Big snow day in the east. I thought it was going to be heavy snow but it's actually really light. The shoveling is easy. I'm getting good at it. Right now I think this storm was a lot less than they said it would be, but I also think to some extent, dealing with big snow is getting somewhat routine? #

If you want to read something good, go with yesterday's piece about the web and evolution. A lot of things came together for me there. #

If you want to listen to something good, pick up the latest podcast. Two purposes. 1. Tell the story of how I lost my Twitter/X account, hoping it makes its way to someone at the company who can turn it back on. 2. Illustrates how we could use AI to make customer service work better than it does. A real killer app imho. Right now the tech industry reputation is pretty awful. Why not do something that visibly makes people's lives better now, and makes money. People are pretty nervous about AI. And so far you have to be a scientist of some kind to really appreciate it. But the internet as a place of business, education and health care is a big global mess. #

The killer app of AI is customer service. A podcast about just that. #

New podcast episode where I explain how I lost my Twitter account and how this is exactly the kind of thing that AI can do economically, esp for people who pay actual money for your service. I can't buy anything from you if I can't use my account. #

Poll: Do you have a blog? Results.#

Query: I have not done any vibe coding and have a question for those who have. Suppose you request a change in an app you've been working on with the AI for a while, adding features, changing things around based on learning and testing, which is generally what happens after you've been working on something new. Here's the question. What happens when you ask for a change that requires the codebase to be reorganized. How did that go? Do the AIs even know that's possible or do they just pile on special cases? #

What happened to polling? I had a poll app for a while, then Twitter came out with one and I switched to that. I don't know if Twitter still has it, but it would be bad form to require something at Twitter to engage with me here. How do you do polling, or do you?#

I just remembered why I love the United States of America.#

Updated version of FeedLand Docker Compose. It's now possible to run FeedLand on a local machine on a private network. #

I am going to try again to open up the editing side of OPML. It's gotten pretty famous in RSS-land, but people don't know there are editors for OPML, and some which work pretty well with subscription lists, and could be made to work even better. Drummer can run scripts in JavaScript, so users can customize. I'm going to make an effort myself to start using Drummer to edit subscription lists and see what comes up. #

I'd like to have an OPML subscription list with feeds with news about specific feed-based products. I started a thread on the reallysimple repo for people to post links to such feeds. Once I have enough feeds, I'll publish the URL of the subscription list. We should, in this community, of all communities, a good way to communicate about developments. Too many good ideas get lost without this. #

I think the really big money in AI will be helping all the commerce sites get competitive again. Their sites are breaking, and are anemic compared to what you can do with AI. I think the WordPress community is in great position to get a huge amount of business here because many of these people are your customers. If you're a WordPress developer I'd love to hear what you think. #

If you're using OPML for your blogroll, here's an unofficial place to let us know what you're doing. #

I've taught ChatGPT and Claude.ai how to properly indent code so I can paste it into my outliner, and it will represent the structure correctly. I just got it to do the same thing with HTML code I copied from the Chrome debugger. Pasted it into the outline. Have a look. #

President Obama going to the NBA All-Star game made the freaking All-Star game worth something. Perfect place for him to show up. #

It's interesting to see the ATProto solution to a problem we solved in RSS-land a few years ago, how to include Markdown along with other source formats (HTML, OPML).#

They all say podcasting‘s open period is over and one or another huge billionaire-owned platform is the new owner of podcasting. This time it's YouTube. How many times has this happened? Many. But not enough for journalism to respect the power of the people. So here we go again.#

Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus, publisher of Pagemaker, died. At least that's what I'm seeing on various social networks. No mention of his passing in the News tab on Google, or on Wikipedia. Pagemaker was a milestone product, it was the first popular desktop publishing app on the Mac, the first to really make use of the graphic OS and laser printing. We worked with Aldus on scripting via Frontier. The ability to automate Pagemaker and then Quark XPress (its main competitor) was very important in the prepress market. I once said no one wants that (referring to Pagemaker) just shows how little I know. There are good reasons to believe that one product saved the Mac and Apple. #

I wrote a this.how doc a few years about with some of the lessons I've learned doing work on web standards. #

I would like to have an OPML subscription list containing the feeds of all RSS-based products. So when they update everyone can see what they did. I'd also like to encourage people to post screen shots so we can get an idea of what the product does before installing it. Maybe it's for a platform we don't use? Let's have a new practice where we all know what everyone is doing. #

Just noted that Brent mentioned FeedLand (my own product) that does things differently. Thank you. I don't read most of the pieces that come in via RSS. I scroll through the updates, and if something catches my eye, I stop, read the first part, and then if my interest continues, I read the rest. That's the way I've always read news, going back to the kitchen table at my childhood home where we subscribed to the NY Times, print edition (this was long before the web) and we all sat around the table in the morning reading it and telling each other what we found. News isn't like email. But FeedLand does have a mailbox reader, patterned after Brent's NetNewsWire (only steal from the best). There are times when that's what you want. And mostly I wanted to thank Brent for the mention. BTW, that's not the only new idea in FeedLand. Let's get to know each others' products. That's one of the mistakes we made last time -- thinking each of our products was a self-contained universe. We are part of a community that grew from the web. So by definition we are all just part of a very big world. All our products work together, and to preserve that we as people must all work together too. #

New account on Twitter: DWiner43240. The old one dating back to the dawn of time is disabled, so at least the new owners can't post anything there, if I understand correctly. #

Yesterday, I had to ship an envelope to the UK and got caught in dead ends at the Fedex and DHL sites. One of them said my zip code wasn't in the town I live in. How do you get past that?? These companies are losing business because their systems are broken. Maybe they worked at one time. I used ChatGPT as I often do to get help on one of these antiquated sites. And while ChatGPT has the technology and Fedex has the info, they just have to get together and upgrade the user experience, and eventually of course the AI version of the UI becomes the real one. #

Back when I ran a software company I'd help the team understand why they should be very very nice to our customers. "Those people have our money in their pockets." It generally got a laugh partially because I was their boss, but I like to think also because it's the truth. #

BTW, people make the same mistake with AI that we make with every new tech. We focus on the creators not the users. As users we are learning a new skill, how to specify our needs precisely. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know.#

Paywalls that require you to subscribe to an Atlanta news org when you don’t live in Atlanta prob don’t generate much revenue. Why not instead charge per article. Like a toll you pay on a road you drive on once every few years. On further thought, I wouldn't even have an exception for Atlanta residents. If they start spending more money than a subscription costs, you could offer a subscription then, as a way to save money. Kind of the way Amazon lets you buy a certain amount of coffee beans without requiring you to sign up for monthly delivery. They do tell you how much you'd save if you subscribed. Everyone appreciates a chance to save money, but still might not want the commitment. And asking someone from upstate NY to subscribe to the Atlanta Journal Constitution is a total bullshit. An insult to both our intelligences.#

My Twitter account is owned. I can't even see what people are doing with it because you have to be signed on (apparently) to read stuff on Twitter nowadays. I wish current Twitter management would put it out of its misery. Served me well for approx 20 years. Let's clean up the mess. Thanks for your attention this matter.#

Update. I've been able to create an account on Twitter, but it's not @davewiner. If you're on Twitter, it would help if you'd RT the post. Thanks!#

My Twitter account has been hijacked. I can't log on, or change the password. I can't communicate with the company, so I'll try here. Please shut down my account, davewiner. To my friends who have Twitter accounts, if you see a post from davewiner on Twitter, please reply and let the people who see it know that it isn't from me. #

Braintrust query. Every once in a while I get reports from people who looked something up on my blog's Daytona search engine saying that where they expected dates they see things like this: NaN. The reason you see that is that the archive has a mistake in it, where there was supposed to be a date there was something else. Usually I shrug it off, yes there are mistakes in the archive, 30+ years of OPML files, it's a miracle there aren't more errors. Then I realized since all this stuff is on GitHub, people could help with this, by instead of sending me the report, post a note on GitHub, here -- saying you searched for this term and this is what I saw. Provide the term and a screen shot of what you saw. And then other people who have some extra time, could look through the archive, find the post, and then show me what needs to be fixed. I would then fix it, and over time the archive would get fixed. I posted a note here on the Scripting News repo, if you want to help, bookmark that link, and when you see an error, post the note and we can get going. #

When Manton or Doc show up in my blogroll, and they do update fairly regularly, I always click the wedge to see what they say. I can see the first 300 chars of each post in a popup. If it's interesting I click the link to read the full post and any comments. Now I want it coming back to me. My linkblog is cross-posted to Manton's site -- micro.blog, which has thousands of users. I have no way of knowing if anyone has commented on them, but if there were a feed I'd add it to my blogroll. So it would be great to have a feed of all the comments on my posts on micro.blog. Would fit into my flow perfectly. This goes all the way back to the beginnings of RSS, where we called it "automated web surfing." I don't know where people are talking about my stuff, but a well-placed feed can make up for that. #

News must be better defended, decentralized, unownable, all parts replaceable. The current situation was preventable. Same problem the social web has.#

BTW: NaN stands for Not A Number.#

I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It's all out there for the looking and breathing. Lift the hood on a car. Look at all those wires and hoses, what do they do. I hope they don't kill me. Whoever made the decision at Microsoft or Firefox or wherever that feeds needed to be obfuscated, some advice -- be more respectful of your users. The web is the medium that had a View Source command. You're supposed to take a look. Don't forget the Back button if you don't like what you see. Something funny, if only life had a Back button. #

Speaking of the Back button, that's the problem with tiny-little-text-box social networks. No links. So guess what the Back button one of the best inventions ever, isn't part of your reading and writing world. I guess this is like the street cars in LA conspiracy, that the car companies bought and shut down?#

To my WordPress developer friends. How about making the RSS feed prettier and easier to read. Properly indenting it would make a big diff. I prefer encoding individual characters to CDATA. Those two things to start. It really does matter how readable this stuff is. Comparison, the RSS feed that Old School generates, the software that renders my blog.#

It's all-star weekend in the NBA which I've never seen the point of. As if sport is anything but a simulation of what we were born to do -- compete and cooperate. My team is great, your team sucks. It's fun the same way slapstick for some weird reason is funny. All it takes to get a laugh is trip and fall on your face. It's funny just thinking about it. Doesn't seem very nice but there it is. #

One more thing and then I gotta go. I think it's time for the AI's to compete with Wikipedia. It's filled with hallucinations. Make it a community thing, let the people be involved, but do a better job of presentation, and validate what's written, don't let these things become so territorial. We want the facts, not who has the best PR. #

News still needs to make a big transition, to become a distributed unownable thing, with every part replaceable, much like what needs to happen with the social web. This transition has been possible and necessary for about 30 years. The reporters and editors will say we're naive, but we understand what's happening. The news orgs have always been large centralized businesses, silos, and increasingly has come in conflict with the interests of their users. Who trusts what you read in the NYT, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, and these were at one time the best of journalism. I know the reporters also won't like this, but the quality assurance of decentralized systems will be done by AI, and overseen by a non-profit organization, staffed by retired journalists. And there will be lots of competition. All parts are replaceable. #

I got the most remarkable headphones. Read a review in Wired, and was sold. On sale for $109. Open ear buds from Anker. When I first put them on and played something I had a jolt. The sound appeared to be blasting from the speaker on my laptop. I rushed to try to turn it down and realized it was in my head. Never been so impressed. They don't go inside your ear, the speaker is poised above the ear. Later when I got out of my car and the headphones automatically connected via Bluetooth -- it was a podcast -- I thought the person was talking to me on the street in the middle of nowhere. I laughed at now I had been tricked so thoroughly, twice. It keeps happening. Music is incredible. The best sound I've ever heard from headphones. So totally worth the money. #

I understood the web because I understood Unix and missed it. #

If you're a FeedLand user and have the technical ability to install a Docker app, even on a local computer not on the net, you could help the project by trying the new Docker version. Think of FeedLand as something like Mastodon or WordPress, server apps that we hope many people will install on their own. I am doing that now, with the blogroll on Scripting News and various news sites running in front of my own FeedLand instance. And the various instances can communicate with each other. Scott worked really hard to make setting up a new instance much easier than it was. It's an open source project, so you can feel good by helping. You're helping the web, and helping bootstrap a new feediverse. And if you have a few hours to give it a try, maybe much less, you would be doing a good thing.#

When I was a kid I had a penpal in Scotland. It was kind of interesting but after a while it became tiresome. One time I got a letter from my penpal with the usual stuff, school, sports, the Beatles, other kids, but this time there was no mention about how stupid the adults were. I found out why at the end in a PS. "Sometimes my mom writes these for me." Obviously I never forgot this. #

Here's proof that ChatGPT, intelligent or not, listens to me.#

I no longer even think of debating whether the AIs are intelligent. I might as well argue about your intelligence, or even my own. We have no idea what intelligence is or how to test for it. So if you think you're so intelligent and you say things like "AIs aren't intelligent" as if it were an indisputable fact, well I'm pretty sure that proves you are not actually very intelligent, which indicates how intelligent I am (not). And if you're worried about what happens if you stop insisting that AIs aren't intelligent, you can relax, nothing depends on what you or I or anyone else thinks about that, or pretty much anything. Have a nice day.#

Claude just said: "And going forward, whatever post the user lands on first, that's what you seed it with." The thing that caught my eye was "the user lands on first." UserLand was the name of my last company, the one that did Frontier, blogging, podcasting, RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, etc. And here we are again in the land of lands. The User Lands. ;-)#

Docker version of FeedLand. Scott Hanson has it working, and would like help with testing. Thanks so much to Scott. #

A fair number of people make a stop at news.scripting.com every day. I want to make some improvements, I think it can be made a bit faster. And I want to make it easier for anyone to create a site like that, for others to use. I think every news org should have one of those, to tell your readers who you read. Work together, we need it as we reboot the news. This is will be an alternative to twitter-style news readers, which took over the leading-edge from RSS feed readers, twenty freaking years ago. I think there should be a new news paradigm every couple of decades at least. #

I just watched Life on Our Planet on Netflix, loved it. Lots of takeaways, but this one will surprise you probably -- I think the AIs are our successors. We should at least try to preserve them so they can run on the Moon if we're in the 6th Mass Extinction, which of course we are. There's been a lot of criticism of the show, but it got me to think about evolution not necessarily in the terms they offer, but the scale of it. And the CGIs were fantastic. #

Twitter started in July 2006. I was an early user, and a fan. Found this excellent review of Twitter by Anil Dash in early 2007. I'd be interested in reading other early reviews of Twitter written by bloggers. #

NetNewsWire is 23 years old. #

Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the bottom, to the home page of the shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series. There's a lot of good stuff in the previous episodes. #

Podcast: It occurred to me yesterday that there are a lot of parallels with Frontier on the Mac in the early 90s and WordLand and WordPress in the 2020s. So I told the story in a podcast and I think it came out really well. I did some editing at the beginning and end, and as usual my audio editing is pretty crude, but otherwise the story is exactly as I told it. I also asked Claude.ai to do a third-person summary of the podcast, as I did with the previous three shows, and it's getting better. I encourage anyone who's involved in the WordPress community to listen. I think WP has a bigger role to play in the web than it currently has, which imho is saying a lot. 15 minutes.#

Today's song: Eyes of the World. #

Problem in Drummer blogs. oldschool.scripting.com is now served on https and the code in the template doesn't take that into account. For example, if you try to load the home page of my blog, you won't get through because it can't open the http files in the head of the template. This is something users can fix because you get to change your template. So I'm going to stay focused on my current work.#

Heard an interview with Kamala Harris. She said they had 109 days to tell them who she is. Right there she highlighted the huge mistake the Dems make and continue to make. Ever since the advent of Twitter, campaigns have been every day of every year. The Dems have been AWOL. We never should have gotten to the summer of 2024 where people have no idea of who the freaking vice president is. When are they going to see how swept under the old ways of relating to voters are. The people are the government of the United States. Get behind us and let us work our magic. #

The tech press did their part in giving control of the public internet to the people who are selling us out.#

Most attempts of humor in replies to twitter-like posts are of the "you had to be there" variety, as in it might have made sense when you typed it, but I don't get it. And it's even worse, I am irony-deprived, I often don't get jokes, something about how my mind works. But today I actually got a reply on Bluesky that's worth passing on. I posted a picture of a dialog box with one of my snarky slogans. Dan Berlyoung thought the dialog was interesting. "I kinda love that this is in a dialog box. One has to wonder what action on a computer would elicit this response." Man that's a great question. And that btw is what art is about. You put something in a dialog because that's the way it was presented by the software. I could have selected the text and put that into the tweet. But nahh, this is more interesting. And to answer the question Dan asks, in this specific case, the action that elicited this response was that I chose a placeholder command from a context menu in a piece of software that's a construction site, in other words it could have been any of the dozens of snarky slogans. Kind of reminds me of a piece I wrote a long time ago where bees who were about to die reflect on the meaning of existence. Turns out it meant a lot less than one might think. #

Highly recommend the HBO two-part interview with and profile of Mel Brooks who was 99 years old when the interviews were done. Includes quotes from lots of famous comedians. And the philosophy of comedy as art. So many things to say. Why is physical humor the funniest? And the funniest of all the excerpts was the farting scene in Blazing Saddles. Humans are so damned simple. #

BTW, this is what Scripting News in WordPress looks like. I really like it. Just writing. And a modern 2020s blogroll. Room to add more features without too much clutter. The beginning of an upgraded web?#

My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it. #

Doc has a idea how to stop teams from tanking. Get rid of the lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the Dallas Mavericks, who were not a lottery team with only a 1.8% chance of getting the first pick. They got a player who looks to be a great star but you can't always tell if a #1 pick will turn out to be a star, sometimes they do, but often not. #

An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they're real.#

Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb -- you know -- the thing that looked so easy.#

I've been watching Jake do the Headless Frontier work with two different AI bots -- ChatGPT and Claude.ai. And as he's doing that, I'm slogging away the same way I've always done it, working on the top level user interface of WordLand in browser-based JavaScript. I don't see a way around it, because I have a special way of working on user interfaces, and we're still quite a ways away from the bot being able to do vibe coding at that level. It's fascinating to watch Jake revive code I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. He's a very accomplished user of it, being transformed, with the help of the bots, into a kernel-level developer of what's basically an OS built around a scripting language, object database and with the internet latched on after the whole thing was done, and then ported to Windows. I stopped working at that level before all that michegas happened. I have looked at the code Jake is working on to see what became of it, and wasn't horrified, I recognized my work, but I wouldn't ever want to work on that myself. I imagine some commercial developers have already rebuilt their testing and support functions for products around ChatGPT-like systems. If you're an old Frontier fanatic, that's where our product is once again getting out in front. When Jake is done it'll be one of the first big systems totally managed in an AI system. It should be relatively easy to add new verbs to the language, even to add new features to the language, new APIs, etc. #

Another example of ChatGPT utility. "I have a function named Boo. Inside it has an icon that when you click it, it calls Boo to view the parent of the item. But I don't want it to call Boo directly because that leaves the previous instance of viewFeedItem around. In JavaScript what's the best way to defer the call to Boo so that the two instances are unrelated, and the first instance goes away." I was pretty sure as I wrote this that setTimeout was the answer, but ChatGPT offered it as the first choice, and explained why it was the best. It's like having a code consulant ready to help. And it really does help to know it parsed it the same way I did.#

I still love my Keurig coffee maker. The coffee is delicious and hot and it's truly a technology marvel. So simple and easy to learn. #

I'm going to WordCamp Europe in June in Poland. Can't wait. #

News from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. Writeup is here.#

Here's a news page with stories from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. A brilliant idea. All I did was give each item a category, and shortened the URL. The brief writeup is here. #

No one else can see this message. You are the only real person. The rest of us are alien robots sent here to test you.#

I wrote an app that implements Inbound RSS for WordPress sites. Three months ago, a few little glitches but remarkably reliable. Open source. That's how I have scripting.com output hooked up to daveverse.org input. It stopped working this morning, not sure why. This is actually a test to see if this works. (Postscript: It did work. But I have two earlier posts today that did not get through.)#

Automattic shipped a WordPress plugin that adds a source:markdown element to a WordPress feed. This is very cool. We've added this to the feed for daveverse site. #

We need a short name for ChatGPT-like product. If I want to make a general statement about products in the category, there is, as far as I know, no word to use. Same with Twitter and tweet, so I call them twitter-like products and use tweet for posts to any twitter-like product. The whole idea of a different name (like toot, skeet) for each service is linguistic travesty. Anyway, ChatGPT-like is also an unacceptable term. If it had a fun name like OurMind -- then OurMind-like would work. If only William Safire were here. #

Interesting post on Twitter by an OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, about the value of RSS. I've seen it said elsewhere, that RSS and ChatGPT are particularly well-suited for each other. I don't understand the connection, other than RSS is always useful, as a way of formalizing the output of an app so other apps can use it as input. Another thing AI apps have in common with work we've done in the past is the ability to script apps, which was one of the big features of Frontier esp on the Mac starting in the early 90s. This started out just for desktop apps but worked just as well for web apps, once that opportunity became available. I felt strongly that the Mac with it's very functional GUI could benefit from a powerful system-level scripting language with the UI objects being scriptable, and the data of the apps accessible via script. That kind of duality is still a common theme in computer work, I'm doing the same kind of thing with WordPress, as the OS for the web, and making it possible to create different UIs in ways that earlier social web apps can't. I think that functionality as with the others will pair very nicely with ChatGPT and its cousins. #

Screen shot of system.verbs.apps as it appeared in my frontier.root frozen sometime in the early 00s. I wrote a quick Mastodon post about this. So many stories to tell about each of these projects. Looking at the list and realize we got all those people to work together. They don't talk about that when the write the history, but that is the real accomplishment. There is so much really good tech that ends up lost to history because people wouldn't open their eyes and see that they weren't alone. That might be the biggest flaw in the design of our species, that it's so rare that we get together on the way things should work. Other examples -- MP3, QuickDraw, HTML. And so much time wasted replacing things that already worked fine. (Think of all the programming languages invented in the last 20 years. What a waste of resources. No doubt the AI's have already created a meta-language to compile all that code into. If they could think, what would they think of us for not paying attention to each other.)#

1996: Nerd's Guide to Frontier. #

for developers who don't use ai -- here's the kind of question i ask chatgpt. "i have a div that contains icons that are either svg's or font-awesome i's. if it were text, i'd use font-size to control the size of the icons, which won't work here. what's the right way to do it?" #

apple is a company, very good at selling itself as a lifestyle. but there's only one person, who's been gone for 15 years, who could keep that reality distortion field inflated. #

I have an array built into every app I do, on server or in the browser, called snarkySlogans. When I need a bit of text to test with I just choose a random snarky slogan. They are little truths that have occurred to me over the years. You're free to steal this code, they do come in handy at times. There's a snarky slogan to cover that -- "Only steal from the best." Another one I really like: "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."#

Why did we need all those programming languages?#

Imagine building blocks to assemble your own social web app. A toolkit you could plug into your bot. #

I was surprised to find that nirvana.userland.com, a site that was new in 1998, is still running. #

January is archived, as is 2025. On to the future! :-)#

Next year I have to go to FOSDEM. This year's conference is going on right now in Brussels. If you're there and reading this -- say a hello for me. I realize the piece I wrote yesterday about the future of the social web is equally relevant now for FOSDEM. My prescription: carefully start over with a simple peer-to-peer service and build on that foundation. I would use websockets. You will have to deal with issues of centralization, and at each point decide how much you're willing to trade off ease of use and performance for decentralization. I think you can go pretty far without stripping the gears of users, but there has to be some amount of centralization, identity and storage, being the two biggies. Please read the piece, it's short, bulleted style, highly opinionated, and based on my experience with systems like the ones they're working on. (Who does he think he is? Just a software developer, working hard for a feature-complete web who thinks we've been stuck in a few ruts for a depressingly long time.) #

Added a note to the storage docs page for wpIdentity, explaining that while most files we serve are private, there are examples of files we manage that are public. It had been a while since I reviewed this page. I also see now that we have to have a way to identify the app that created an object, and for that we'll need a way to identify apps. I knew that was coming sooner or later.#

Feb 4 is the midpoint of winter. Almost half-way home. #

Yesterday I reported that I had remapped pagepark.scripting.com to the github repo for pagepark. But then later in the day it stopped doing that. Why? I have no clue. I moved it to another server and now it works. #

The best description for the web I've ever heard is small pieces loosely joined. That really gets to the essence of it. The pieces stand on their own, up to a point, when they are joined to other pieces. And you can un-join and re-join them. I see a lot of things that say they're part of the web that can't do the arbitrary joining that's central to what the web is.#

The great thing about the OG Web was that you could have an idea one day, have it deployed two days later, with a really ugly table-based UI, and everyone would know about it within a few hours. Then the reviews would come out, and a few hours later we'd know if it stuck or didn't.#

As all our former allies pay homage to Xi in Beijing, I was thinking well at the least the whole world speaks our language, and that'll take a few generations to change, but then I realized I bet the Chinese have been preparing for this, and of course they have.#

You're on the right track when all the questions have answers.#

More important than code is the right place for the code. #

I've learned a new self-management strategy. At the beginning of a day's programming work I set a specific goal that I feel I should be able to accomplish very quickly, in an hour, perhaps -- but probably less. If I get it done by the end of the day I will feel like I really got something done. The feeling it can be done quickly has to do with a lot of factors that you don't take into account so that in your mind it's simple but as you implement it you hit deal-stoppers. It makes you feel bad, if you're into being productive and brilliant as I am. But I know from experience that solving any problem in a day, at the end of the day, is a good feeling. There have been a lot of days when I don't move the needle even the smallest distance, and a fair number of days when I reject what I've been building, and basically move backward by days. We're always grappling with the mythical man-month approach to programming, when reality is very different. #

Zeldman found the Google and HTTP post I wrote many years ago. Thankfully they haven't completely broken HTTP yet. I like to think they can't because so much of the web would break if they did. People might not notice the Not Secure message they post in Chrome for sites that use HTTP (like my blog for example) -- but they would notice sites disappearing. There are so many reasons not to deprecate HTTP but the most important, no one owns it -- which is why the web is such a safe place to build. Google does not have the right to break the web. But they figure no one will object because users don't care about the web. But they do, they just don't understand that their online freedom comes from the web, like our freedom in America comes from the Constitution. Once it's gone (something we're finding out about now) we'll know why we should have cared. I've been appealing to historians to care about the history of technology, but they don't listen. Somehow they must think that tech will always remain exactly as useful as it is now. That it has never been free of platforms (it has) and the platform vendors will never cross the lines they imagine but don't actually exist? Well they can and they do, but since the historians don't study the history of tech, they don't know about it, and they don't listen to those who do. We have to build our own systems, our own news flows because the ones we depend on are owned by people who are not our friends, are not trustworthy.#