rich. If I'm not mistaken. #
- But syndication, in 2002 -- was getting much more complicated than it needed to be. So "Really Simple Syndication" was supposed to be a little funny because it was not like the acronyms that tech usually comes up with. #
- It didn't pretend to be anything but a syndication format. Complexity is the enemy of good software. You have to work at making something no more than it is. It's a struggle. And you don't add complexity wihtout having a really good reason for doing it. #
The people who call themselves Mets fans who are sad when the Mets don't make the playoffs are really Yankees fans.
#Last week I released a new toolkit that includes
docs for your AI programming partner. Ask it to read the docs, and then tell it about the editor you want. It works with WordPress sites via the wpcom API via the wpIdentity server. A new frontier. ;-)
#
If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would talk about. Then do it again. Ideally it would be something that reporters would like, that they could see themselves using. As you know, my Big Idea is give people choice of editors, for writers. But I just thought of a technical thing they could do and might make no sense, but how about running Claude skills. So anything a Claude app can do a WordPress plugin can do. I just built my first skill, and they can be Node.js apps. That's a pretty broad range of features you can support inside WordPress. Also ask users to tell you what would turn them on. Couldn't hurt, sometimes they have ideas that you as a developer never would think of. I made a few million dollars from an idea a user gave me once. Not kidding.
#Scott Hanson who works with me on all my projects is doing his WordPress development using Codex. Here's a
plug-in they wrote. Loving this. So we're all turning this corner. There are so many things I want to do, but keep hitting bumps. I recover and come back, so far. I go slowly. The bot wants to run at a breakneck pace, which I know from tons of experience gets you a worthless result. One of the byproducts of my current project is a /opml skill that reads and writes .opml files in a way that's compatible with all the apps that use OPML. Pretty sure of that since I published the first OPML file in 2000 or so. Not sure how I'm going to release the skill, but I want everyone to have it.
#
WordPress has remained mostly constant for its whole life, at least from the point of view of this outsider. But now the world its embedded in is turning upside down and WordPress must change, but no one really knows how that change will manifest.
#The
opmlProjectEditor explainer needed a light edit. It should make a lot more sense now if you're a newcomer. Perhaps the most important thing is that it now includes an example that you can open in Drummer to see how it works in an outline editor. OPML has become a really important format for apps that use RSS, but it's far more broadly adaptable. It's a good package for a whole app, and you can teach your tools to use the common structure to make it easier to share it with others, to keep a repo current, and to deploy the resulting code.
#
- I've been designing and developing software like WordPress for over thirty years. I have stong opinions about where the product should have gone, but mostly I've not been talking about that, because I don't want to interfere with what Matt is doing. #
- I've known him since he was a teenager in Silicon Valley, a boy wonder to whom the web has always been there, whereas to people my age, it was a miracle that came along to put down all the dominant BigCo's who made it impossible for individuals to create.#
- But I've never believed in open source the way Matt does, as I explained last week. I think there needs to be competition in the writer's UI for WordPress, and in all other areas of the user interface. I think that's what it suffers from. There isn't enough diversity. Creativity is crowded into a very small space, plug-ins. Because there's an API that covers the full functionality of product, there's no technical reason it has to be this way. I believe in competition, because it encourages listening. People don't listen to their friends, I've discovered, but people do listen to their competitors. #
- The community is paralyzed, it can't fix basic problems that have been there forever. Gutenberg was a good idea for a site designer and a not-good approach for writers. But it should always be a choice for writers, if they like Gutenberg. There should be no single recommended editor for WordPress.#
- Imho, there are ways to navigate this landscape, but it's going to require immediate and radical restructuring. #
- WordPress is not the last hope of the web and the web is not going to disappear in our lifetimes. Everything is built on it. People who say it's about to disappear are alarmist purveyors of clickbait. You'll still be able to ship apps for the web five and ten years from now. But WordPress is an important part of the web, and I don't mean because it runs a certain percentage of all the sites, which is imho a meaningless stat. It's a uniquely valuable API and an implementation that's debugged and scales and is profitable, and can sustain a large organization supporting it. It's one of those things we could lose, but we'd be much poorer if that happened. #
- WordPress is unique in the products that came to us from Silicon Valley. It's universally useful and it doesn't lock you in.#
- If a product like EmDash were to be the successor it claims to be, well there goes all the open stuff, because I don't think they have it in their blood the way Matt and WordPress do. #
- My conclusion after being a software developer since the early days of Unix and personal computers, and at times being part of the Silicon Valley -- there have to be a variety of UIs for WordPress, where all our work is compatible, regardless of what our tools look like, the approaches for users could be radically different. It's been a monoculture, and imho that's the problem. Break it apart, yet retain the compatibility -- that's the most powerful position possible in tech.#
- PS: After writing this piece, I looked for early references to Matt on my blog, and came across this piece he wrote in 2006. He totally understood what was going on in RSS land. Here's another Matt post from 2010, which after reading I concluded that he saw WordPress as I saw it and still do, as the rightful heir to the legacy of Twitter. And Matt and team did develop the API he talks about in 2010 as hypothetical, it's there now, ready to lead us out of the darkness. #
Today the work with Claude is much better, though when we got started it was even worse than yesterday. The key to getting on track was to figure out why it worked so well in previous projects and fell apart with this one. In each of the others, I passed off an existing project for it to convert or build on. This time we started with something it had created without a "starter." So I took all the random bits we had and organized into the
opmlProjectEditor format we had
specified back in early March. It's how all my projects since 2013 are organized, so it's a good fit for me, and also for Claude. So now I'm going to pass back a package that's ready to be worked on collaboratively. The other thing is I switched to the Opus 4.6 model from Sonnet 4.6. So I've made it to 11AM and feel like I've already accomplished something today. The problem was yesterday we were spinning our wheels, and that doesn't work for me. I'm a very directed developer. ;-)
#
A glitch in the matrix. The app that keeps
daveverse.org in sync with scripting.com has been offline since Friday, so I'm republishing all the posts since then. They will all appear to have been posted today on daveverse. As they say --
still diggin! #I updated
sally.scripting.com to support https, and updated it with posts from scripting.com in 2023-2026. I was using it as an example of prior art of user interface for Claude. I figured restoring this app on my own would be penance for believing that Claude was anywhere near as smart as I am. Not even close. Not today at least. Grrr.
#I've come to the conclusion, perhaps temporarily, that Claude can't work on a programming project with an experienced developer. It doesn't check its work, it'll think it's found the problem, makes a change, or worse causes you to do a lot of work so it can make a change. It doesn't use the information it gives you, can't even remember what was in a bug report less than one screen above. I could have done the work I coached it through through the morning, with a thoroughly inadequate result, in an hour at most. At least today it couldn't learn from prior art, and couldn't follow basic instructions. It's weird though because I'm really suprised how little it knows about the scientific method or even has been trained in how to work with others. I seem to recall situations where it was extremely good at reading code. Not a totally wasted session, let's see what I can learn from it.
#
We reached a milestone this morning, completing the project to add a Gutenberg version of the wpEditorDemo app. Claude did the programming on the new version. It required changes to the server app, which I made. It took 2.5 days to do the work, which was more than I thought it would. A lot of was learned. Now I'm figuring out what my next project will be.
#Heard a report on NPR re why the Dems might win the mid-terms in November. They mentioned gas prices but not concentration camps for immigrants. They mentioned inflation but not the military occupation of Minneapolis and DC. They also forgot to mention that Trump keeps threatening to nuke Iran.
#
BTW one thing you haven't heard, because the press is so self-centered, is that as you get deeper into the AI environment, you get smarter. Not just better informed, that's what the web has been doing for 30+ years. The AI stretches your mind the way PCs did initially. It makes you smarter. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the (virtual) people we want working with/for us. There are very few
human people who seem interested in collaborating. They all want to blaze their own trail, and if you want to improve their product you have to reproduce the whole freaking thing. The web had a different philosophy, adopted from Unix, not the tech industry. We want to work with others. And we do. And it seems there's an opportunity to cast the entire AI push in the same light, so that the individual developer has the power to make industry standard products. Without the
usurpious business models of the Silicon Valley VCs.
#The demo for Gutenberg is at
demo.gutenberg.land. Easy to remember, and makes the point. If you want Gutenberg instead of
WordLand, you can have it. Hopefully this reinforces what my goals are here. I do not want to favor any one kind of editor. I want every kind of editor here. I want there to be a web of great editors that runs on the web.
#BTW, when playing around with Gutenberg, I wonder why it doesn't allow me to move blocks around as if it were an outliner? Or maybe it does and I don't know the UI for that? John Johnston
says yes it does work like an outliner.
#
- The logic of Cory Doctorow's enshittification model applies to government too. #
- Both political parties view the electorate as sources of money or people who are manipulated by ads and PR bought with the money. #
- The wants and needs of people, in both government and social media, have nothing to do with anything. #
- In both cases they work for the benefit of the funders, only. #
- It's just a business. And users and voters realize that, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. #
- Voters attach to any company or person who sounds like they get it and agree and want to fix it. In politics as in tech there are people who actually do want to fix it. We thought that the web would do that for politics, but the users gravitated to the enshittified spaces. And the developers all acted selfishly and wouldn't work with each other. Now the hope is that with AI tools, individual developers can maintain codebases as big and complicated as the ones maintained by the VC-backed companies. No one talks about this. We should. #
- I've now done two projects with Claude Code. I added a feature to the server running behind WordLand, and adapted wpEditorDemo to work have a second example, using Gutenberg as the editing user interface. Haven't released the Gutenberg app yet, that should happen today, Murphy-willing.#
- I had never written a Gutenberg app before, btw. Claude figured all that out. For most of the project I didn't look at the JavaScript app it created. When I finally did look I was delighted to see that it used the same coding style as I use, developed over many years. It's like programming in overdrive.#
- I had to do the testing for Claude in the second case because it can't test apps that run in the browser. So it was giving me checklists of things to do and I'd report back on what happened. Still, a lot faster and easier than doing it on my own. It's a very good, tireless and super well-informed programming partner.#
- Not sure what my third project will be, probably going to stick with something small. The big move will be working with FeedLand in this mode. There are a bunch of changes that should make it run faster. Also might be possible to make it easier to install for people who are using AI tools. And since most of the action takes place on the server, I think I can get Claude to do better testing than I, a human can do, one who gets tired pretty darned quickly. That's when things get really interesting, not that the whole thing isn't really interesting, most interesting dev work I've done since the early days of the web.#
I'm working with Claude today to finish Gutenberg Land. Figuring it out as we go along. It can't run the app itself because it's browser-based. I look forward to a project that runs on a server so it can run it locally and we can really make things hum. This, if I guess correctly, is how Jake is working with Headless Frontier. He just got the Frontier debugger working. Why? I asked, given that we have bigger more immediate priorities, like getting Manila running on Digital Ocean (what a trip that will be) -- he explained that's because he wants the AI bot to use the freaking debugger.
#
Hacker News isn't a
software masterpiece. All the pieces have to be there to make something as real as HN happen.
#
The president of the United States is spinning around acting like a NYC real estate jumbo who accidentally was elected president and after only five years in office has realized a whole new level of trolling. It started with cable news, then went to Twitter, then masked American gestapo killing protestors on TV for everyone to see, and then starting a war with Iran of all countries. #- I'm sure his generals suggested that at the same time as they were bombing Iran proper, that they should send in a few boatloads of Marines to occupy the Strait of Hormuz. When the Iranians weren't so desperate, it might have been relatively easy to take it over. I'm sure we've spent billions over the years on what to do if we had to attack Iran, not like now when things like this are done on a whim. #
- Anyway, what a movie. The audacity of the writers. One things for sure we'll all be watching at 8PM Eastern to see if he blows up the world tonight or whatever. #
The voice of America
channel on Bluesky.
#
Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly -- in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.
#
Excellent podcast discussion with John Stewart and Heather Cox Richardson. I desperately wanted to get in the conversation. I think they missed something important and came soooo close. Trump isn't only a TV star, he's a blogger. Comes naturally to him. Why wasn't Obama transformative in the same way? First black president. You get to be the first black president by being utterly brilliant and infinitely careful. There wasn't a single spontaneous moment in his presidency, though there were scripted moments when playing that role. And some amazingly brilliant speech-making. He's perfect, but that's because there were severe limits on what he could get away with. #- On the web the ethos is "Come as you are, we're just folks." That's not Obama. #
- Who also had to be hugely careful? Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Not Joe Biden who's famous for his gaffes. #
- Trump doesn't give a shit what you think, that's why he's so good on Twitter. Trump was a TV star but right now it's more important to be a natural born blogger. #
- I was beating this drum ever since Trump appeared on Twitter. We need to be much better at this. We're still in the hole. At least Newsom knows there's a problem but imho he isn't the answer. We need someone who's bitter and funny, like Joan Rivers or Don Rickles. You don't need to understand government or politics, just show up and be a kind of lovable asshole 24 hours a day. #
- People could relate to Trump. Trump, even though he's not a great dancer, doesn't mind doing it if you think it's funny. He's a total entertainment package. Very random. #
- Wouldn't hurt for the next Dems to to find someone like that. Hopefully not to run for president. #
- HCR said Trump was Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs -- I LOL'd totally.#
WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports
all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026.
#Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is
what I see on the Posts page.
#Does EmDash have a feed reader built in??
#Suggestion for feed reader devs. Put a
Check Now button on the page for a single feed. It shouldn't overburden your system because it's just doing an HTTP read and a little parsing. Not much more work than reloading a page in the browser. The benefit is you can see a current view of the news according to a specific feed without waiting. Makes the web roughly instantaneous for every feed, even ones that don't support rssCloud.
FeedLand has such a button.
#
- Things are changing a lot. Huge flow of ideas, and some catching up to do. Mind bombs in every direction.#
- Last night while watching sports I learned via ChatGPT about MCP. #
- Here's what it can do and people *are* using it for this#
- You could turn ChatGPT into an easy editor for WordPress posts.#
- Just as I have developed the habit of getting it to create a handoff.md file when I'm done with a session, I could write something with ChatGPT helping, I don't ever do that myself but i might, if it were easy. and when I'm ready to publish, I'd say "Please publish this on my daveverse site now." I might specify a category or two, or set defaults, it's good at that stuff. I've taught Claude to write code in my style, so I can maintain it (to answer Aral Balkan's question on Mastodon).#
- We create little hierarchies everywhere we go. #
- So many places. I have no room for new ones, yet I have to make room because there are people there I want to work with. Now I have to manage it. #
- If an alien came to Earth and asked why we don't just create a way for a little hierarchy in one place to appear where ever you want it. #
- It's not out of reach, it would take two or three developers with enough imaginative users to get the ball rolling. #
- Write down the features you'd have to support, concisely and simply, and provide conventions for making those hierarchies accessible through a very simple format, in JSON or XML or anything isomorphic, and then we start building. #
- And start releasing apps that work together. That's what I want to do. #
- WordLand is supposed to be the first such app. But maybe I need to go even simpler for example code. Thinking about it.#
The aliens were confused by the inefficent way we were organizing our ideas.
#
- This is something we can and should research. #
- Let's give one of the ai apps a fairly good idea for an app we want to use, and help it -- not by coding, just by answering questions about how it will work, and Iterating over the product until it works like we want it. Sometihng simple, like perhaps a text editor for Mastodon. Something that isn't squished in a tiny little text box, and has icons for bold, underline, links, etc. It could be useful. #
- Then let's look at the code with an open mind. I think i've given it enough examples of good maintainable code that I could get it to produce maintainable code. #
- This was in reply to a Mastodon post by Aral Balkan. #
Please follow me at my new Twitter address:
bullmancuso. Whatever anyone thinks of the company the product is still unique, there are people and communities there that I need to communicate with, and I just don't have that kind of network anywhere else.
#My first
real post in the New Dave On Twitter, or N-DOT.
#Yesterday I
wrote about AI introducing doubt with something as fundamental as how software is created now with the advent of AI software that can be used effectively to write software. Behind that I wondered if the open source developers of WordPress had changed their methodology? Is their codebase managed by ChatGPT now or Claude.ai? Not only did I get the answer to that question overnight (yes, they have made the change), but there was an announcement of a new WordPress competitor, something that hasn't come along in decades, actually. It's called
EmDash from CloudFlare. I read their announcement, and then asked ChatGPT to walk through an analysis of it with me. Here's a link to the
conversation, hope you can read it. It understood my concerns. Is this something that can work with my product WordLand. Short answer: No, not as-is. It apparently doesn't support the wpcom api what we use to connect to WordPress. By design, you can import WordPress sites into EmDash, but they don't interop with each other. It's for moments like this that I have my
WordPress news FeedLand flow. Already there has been some
analysis. No doubt anything written today is going to see sketchy in the days to come, first impressions don't usually end up meaning much, even so I'm anxious to read what other people think. Meanwhile I'm thinking that maybe I should shift gears back to working on FeedLand, thinking that the WordPress world is too shaky now to try to introduce something new there. Likelihood of success is decreasing every day it seems.
#Continuing, isn't it a shame that CloudFlare didn't take a different approach? What if they had created a fantastic WordPress runtime, which seems to be where most of their effort went, and that's where their expertise lies, not in crafting new user experiences. A service you could buy from CloudFlare, along with all the other services, that does a fantastic job of running WordPress sites. The customer wouldn't need to know how it worked behind the scenes. Yes, that would still be competiting with existing WordPress vendors, they make money off runtimes, but for the users it would mean they could keep using WordPress the way they always have, and the result would run better. That they didn't do it this way, that's it's all-or-nothing, might turn out to be the reason the product doesn't take off. It's a serious consideration. On the other hand there probably are a few WordPress users that would like to try something new out, esp if the cost of conversion is near zero (which they kind of claim it is).
#
When I think of "Slack" my brain immediately translates it to "AOL." I'm not kidding.
#
The perfect app for an AI to do for you is a demo app. Yesterday I wrote about 
