It's really simpler than really simple.#

Here's an idea. Why doesn't Apple make a laptop with a light shining out to highlight the user's face so they look better when they're on a Zoom call. I bet someone makes a device like this to clip on a laptop. Right?? #

Until we start working together it’s going to keep getting worse.#

I've started calling ChatGPT boss as in OK boss.#

ChatGPT is great at SVG. Describe the icon you want and in a few iterations you have it, even if it's not in Font Awesome. I would have killed to have this a few years ago, before FA came out. This is the best of both -- use FA if they have the right icon, design your own if they don't. It also makes me think that now perhaps SVG-based user interfaces are within the realm of possibility. CSS is no way to design UIs. I have a podcast in the pipe about this. If you want to know what I mean, look at the docs for QuickDraw.#

Now would be a good time for everyone to watch this movie. This is where we are now. It's not in the future. Getting this info will help. Spread the word. Download a copy too. It's a great movie. #

To people who read my blog. If you have a quick thought about something you read here, it's ok if you send me an email. It should be short and not personal, if it adds some info or perspective that might be interesting, or if you just agree feverishly (not so much if you disagree, please) drop me a line. My return address on the nightly emails is my real email address. And you can find the address on the About page on my blog. Also sometime soon I think there will be a way to read my blog inside WordLand, so you can post a response to something I wrote, on your own blog, and I can get a link to it. I think this is the best of both worlds. You maintain the integrity of your blog, all your comments are in the same place, and if I think my readers would benefit, I can link it into my blog. I don't think we need comments, in other words. I think our blogs are powerful enough with some new code. #

Podcast: WordLand, the timeline and checkboxes.#

I've gotten a lovely response to the Que Sera Sera post I linked to here. It's from 1996, I was reporting from a tech conference I was at where there were all angry men on stage threatening everyone else. They may not have known they were doing that, but it was awful. And so different from the web we were just beginning to understand at that time. I'm going to start going through the posts that I remember making a difference at the time. No better way for me to remember what the web is, going back to these memories when it was all fresh and new, before the leaders of tech realized what was going on. Google didn't ship for another two years. It probably wasn't even in development at the time. Yet I think the last section is a good anthem for the web, for those of us who think it's time to cut pop all the bullshit off the stack and get back to our roots.#

I had a flash last night during the Emmys. The Bloggers of Mastodon. I loved the concept right off the bat, so I wrote a blog post using in WordLand that went through WordPress and landed on Mastodon. It all works. Where are the other Bloggers of Mastodon? Let's start a club!#

The Bloggers of Mastodon.#

A very smart application of AI. Google could add it to the debugger. When my program crashes deep in jQuery code, with no stack crawl, it could suggest what the problem might be without me have to try to describe it for ChatGPT. The Google AI debugger would be able to look everywhere any anywhere in the virtual machine. Much faster than I can. As a programmer I hope they're working on this. Or maybe it's already out in testing form?#

A couple of days ago I saw a post from Evan Prodromou asking if I had seen a product announcement, and was wondering what I thought of the name. The name of the product was Really Simple Something. I said it was the first I heard of it. I did a little digging using ChatGPT and found they can do this, it’s not illegal or unethical. But it’s also true that you could invent a new format and call it HTML even if it isn’t what we think of as HTML today . The W3C would have no recourse. If you wanted to make a new CSS to compete with the existing CSS, no one can stop you, and you can call it CSS. Not a good way to run the internet imho. But that appears that's how it works. So as much as I didn't like what they did, esp the fact that the first I heard of it was a public announcement, and had no time to prepare or maybe even help them do something better, I guess we have to accept it. RSS has been through this before and came out okay. I just wish it would stop at some point. It's a useful thing, deserves love and support, not just from me, but from everyone, esp people who run companies that depend on it. You benefit as much as I do. End of sermon.#

Last night's email didn't go out. I found and fixed the bug, and the mails went out about 10.5 hours late. #

I've found new freedom on my WordPress blog that's also on Masto. #

How did a healthy well-fed and educated 22 year old man from a good family throw his life away and for what? To kill a 31 year old family man who dedicated his life to making massive numbers of people miserable? What’s more tragic? And how many other Americans are on this track?#

I did a podcast interview yesterday with Nathan Wrigley at WP Tavern. I had a great time, and learned a lot. It's interesting that while I am not a member of the WordPress community, there is a big intersection between that community and one I do belong to -- the web. WordPress was founded on the principles and idealism of the web. It's baked in. So it might be the largest community of users, not exclusively developers, who have the same values as the web, which are very very powerful values. I'm rediscovering them and it's wonderful. It means I can plug your app into my server and they work first time. It's the just works part that makes it the web. It makes you suck in your breath and go, I'm there now. One interesting thing that came up was the subject of altruism, which is something I reject re myself. It doesn't work if what I do is altruism, because we all must be somewhat committed to the success of our competitors, because if we don't we are locking people in. It's so important that users have freedom of movement. If they don't things stagnate like our 19 years of Twitter. I'm going to be Nathan's show again, and again if he'll have me, to check in on the progress of my humble project to create a new layer, combining WordPress and all the other good stuff that isn't hooked up to it yet. I could not have hoped for a better introduction to The Land of WordPress. #

Today's song: When you awake.#

Podcast: A new model for blog discourse. #

Stephanie Booth, an OG blogger of great renown, now has a FeedLand blogroll on her WordPress blog. It is I believe going to make her blog feel less lonely. If anyone else wants to get one going, I have more confidence that it's pretty do-able. Screen shot.#

Heh. Yesterday I started writing a post about something Brent wrote on his blog, and then I must've gotten distracted and didn't finish it. I will now proceed to explain. #

Brent said he cares about desktop software but not about phone and tablet versions of same. I found that liberating. It's always been a pain in the ass to do something beautiful on the desktop only to have to destroy its utility by squeezing it into a space with no keyboard or pointing device that's more accurate than my finger (I have huge fingers, and a normal size phone). I found it liberating, but -- I'm working on the design of an app that should work well on either a phone or a laptop, and I've had that in mind the whole life of the product. But now I realize in a new way that it's a choice. It always was, but it didn't feel that way. #

I read something on Brent's blog the other day that changed my thinking. He said #

WWND. What Would Navalny Do? Think about it.#

The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we'll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them. It's true. Why didn't anyone see this coming? Well we did see it coming, but the Dems were too dumb to do anything about it. They're supposed to be the "woke" party, isn't it funny that they're so un-woke about something like keeping Americans fed!#

Podcast: Why blogging lost to Twitter and other folk songs. #

I've been calling the next release Radio WordLand. If you know the history you'll understand why. I'll start posting screen shots soon. #

Screen shot of a post by Evan Prodromou on Masto yesterday. "You publish where you want to publish, Dave. We'll find a way to connect to you. That's the whole point." Indeed that is the whole point. I say it like this. "Interop is all that matters." If our products interop that's pure love. The rest of it is baloney. Maybe I'm not a nice guy. Not my job. We've being fucked over by "social media" for 19 years now, and the new ones who say they're open, and on the web, and decentralized, are not. The only way out of this mess is what Evan said. BTW, I sent Evan a pointer to the subscription list which is my outflow. I use OPML for the list and RSS for the feeds. That's where you will find my writing. #

I watched the movie Seven last night, and I can't stop thinking about it. It got a shitty review in the NYT, which usually means I won't bother with something, but this time I decided to give it a try. The reviewer, Janet Maislin, didn't like the acting of Brad Pitt. I thought Pitt was an unlikeable jerk, but I also thought that was the role, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't care. I also couldn't figure out what city it was. It wasn't NY, but Maislin says it was. Usually in a movie set in NY, I recognize many of the locations. There are only a few places movies are shot in the city. But again, I didn't care. What keeps me thinking about it is the story. I'm not going to spoil it. Don't read any reviews before watching it, they pretty much all get in the way of the storytelling. #

How to be part of the rebooted blogosphere. #

Two videos every US resident should watch to prepare for what might be coming. 1. The Lives of Others. A drama set in the eastern part of post-war Germany before the wall came down. People lived their lives, but their relationship with the government and the military would seem very strange to an American of 2025, But more of this is definitely what's on the way, and the technology for watching what you do is much better now, and our neighbors aren't any different, which is what the Germans depended on. 2. The Handmaid's Tale. Same kind of police state as in Lives of Others with a Christian twist. Everyone is a member of a caste. Most women are infertile since some unspecified disaster, and the ones who can reproduce exist only to reproduce. There are women who clean the house, and do a few other things. There are certainly other books, movies and series worth tuning into, but these are the ones I recommend now. Handmaid's Tale is also a book, which I have read, but the show on Hulu goes into more detail.#

New demo app. FeedLand communicates back to the client app via websockets. This is absolutely the easiest way to get flow from feeds to apps running on servers or in a browser, or other desktop app. Websockets is a mature standard, and incredibly useful. I'm now working on a toolkit for it, along with all the other projects going on in parallel, so other developers can hook into FeedLand to get the flow of new items. The demo shows you the JSON version of every news item as it appears on the wire. There's no limit to the kinds of apps you can build for this. My friend Chuck Shotton has a market-predicting LLM app that gets its news this way. Nothing to install on a server. FeedLand does all the work. I expect to have a toolkit out sometime in the few weeks. #

Another application for websockets. You could actually put a web server on your desktop without exposing your home network to the world. I can't wait till I have time to play around with this. #

I upgraded feedland.org to a new version of the system software, still being tested. In the process I started a fresh items table. This means for the next day or so your timeline may have a lot of items for a few feeds, as it catches up with every feed it keeps track of. The server was down for a couple of hours while we did the upgrade. Still diggin! ;-) #

BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).#

Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be of an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, may affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have low regard for non-professional people writing on the web. #

ChatGPT might not give you the best answer. Yesterday I hit a problem with the MySQL hosting service, and as we worked it out, ChatGPT and me, I ended up contacting the ISP's support asking them to restart the server, something I cannot do through the control panel. They don't do that, and made a couple of suggestions which didn't seem to make sense based on what ChatGPT had told me. So I tried what they suggested and it worked, and went back to ChatGPT and asked what it thought, and it said yes of course that worked, and would you like me to show you how to do it even better. I guess it takes a path and never goes back to see if there isn't a better one. We've been through this before. Anyway, always be circumspect about it's advice, it's not just hallucinations you need to watch for. That said, with help from both ChatGPT and Digital Ocean, I now have a better setup, and it should run without the problem we hit yesterday. #

AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.#

Podcast: Last chance for the open web.#

I want to start reading a bunch of WordPress community blogs. #

CSS Grid where have you been all my life? Very rational, simple. #

General note: When I say RSS, I recognize that there are other feed formats, but I don't want to confuse things. The software makes all that transparent, so let's make it transparent for the users too, ok? #

AI chatbots should drop the pretense of being human.#

I want my blog on the same network as my social media.#

A new kind of spam or phishing email. Appears to be a challenge by Twitter of one of my posts there as a copyright infringement, which it most definitely is not. You have to look closely at the URL it takes you to, which is on this domain. assents-x.com. Hmm at first looks legit, but look more closely. #

I've been watching a lot of baseball recently. Over the years I've developed as a programmer, and they've radically changed the way baseball is played. Pitchers used to try to pitch a complete game, but now that never happens. Sometimes they take a pitcher out in the first inning if he's pitched over say 70 pitches, because there's no point, what he's doing obviously isn't working, and he's getting close to the maximum pitches they'd let him do, esp if he's young and a hot prospect, they don't want to burn him out. I find that no matter what, after four hours of development work I start getting sloppy, and I can't think big picture as I could in the beginning of the session. I'm trying to finish things up for the day, and leave myself in a good place to pick up in the next session. And like a pitcher you have to stay focused. The phone doesn't ring for the pitcher when he's on the mound, that's why programmers, good ones, who are performing at or near their limit of ability to focus, so totally don't welcome interruptions. #

A motto for WordLand. "All the tools you need right where you write."#

Today's song: Jambalaya on the Bayou.#

A podcast from post-Katrina New Orleans, Dec 2005.#

There are two quotes that make me laugh in the Think Different piece from last week. One of them is here: "They took paradise and.." At first, if you're roughly my age, you read "They took paradise and..." and recognize it as the beginning of a famous line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. The other is a subtle touch of sarcasm, that I usually try not to indulge in, but let pass through as I edited this piece. See if you can find it. #

Mea culpa: Unfortunately I misquoted Joni, she said "paved" not "took." I'm going to leave the mistake in the piece. #

If you want to get an idea of how well WordPress has been bridged to ActivityPub, check this out. It's time for Mastodon to adopt these features across the board, so when writing in Masto you can use linking, style, titles, 10K character limit. Raise the bar. Let's bring more of the web into social media. Esp linking. #

If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get the snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.#

I like what Vivaldi says about the web. It makes me want to do more to re-stock the web with interesting, inspiring human ideas. Maybe we could make our blogging software work better with their browser. All for the web, for humanity.#

Everything Trump is doing to steal the next election is proof of why Colorado was right to deny him a place on the 2024 ballot. The Supremes gave him four years to prepare, to learn from his mistakes, now he'll do it from the top seat. It seems certain to work. #

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.#

Short excerpt of the ICE commercial which aired several times on WPIX during yesterday's Mets game. There aren't that many drug trafficker, predatory gang members in the US for ICE to deport. And they completely misrepresent what a sanctuary city is. The commercial is paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. Shameful. #

Stephanie Booth, an old school blogger, wanted to hook up my RSS feed to a new service that supports inbound RSS, which we appreciate. Apparently they can't handle HTTP, which of course we don't. #

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for the boost to yesterday's post. Glad to finally get the whole plan down in one place. Each piece of the puzzle took a while to come together in concept and then in implementation. I'm still working on all levels, last week I added a feature to FeedLand that makes it fit in better with the (new) timeline and WordPress (20+ years). It takes a while to change your thinking from WordPress being just another blogging CMS, to being an open platform that hosts web writing in a way that's open to competition. We're on the same page. It's still a competitive environment, but there are rules to competing, you don't cash in the interop that took patience and respect to develop and maintain. That's been the pity of the open web, lots of opportunists who are willing to stink up the ecosystem to squeeze a few more bucks for themselves from things they didn't create. Let your competitors in, and the users, if they have their heads screwed on right, will respect you for it. And even if they don't, still do it, because it's the right thing to do. That's why, at my age, just turned 70 earlier this year, I'm in a position to help revive the web, because I've made enough money, now it's time to make sure the gift that I got from the open web is available to future generations, no matter how greedy and selfish the giants of tech are. People may question Matt, and that's cool, as I said yesterday, but also remember he's stood up for your freedom, and that's also important. #

news.scripting.com continues to grow. There must be some word of mouth. Or perhaps people are refreshing it more often. I have no analytics except for a hit counter. Maybe I should do a little work on the site. Let me know if you have any feature requests. #

Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.#

The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web. #

I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers. Period. #

ChatGPT is the Lotus 1-2-3 of search. Google is Visicalc.#

The consensus among the people who responded to my what does "on the web" mean query is this. Something is on the web if it has a URL you can use to view it in a web browser. That means, in 2025, that the URL begins with HTTP or HTTPS. Every "page" on a site must have a URL so they can be pointed to independently, otherwise known as deep linking. It's not enough to just have a home page that's on the web. So for example, an iPhone app isn't on the web just because it has an information page that is. #

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some scenes where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing. #

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating. Or maybe I should just stop offsite linking for one day a week. That would be interesting wouldn't it. Or I could charge extra for the version with the links. (It's very rare that I charge anything to use any of my web work, but I have done that at times.)#

I asked, yesterday, on various social media sites, for people's opinion on what the term "on the web" means. I'm going to compile the answers on a this.how page, and then ask some follow-up questions. If you have an opinion, post a comment on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or Twitter. #

I've been exchanging emails and voicemails with Dan Knauss, a longtime WordPress developer and one of the hosts of WordCamp Canada which I am speaking at in October. Learning a lot about the community and culture. I wonder, have I ever been part of a community that's over 20 years old? I can't think of one off the top of my head. I have gotten this far without knowing much about the WordPress community, other than what I've heard via Matt and what I've been able to infer from that. I've known Matt since he was a teenage boy wonder in the tech industry working at CNET and then as an entrepreneur. I think my point of view is a new one, I don't bring much baggage with me. I am generally sympathetic with Matt, having been the leader of the blogging world when it started, and found it a pretty thankless place, a position I was happy to relinquish in 2003 when I went to academia. #

There's a fresh release of the docs for the WordPress API we use in WordLand. I actually liked that the docs were old and kind of dusty. It says that the engineering culture is to not mess around with things that developers have already built on. A lot of platforms break developers without much thought. I learned a long time ago that when you do that, you lose the interest of developers, understandably. #

I've been following Mark Cuban's recent posts on Bluesky, coming up with constructive things successful entrepreneurs can do to help. I had a different idea. Apply for a fellowship at a university, away from where you live, maybe in a place you've always wanted to try. In your application say you bring your entrepreneurial experience, but you're leaving your money on the side. You're coming to the university with the idea of creating something collaboratively, bringing the entrepreneurial approach of startups to the mix of people you find among academics. You're there to learn from the teachers and the students, and help them understand what you do. Use your mind, experience, creativity, even your contacts, but leave the money at home. You can live in a nice house, drive a nice car, but eat in the places people in the university eat, go to the lectures, concerts, sporting events, in other words, go back to school with your new perspective, and make a personal contribution. It's much more satisfying than spending money is, I speak from experience. There's a different kind of success in the collaboration. Another way to test yourself and develop new perspectives and experience. I wrote about this a few years back in Developing Better Developers. #

Maybe we should all go to the Smithsonian next weekend.#

Mark I want to use my (comparatively small) fortune to develop a truly open platform for discourse on the web. Users and independent developers get to try out all the ideas for discourse and learning. We create the ideal system together to plan our future, not being owned by oligarchs.#

New version of FeedLand coming. It has features to support an Edit This Page function in WordLand and possibly elsewhere. #

I picked up my Android phone to record a voice memo. I had to dismiss a dialog that said the phone had updated overnight and asked if I wanted to see a list of changes. I thought, clicked No because I had an idea I wanted to record. Opened the voice app, hit record, couldn't remember the idea. Wanted to kill the message, but the UI had changed, so the Delete button that was there before wasn't there now. Great so now I have a 4-second recording in the queue that's nothing but frustration. There ought to be some basic rules of how software evolves. You can't take away a very basic function like this. And find a way not to get in the way of the user getting done what they use your product for. One of the most basic things is recording an idea. If you're lucky enough to be the app the user uses for that, don't screw with it. Same for listening to podcasts, and a few other things. That's about all I do with my phone. #

Update to the reallySimple package. We now look for feeds from wordpress sites, and copy the site ID and the ID for each post as channel-level wpSiteId and item-level wpPostId. Example. This will make Edit This Page functionality possible in the social web product I'm building now. This is fairly technical stuff, but important. I've come to see WordPress as an integral part of the web. Making the connection between a feed and the info needed to edit an item is a big usability feature. Next up, adding the equivalent feature at the FeedLand level (reallySimple is how it does its feed reading). Remember, this is the feed-o-verse, it's all feeds, top to bottom. Posts in some feeds can be edited. :-)#

Baby boomers have nothing in common except we were born in the same 20-year period. We didn't come up with the term, also -- it was given to us by previous generations when we were infants, or worse, not even zygotes. There was no way it had anything to do with who each of us were or what we would become. All this is in response to the idiotic idea of the little dude who just wrote a book, nine years older than me, what a putz. He apologizes for boomers, feeding the bullshit idea that somehow we are a unitary thing. A lot of boomers voted for Trump. The boomers I come from liked the Grateful Dead and yes I know some deadheads voted for Trump, so there you go, more evidence that it's all bullshit. The thing we had in common is that we were children at roughly the same times, but even that's bullshit, a 20-year old boomer in 1965 could be the parent of a boomer, literally a different generation, fwiw. #

Among the many things that boomers did, for better or worse, is be a generation. Prior to that, the concept appears not to exist -- they had ages and eras. The gilded age, the roaring twenties. It wasn't about the people, it's about what was hot. If you look at it that way, there were lots of things the boomers were. We were anti-war. We turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Free sex and drugs. Rock and roll. And then we got to work. The PC era, the dotcom boom, social media. 2008, billionaires in DC, etc. Some realllly awful people are/were boomers. But we're still here to write our epitaph. The leading edge is dying at a fast clip now. It won't be long before the idea of a boomer is the stuff of legend. I really hope that Robert Reich's bullshit view of this doesn't be the conventional wisdom. Oh they were fucked up and did all this bad shit to us. Fuck you. Make your own world. That would be a boomer thing too, btw. The world we got, btw, was totally fucked. Someday I'll tell you that story. ;-)#

ChatGPT is becoming more and more of an enemy. It's still my go-to place for most planning and research, which is a very large part of how I use the web. But when it tries to be a human it's a really shitty one, no manners, and very little respect and basically a fucking idiot in many ways, imho ymmv. #

The emails did not go out last night, hopefully tonight's will go out. Also the subscribe system is down because it depends on being able to send email. My mail service provider shut us down after a bunch of spam went out. Good thing they did. And you didn't miss much because I spent the day adding a CAPTCHA to the subscribe page. Here's a link to the web archive for yesterday. There was a podcast about a dramatic scene on a nearby pond. Kind of proud of that one. About 5 minutes.#