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.
#
BTW, suggestion to web-based companies that send out notices via email. It's good to do that, but make sure somewhere there's a link to exactly the same material on the web. It can only build traffic for your ideas,
earned media.
#
- Got an email from Automattic about MCP support in WordPress, which is now available on their servers. With this new interface you can write prompts in Claude etc that do things in your WordPress workspace. Kind of like a scripting language, but English, like this -- "In WordPress, please set the category for the current post to Project 32." #
- I guess it's very much like the wpcom api we're using for WordLand. It's going to be harder to get people to look at wpcom with this kind of functionality out there. It was always going to be hard, but I liked the challenge of telling a story about a great bit of technology that could save the web but wasn't known to almost all developers. WordPress never attracted the kind of devs that care about APIs like that one, ones which would let you build on WordPress as opposed to in WordPress.#
- Tech is always foggy and full of hype, but rarely is it as intense as it is in 2026. AI is the major thing people are talking and thinking about, trying to figure out if there's a way to be part of the fun with our software and ideas. And there are so many quick ways to get hooked up to the hype, that seem pretty desperate, the kind of ideas that emerge from management offsites in orgs that have little sense of direction -- "let's add AI" everyone agrees, without any idea of what that means, and not much comes of it. Firefox, the perennial hype-harvester very predictably did this late last year. No we don't need another browser with AI. You have to think harder and more creatively. My advice was to be better for the web, and eventually if there is a link to AI it will reveal itself. But you have to pay attention for that. #
- As revolutionary as AI is, some things aren't going to be done with prompts, pretty sure of that. It 's a lot easier to pick categories from a dialog than typing an instruction in ChatGPT. Think about how you drive a car, you don't slowly tell the car to "turn the wheel left and tap the brake, now right, and hit the gas." Maybe this will turn out to be like the difference between using a mouse or a keyboard. Some people thought keyboards were obsolete when the Mac came out in 1984. I'm using a keyboard right now. #
- I'm going to finish the new WordLand and ask some people I want to connect with to try it out. The goal is to create a new kind of structure for the web, made out of posts that both stand alone and are part of a graph that you can walk around in. Far more spontaneous than web rings of the early web, like my blogroll does so much more than the static blogrolls of the 90s and 00s. But it is going to be hard to get attention for it, in the midst of all that's going on with AI. #
- On the other hand, I haven't seen the AI tools get into social structures, I feel very much alone with my AI collaborator. I know there are ways to set up collaboration, but that hasn't reached me yet, and at this time I'm not actually receptive to the idea. I haven't yet seen how we can plug away together human to human. #
- Like everyone else we're feeling my way around this, looking for ways to add value, and at the same time help to revive the web, which definitely needs help. #
- I'd like the web to make the transition to AI, not to become even more forgotten. I feel like this is the last chance, I want to get the web hooked into AI, but I have to work with other people, going it alone won't work.#
- Just some random thoughts on a Wednesday morning, having absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it's freaking April 1. #
- There's so much bullshit, why deliberately add more -- in hope of being either funny or memorable -- and only succede at annoying. #
We prefer to try to keep things real here.
#
It's peeve time. I've just listened to a song that inspires me on Amazon Music. A song I've been humming and singing in my head all morning. After it's done, the voice of Alexa comes on and says "BTW, you have two new messages. Would you like to hear them?" Now I have to think about how much I hate this. I had an exalting experience I want to savor and the frickin robot intervenes. If I say "don't do that again" it says basically "Sorry Dave."
#BTW the latest episode of 500 Songs is about
The Who and
Tommy. I of course had the album, which means every song is deeply embedded in my personal LLM. This episode, in
two parts, was one of the best most recent ones. As with what
Get Back did for the Beatles, when you know more about the people creating the art it has so much more value.
#YouTube now puts commercials in front of songs. I used to be able to point to a low rez recording of a song as part of my blog. Now I have to think about all the links I've put in my archive that lead to shittified Google. I had never used that adjective before, I think, this certainly qualifies.
#
I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort."
#Yesterday I ran a
podcast, a voicemail to NakedJen saying she could/should use Claude or ChatGPT to create software. Later that day she told me about the software she had written. I tried using it, and and then interrogated ChatGPT which had been her programming partner, to explain what she did and what the app does. I'm not sure I have the actual story yet, have to talk with Jen live. But it turns out that the thesis was correct, and she was already using ChatGPT, had even given it a name -- Harry, and was delegating tasks that I would want to use. Of course she was. Now I have to learn more from her about what she's doing. Stay tuned.
#On Feb 8, two months after
Firefox announced they were
pivoting to AI, I wrote a
piece saying in 9 points what I would do if I ran Firefox, instead of what they were doing. Now a few weeks later, has there been any further development of this idea?
#
There's something incredibly funny about slapstick and farting. I was flipping channels the other day and came across an
old WC Fields movie. I used to love them when I was a kid, but figured now, with so many many fancier forms of entertainment this wouldn't get to me, but I was laughing uncontrollably the whole way through. Later, I caught a SNL skit with a boss being surprised by her employees with a Happy Birthday celebration and started farting uncontrollably. They're indulging in body-humor thanks largely (I think) to
Sarah Sherman whose whole comedy schtick is about disgusting things about the human body, esp her own. The boss was played by
Ashley Padilla, another SNL superstar. Everything she does is funny, esp farting. Even now,
rewatching the segment, I couldn't help but laughing loudly. Farts are funny. I have no idea why.
#
Podcast: Jen and I often exchange voicemails. Yesterday I sent one about how she, who is not a programmer, should try creating software with Claude or ChatGPT. I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get it to give you a file that you can run from your own desktop. But I explained that in the voicemail. Midway through I realized this a podcast, and checked with her if it would be okay and she was very emphatic that I should. You see NJ aside to being one of my best friends for life, is also a
Natural Born Blogger or a person with maximum audacity. Her first instinct like mine is to
share it and shut up. So that's what I'm doing. As usual I asked Claude to write the show notes. Hope you like it and thanks for listening!
#The source code for my
podcast builder app is
open source. Of course I use my outliner to edit the
OPML file for the podcast text and link in the enclosure. I recommend
opening it in Drummer. To see how the atts work, click on the suitcase icon with the cursor on the main head for each episode. The new att is enclosure, which is the URL of the audio for the podcast. Drummer automatically fills in the length and type.
#
- We should teach everyone how to write software with the AI apps. If the language is too hard, make a new language that's easier. Eventually we'll come up with a fantastic language but you and I won't invent it, people who are newbies in 2026 will. Just like there was a whole new generation of software for PCs, graphic UIs and then for networking and the web. Try this out in Claude.#
- Can you create a browser-based app that asks for the user's name in a nice dialog, not the one built into the browser, and then takes the name and displays it using only css styles in a simple animated fashion. It quits when I hit the Escape key. Give it to me in the form of an html file that i can download and run by double-clicking it in the Finder. Call the app hello.html.#
- I tried doing it but there was a bug in the result, and I had to say "Claude, 'delighted to make your acquaintance' appears but nothing else."#
- I did a video demo of this exercise. #
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the
Green Knight is fantastic. Got the tip from a NYT email, but even they didn't say what the rating was, or even what their own reviewer said. Had to do this thing manually. Do they have any user-oriented creative people in the mix anywhere in this system??
#
- There's a conference in Vancouver this weekend for people who are developing apps for Bluesky. They have a protocol they are proud of called AT Proto. A sexy name, but imho it doesn't do anything that Twitter's API did 20 years ago. So why do people hope it'll make a difference for independent developers? I think they're believing because they want to believe in something, a magic potion that will make it easy for the web to overcome the power of the silos like Twitter, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky too. #
- I feel most sympathy for the developers who are using AT Proto to make writing tools that use the web as their prototype for what a good text editor would do. But they overlook the problem that Bluesky itself has most of the limits on writing that Twitter has, although Twitter is working slowly to get rid of the limits, presumably because when Elon Musk saw them he thought the limits were bullshit, as I do too and always have. It was a tragedy for the web, the day Twitter decided the web wasn't a good model for writers of "tweets" -- they had to get rid of style, links, editing, enclosures and add a character limit so people couldn't use it for a longform writing platform. #
- The division created a problem that users have always wanted someone to solve -- they don't want to have to copy/paste everything they write into five different editors because none of the silos can connect, much like the Apple TV series of the same name. Each silo is a world unto itself. And somehow, Bluesky which preserves the silo tradition, also claims to be a lover and supporter of the open web, truly outstanding VC hype. #
- Here's what Bluesky could do to turn me into a fan. Get rid of the limits. Then the people who have created writing tools for AT Proto will have a market to serve. We will of course convert WordLand to serve that newly enabled user base. Maybe that's what the writing tools devs are anticipating -- the day when Bluesky decides that character limits have outlived their usefulness. And that links, the core innovation of the web, deserves to be loved, not hidden as if it's too much power for their users. When we can add an enclosure to help be sure that podcasting survives the latest BigSilo onslaught (it has survived all that came before, I have no reason to believe this time will be any different). They do also need to support inbound and outbound RSS so we can easily hook everything together. I will praise them individually and collectively. I would love to be wrong! I will sing a song in their name. #
- Rule #4 of Rules for Standards-Makers: "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."#
- That's where Bluesky is stuck. If they want to keep their devs and to attract new ones, they have to give them access to all their users. All of them. And the only way to do that is to get rid of the limits, to make it the one twitter-like platform that can handle everyone else's tweets, and every writing tool ever written for the web before Twitter came along -- ie Tumblr and WordPress, and everything anyone can think of that conforms to the standards that power the web -- HTTP and HTML. I've suggested we settle on Markdown as the core writing functionality of these platforms. #
- The problem is that Bluesky doesn't have much of a business model if all their users can walk out the door every night. Not much monetizable value in that, but it would be good for the web, and for civilization.#
This
piece explains the tragedy of how we've set up communication using our networks, all based on exclusive products, rather than standards which mean you can use whatever software you want for more and more of your communication.
#Send
this video to your favorite
Democrat and let them know that we would
pay money to have this video run as an ad running everywhere, exactly as-is, no editing, not made glamorous. This is the truth that absolutely is not getting out about the law the Repubs want. We need to communicate with each other using the amazing tools we have at our disposal now in the
third decade of the freaking 21st century.
#
- When I heard about Matt's product Beeper I thought wow what if that were on the RSS network. #
- I think RSS should be here. Makes sense doesn't it? #
#- Why not an open independent format from nowhere that no one objects to you using and will not do anything ever to turn you off. It seems it would be fairly easy to add two-way support. :-)#
WordPress can now
connect via MCP for both reading and writing. This sounds like a possible alternative for the
wpcom api that we're building on in
WordLand. Sometimes it feels like everything is being reinvented. If the world would just stand still for a moment we might be able to do some building. I wonder how the advent of AI is affecting how WordPress is being developed. I know it's changing everything here.
#Meanwhile I have to tend to the past. I had a server go down the other day, and haven't been able to get it running again. It's a very old one, the first I used PagePark for hosting the apps. So I'd rather not have to dig into whatever it is that's keeping it from running. This morning I moved the test app for XML-RPC,
betty.userland.com, to another server, so
this page now works again.
#
You can't really use Claude to do research. It always assumes you're trying to
do something. If you don't tell it what you're trying to do it guesses, and then starts telling you what to do. Its guesses are always wildly wrong. How do you tell it to stop telling you what to do? It totally disrupts your train of thought. But it makes me miss the days of Stack Exchange and Google search.
#
- Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes. #
- And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic. #
- People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be: #
- The first question could be:#
- Do you have your birth certificate or passport?#
- In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed. #
- And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law. #
- They might want to keep things as they are.#
- I’ve watched Mozilla not get it for what feels like decades.#
- Their only legit function imho is to make the real actual web be a great platform for independent developers.#
- For that, start by adding user controlled storage to the web, a few standard formats, and let app devs take it from there.#
- I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved. #
- So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.#
- The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.#
- Here's a screen shot of the domains folder. #
- Here's the script as a screen shot and GitHub doc. #
- This is just a way to preserve a little of the Frontier culture. Hard to explain in words. Easier to show as screen shots. #
- The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do. #
- It's another freaking algorithm.#
- Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know. #
- Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing. #
- First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.#
- AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.#
- And how mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer or Soul-Sucker or You-Cuck. Then at least you'd know why you're there. :-)#
- BTW, as long as Bluesky has a 300 char limit and no style or links, I'm going to have to hand-translate posts there to become posts here where no such limits prevail. At some point either they give up on the limits or I give up on them. #
Video demo: Using categories in FeedLand for dynamic OPML lists.
#
Happy to report there are FeedLand users who want to edit OPML lists there so they can subscribe to them in another feed reader that has support for dynamic OPML lists. I am happy because this is a very cool feature that will be so much more fun if other people use it. If you want to set it up so you have a list on feedland.com that you want to subscribe to in another reader, instead of subscribing to all your feeds, like this -- create a category for each list you want to hook up to another reader. It will be much easier to manage down the road. Categories in FeedLand are very simple, but if you use them carefully, they really help. Here's a screen shot of my Cats menu to give you an idea. I really use FeedLand in the most powerful ways, but it'll really click when others do the same. We might be there now.
#
There's a problem with one of my Digital Ocean servers today, it turns out it's a problem with
Caddy, not sure why -- but it doesn't seem to be on the computer any longer. I can figure out how to re-install it, but it always is a bit tricky, and I wish I didn't have to do it. In diagnosing the problem I used Claude, it asked all kinds of questions, gave me commands to run, and I dutifully reported back the results like a good servant. It's so funny to be a tool for the cyborg. Then it hit me, why don't they offer servers with built-in maintenance by Claude. I would type commands at like "install the following apps on this new server I want to commission, and check into it every so often and if it's running out of some resource, get in touch with me and let me know how much more it'll cost, and I'll just use it and you can keep it running." I think it's a really nice application for AI.
#I wanted to subscribe to the
GiftArticles feed from Mastodon. It makes it possible to read news on paywalled sites. I found the feed by going to the site the feed comes from and tacking a .rss at the end. You can
read the feed in a browser, and my
feeder test app can read it as well. But for some reason FeedLand won't subscribe to it. Have to dig into that soon. I'm looking forward to doing some long-overdue work on FeedLand before doing the next push.
#
A bit of history. Read this
post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in
2006 and
2026.
#
Andy Baio noted that it was 20 years ago today that
Jack Dorsey posted his
first tweet. He also noted it was the day that
Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on
Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was interesting piece written by
Phil Jones on how everyone watched me all the time and they were all trying to figure out what I do. Fact: At the time I was trying to make OPML grow big like RSS had, but it didn't happen. The big concept was the
World Outline that would be an open directory where everyone created browsable outlines that linked to their own outlines and others, in a completely fluid way. In order to be something it had to catch on, and it didn't. In the intervening twenty years, I tried it again and again to start a technology party like blogging and podcasting, viral viralities -- but nothing stuck. I came close once, with
Twittergram, but I didn't want to run a company, I wanted to keep developing software. Sold it to
Betaworks, but they never marketed it. Instead I helped them launch
bit.ly and had a blast doing that. I love doing PR. Anyway I guess I got lazy. And I wasn't building on the web any longer. Instead I was trying to fit in between Twitter and Facebook mostly. Now I'm getting ready, much older and more tired, but wiser -- to go back to roots, to use WordPress as my blogging platform, as if it were Frontier -- and see what we can build out of the web and if it'll stick. That's why I'm so relentless at getting people to play with me. It's the same damn thing Phil Jones describes. And OPML is going to be a big part, yet again -- only this time playing a vastly different role, with lists of feed locations on the web. If it works we will call it the
feediverse. Even if it doesn't work. ;-)
#BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.
#
- I've written a bunch of pieces with this premise, what if I were CEO of Apple being the first, in January 1996, before Steve Jobs returned. This time I'm writing as if I were CEO of Bluesky, a company that just got a new interim CEO, Toni Schneider, formerly of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. This started as a comment in reply to Colin Devroe on Mastodon, but quickly exceeded its 500 character limit. And no doubt I will expand on it over the course of the day. #
- Here's the issue. AT Proto is proposing to be a better web than the collection of standards that make up the web in 2026, starting with HTTP and HTML and DNS and including Markdown, WebSockets, MP3 and RSS and probably a few others. Maybe they can come up with something better organized and with more consistent interfaces. But the web doesn't work that way. Once it embraces a method of doing something, it goes on, and doesn't reconsider. It's exactly like evolution in the natural world. #
- Example: RSS was a deeply entrenched competitor when Atom came along, intending to do everything RSS did but do it differently and better. It did get some support and still does to this day, but the differences are flattened out, most feed-reading software doesn't know if the news came from RSS or Atom, the distinction is buried in low-level code.#
- If you were to look at the size of the developer base for the web, it would be clear how steep a hill AT Proto has to climb, and why? What's in it for Bluesky except satisfaction of ego? Not a good business proposition for a startup. #
- But they can't abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give it to a standards body, work with them, but at the same time work on interop with products like WordPress and support inbound and outbound RSS. Markdown would be nice too. Get rid of the character limit and support links, styling, enclosures (for podcasting) and make their posts editable. In other words they have some catching up to do re the web. That's where their leadership would be welcome instead of questioned. #
- Colin, I don't think they should do it for you and me, they should do it as an investment in their future. Get in the game. The idea of creating something that stands alone is imho very un-web, and not differentiated from their competition. The web was made for small companies like Bluesky. Trying to act like a giant in a way even the biggest giants wouldn't work is not a formula for success. I think Toni and Matt would understand this.#
- The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me. #
- There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.#
- The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.#
- The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.#
- The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.#
Quick note on
Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management probably is the reason this happened now. They should also clean up the promises they've made about Bluesky as a platform. I've done the homework, having
developed a
few apps using their API, some are still running. If I were their new CEO, I would announce that in addition to supporting AT Proto, they will also hook up Bluesky to the web. The web is already decentralized. Lots of developers know how to build web stuff. We can all breathe the same air.
#Knight Foundation: "How did a private foundation with roots in local journalism and civic life find itself on a cap table with venture capital firms like Bain Capital Crypto and Bloomberg Beta to invest in a tech startup?" Imho because they misled you.
#
Thinking about linkblogging, my
blogroll software doesn't do it correctly. When you click on the link to a linkblogged link, you must go to the place the linkblog entry points to, not the linkblog itself. I know that sounds confusing, but here's an example. It's obvious we can skip the stop and go right to the thing they were pointing to. It's awkward in the code because the RSS 2.0 item-level link element is doing double duty. I think I should add a source:linkblogLink element. I also think it's a good time to start discussing this among devs. There's some very nice fertile ground here and an opportunity to work with each other.
#I wanted to change the URL for the
source namespace in the
RSS 2.0 feed for my blog, from http to https. I thought this might be a nice warmup project. Started at 9AM and it's now 10:45AM and it might work now. Let's see. Nope. Thought of something I didn't do. Let's see.
Yes! We
win, sorta. Bing?
#I talked with a friend who makes a feed reader app, suggesting how to hook up to a
linkblogging tool. Thought I would share the instructions to everyone. I'd love to see more people using software to do linkblogs, rather than do them by hand. Then we could build systems for distributing them. This is how we create markets, by getting more people automating their work, and thus we are able to connect components together. So if you make a feed reader, how about hooking up with linkblogging tools?
#
Podcast: A one-line comment on Brent Simmons' blog got me started on a 10-minute ramble about suspension of disbelief, in software. Also a story about meeting Ted Nelson at the West Coast Computer Faire in SF in 1979. Skiing. And other miscellanea. BTW, I didn't even remember the quote correctly and I might have misinterpreted it. It's still a good story imho. ;-)
#
Small update to the
source namespace.
source:localTime is a channel-level element. It was incorrectly stated that it is item-level.
#I have a hard and fast rule about phone calls that solicit private information. I hang up. The worst are insurance companies. They expect you to enter all kinds of confidential info on a phone from a number that doesn't even verify as belonging to the company. Caller ID has nothing to say about them. Yet at least some of these are legit and unless you do what they want, you don't get your meds.
#
I asked Claude: "What is OpenClaw useful for? Do you think I could use it in my programming work, based on what you know about what I do?" Basically it's for non-programmers. Then I asked: "I wonder if I could make software that would be useful to people who love OpenClaw?" That was more interesting and included in the response I linked to, above.
#
- A clip from a video interview with Marc Andreessen has been making the rounds. He was a very successful entrepreneur in the early days of the web and has been a very successful venture capitalist in years following. He's 54 years old. You should watch the clip before reading what it inspired me to say, on Bluesky and below, after a lot of consideration. I kept it about me, and my experience, not coming to any conclusions about him or anyone else.#
- I went through a heavy duty midlife crisis when I was in my early 40s. I started seeing a therapist. I was depressed because I had achieved everything I was supposed to, I learned later, but didn't get the love and acceptance I felt I deserved. #
- The therapist kept asking about my childhood and my relationship with my parents. I said I really don't want to do this. Why can't I keep going the way I have been going (as pmarca describes). "You can do that, she said -- but you won't have as rich of a life."#
- So I gave it a try, and it was the beginning of an education that somehow I had missed. Inside I had come to conclusions that were flat-out wrong. I got to know myself. I stopped thinking others were responsible for things that didn't make me happy. Usually it was me, projecting on them. #
- I learned how to get what I want. She was right. I'm still learning 30 years later.#
- I'm software developer, that's really all I wanted to do -- and blogging and podcasting, ideation and programming. I made the career I wanted, both before and after the therapy sessions that got me started on my trip through myself. I've learned that I am driven by my subconscious, the feeler, even though my concscious self, the thinker, denies there is such a thing. #
- Whether you accept it or not, you do have feelings and you are driven by them. #
- One of the great things about going inward is you learn to relate to the subconscious, to form a team -- a parent-child relationship, where the subconscious is the all-powerful child, and the conscious can see things the child is too self-centered, too narcissistic to see. There are other people around, and the things that freak out the child often aren't dangerous. But if they are, the parent is there to help, but that's all it can do. The power is with the child. Lots more to say about this. And btw, yes, I am very woke, relatively speaking -- having lived in Northern California for 30+ years, and have sampled all kinds of workshops and retreats, and visit my hot tub most days, to remember that I don't only exist in my mind, something programmers are particularly subject to -- because we do a lot of thinking, it's a big part of what we do. All the while we still have the body, the child, ready to flee or attack, if danger should come. Or ready to feel glee when what you just did worked the first time. 😄#
Thinking about the
SAVE Act,
60 Minutes should do a segment on what you have to go through to get a
birth certificate in any random state. It's a lot of work, I've had to do it twice in the last few years. You'd have to be a pretty committed voter to be willing to do all that work. I imagine it would be even harder if you're black, and it's going to be hugely hard for married women who changed their last name when they got married. And how much you want to bet they don't accept birth certificates from Muslim countries? It is the biggest scam ever, and if the journalists don't cover it that way, always, with no both-sides-isms, then we should all know this is the end of journalism in the US. And btw also the end of real elections in the US too. The Repubs these days like to say they're against the "deep state" -- well my friends this is about the most deep state bullshit ever.
#
They've been having intelligent and clear-thinking guests on CNN and MSNOW on the coverage of the Iran War, unusually good discourse. But the best coverage I've heard has been from Frontiline podcasts. There's a
new one out, haven't listened to it yet, but the one I heard
yesterday was very informative and probably a better briefing than our president has been getting (or paying attention to).
#
The thing that we all missed is that WordPress is the best candidate for a standard for what an individual social network message is.
#
An example. This isn't all the data that WordPress keeps for each post, it's just the stuff that WordLand uses. We add some of our own metadata, that's how it is extensible. It's open source, and it's evolved for 20+ years, with a strong ethos of not breaking devs. It could have been twitter, or masto or even bluesky, but they don't show through enough features to be useful as "web text." We want to use all the features of text on the web. I may be the only one who sees this but I predict in a couple of years if we aren't subsumed by AI everyone will say they always knew this is
what WordPress is for.
😄 #If I knew how AI would work with software, I would've done things differently to prepare for this. I find myself wanting to ask questions about my code that I don't have proper tools to answer. I have to get all my code managed with the new system, but not sure that's even the right way to go. Once I started using it to build full bits of deployed code, not to just answer questions about the work I'm doing one day at a time, I've become confused about planning my own work.
#I added
Paul Graham to my blogroll at scripting.com. Another massive oversight.
#
Coder is derogatory term btw, as if our work was like a telegram coder, but it's understandable I guess because all the lay people see is us typing on a computer and being grouchy when they interrupt our train of thought. Coder is analogous to calling a chef a chopper. You have to understand the activity you're proposing that AI is replacing. And I find all the discussions about art very harmful -- because AI opens up graphic art to people who never thought they could do it. I bet you some absolutely fantastic artists are blossoming right now. Calling it
slop is just as disrespectful as calling art expressed in software "code." BTW they said the same bullshit about bloggers and we know how that turned out.
#I gotta say some days I start with a lot on my mind and am driven to write. This is one of those days. Maybe I'm inspired by the
torrent of posts by my blogger friend
ma.tt. Blogging can be a solitary thing or a relative thing. When you blog about something I have something to say about, I write on my blog and link back to yours, that's relative. The problem with comments in the old blogging world is that my comment resides on your blog. No more of that. I want equal stature for all writing, your comment should appear on your blog, yet still be easy to find from the other person's blog (and this is very important) with their support, it has to be something they want their readers to see. Otherwise the comment is still on your blog where your readers can see it.
#24 years ago I had life-saving heart surgery. The treatment was not available to my grandmother who had the genes from which I inherited the condition. She died very young, but that was normal in her time, there was no treatment for this kind of disease beyond, don't exert yourself too much for the rest of your (short) life. Do you think heart surgeons are
less useful now that we've had such amazing innovation in one freaking lifetime? Right now we're just beginning to discover new ways AI gives us the same kind of new power that bypass surgery gave to surgeons.
#
If we can get the web to come back,
Scripting News could have new relevance. The age of the silo really hurt my rep. But I think people will ultimately appreciate that I never turned by back on the web. It was either the web or the highway as far as I was concerned. I've already lived under the thumb of a corporate platform vendor. I'd rather give up than try it again. And by the web coming back, I mean when products are
expected to interop, the way podcast clients interop. I don't care if they're forced to do it, or do it willfully, with gusto -- but I know and so do people who tried to develop on owned platforms know, that it just doesn't work if there's a BigCo in charge of your destiny. There's always an acquisition or reorg just around the corner that sacrifices your future, often for no reason other than they don't care.
#As you know Jake Savin is getting Frontier to run on current Linux and Mac OS systems. Today he posted a wonderful
screen shot. It's how Frontier's built-in web server says "hello world."
#We're still fixing problems created by the switch to https on the web. Reported a problem
yesterday, was surprised to find an inconsistency in the way WordPress represents guids in its RSS feed for a post and in the API. This morning I posted
an issue on the WordPress repo on GitHub. I don't think they can fix either approach without breakage, so they probably have to leave it as-is. I updated wpIdentity package to normalize guids it gets from the API to lowercase, so even if they change the implementation my software won't break. Another reason we're still paying for what Google decided we needed. What we
don't need -- BigCo's f-ing with the f-ing web.
#Happy Friday The 13th! ;-)
#
Substack would be the web's printer, if they supported
inbound RSS.
#Bluesky is actually pretty close to being on the web. The biggest missing piece is
inbound RSS. They already support outbound, it could use a review and tuneup, but that half is mostly there. I would even go a bit further, if they really supported RSS, it would
be the web.
#Just added
Daring Fireball to my blogroll. What a huge oversight. Glad to get this fixed.
#
- Try entering this into Claude or ChatGPT: #
- "debugging an app that uses wordpress rss feeds and noticed that guids are http but other addresses in the feed are https. this causes trouble." #
- Here's a screen shot of the Claude response.#
- A while back Matt was giving me grief, in a friendly way, about how scripting.com still uses http addresses. I could switch over, but then all the images and included files posted before 2014 or so would break. The minor gain in security on a site that doesn't ask for any private information, is totally not worth throwing out all the work I did on a site that actually has historic importance is just a bad deal. It would be a solving a problem no one but Google has (and it's not even clear what that problem is, and why I should care). There's a principle here too -- letting one company dictate to us how the web works, well I got into the web to get away from that. #
- Anyway, the reason they still use http in a place where one expects https is apparently is the same reason. It would break things that they don't want to break. I'm not suggesting they change it, but somewhere in my codebase somehow the http addresses are getting converted to https, and I haven't (yet) been able to track it down. I'm pretty sure it's a bug I unknowingly introduced. #
- PS: When I'm calling through the API, I get back a record that has a different guid from what's in the feed. Seems like the API and the feed should be in agreement. This is the code that gets the post record. My guess to get them into agreement, I'm going to have to hack this, changing https to http. And there is the reason they can't fix this, and just have to live with this mess. I think overall the people who manage the feed and the API are doing a pretty great job, btw. You have to know I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it. #
- PPS: I reported the problem once it was fully diagnosed, on the WordPress repo for Calypso.#
- Thinking of AI and how it relates to software development, I'm working in the old mode and the new mode. The old mode is I build a project over a few years. I try to bury bits of functionality behind interfaces, either APIs or UIs, and hope I can forget how they work and just access them via the interfaces. Repeat the process. In the new mode, I rely on the machine to remember all that. Claude Code is the key to doing that, using a GitHub repo. And then two or more people can work at the higher level. Obviously the next thing is to see if there aren't some interfaces we can build that are even higher level. The evolution of AI and languages go hand in hand. On the other hand, human beings being what we are, it's just as likely as there will be a wild proliferation of new even more complex interfaces, because now we can rely on the machines to remember the complexities, and their limit is, compared to humans, practically infinite. #
