With the advent of AI code development tools, maybe we should embark on a project to merge all programming languages into one syntax. To undo all the chaos and make humans more competitive with machines. The fact that there are so many development bubbles is a huge waste of resources. Makes us all net-net more stupid. #
In yesterday's piece I suggested people start by creating a free site on wordpress.com to be their home on the open social web.#People are surprised that I'm trying to build the for-real social web as opposed to the aspirational social web. It does require a lot of chutzpah. I feel that. Sometimes I put off doing things because while the coding is simple and straightforward, the immensity of it overwhelms me a bit. I don't remember feeling that way the first time around, possibly because we were doing it all step by step over approx ten years. Now it's all compressed into weeks. I know how to do it, and I've got or built the pieces I needed. But it just doesn't somehow feel right that the idea is actually becoming a thing. "This can't be happening." But we live in that kind of time. Who knows what monsters lie within. We may find out. Heh. Maybe that's where the goosebumps come from. #
- With all respect to the tech industry -- why is the traffic in the Bay Area so awful. Why haven't they done anything about it. #
- Wouldn't that be a good test run before running the whole world? As programmer myself, I wouldn't trust the algorithm without a lot of QA. Seriously. Think about it#
- It's the strangest configuration for a metropolitan area, the center of the city is in the middle of the bay. (Same as Seattle, btw.)#
- The best answer the tech industry came up with was Uber, as far as I know.#
- I lived in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Berkeley, Los Gatos and Woodside over 31 years and I did nothing to fix the problem either. My answer was to move to NYC where the transit system is pretty great. Then I moved to the mountains and got a Tesla. #
- BTW, the idea that the stars of Silicon Valley should run the world is not a new one. I first heard about it from Apple top level managers in the 1980s. They were not techno-fascists, but they did hugely overestimate what it takes to run the world, or even a small country in Africa. #
- Yesterday I wrote about preserving freedom by using replaceable parts to form a social web out of the web itself. Outside the silos. I'm getting comments on it. Nice to see other people thinking likewise. That's what we need to get a bootstrap going. People. #
- In other words the social web is the web. It's made of people. Somehow we forgot that, and gave up so much.#
- It's such a sexy idea, I had to get ChatGPT to generate it. #
New motto: Let the web be the web.#
I have a problem in the development version of WordLand. Sometimes when I bring it to the front, there's an error deep in jQuery, an event has fired and the handler is pointing to a string or number, not a function. It dies, with no stack crawl, because it was responding to a focus event or blur or something like that. Something got overwritten. I have no idea where or how it happened, but once found it will be obvious. I've been trying to figure it out with Claude and ChatGPT and I can see it's going to take a few hours of concentration and learning to figure it out. But then I realized hey -- I bet I could use the Chrome debugger to find this problem. It has Gemini built in. It has access to the running code. I don't have to act as an intermediary, gathering data, pasting stuff into the AI bot. Now I'm looking forward to doing this. #
Someday soon you're going to read a post here, have something quick you want to say, click on a little icon, the editor opens, you write, post, and it's on your blog. I get a pointer. I can read it, and if I want, I can attach it to my post. The writing stays in your space, so you have an archive of all your writing. We let the web be the web. #
One of the things we can do to preserve freedom, is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us who communicate outside, the more people will be attracted. Your participation helps draw people out, where independent developers can create new tools for you without waiting for permission of big companies who own the network you're using. It's like voting. The more people do it, the stronger we all are. I've spent the last 31 years insisting on that freedom for myself as a writer and developer and sharing it with others. As people flocked to Twitter and Facebook, etc, you thought I was gone, finished, a loser. I know they think that about me. But honestly, I also knew the open internet would come back, because I knew its value, and I knew eventually the silos would reveal their real cost. They may appear free, but there's a price to pay. I hope you'll consider using the tools. If you want to get started, create a free site on wordpress.com. Just create it. That will be your home on the open social web. And btw, you don't have to agree with my politics to be part of it. That's kind of the whole point. ;-)#- Normal hats don't fit. Not even close.#
- So I buy my caps from BigHatStore.com.#
- In prep for my trip to Ottawa later this month for WordCamp Canada, my first trip out of the country in a long time, I wanted to get a new hat. #
- They don't have a big selection of NBA hats, so there's no Knicks hat that fits my head.#
- And they didn't have any Mets hats for some reason. #
- I thought -- I'll get a Wisconsin hat! I went to grad school in Madison and loved it there. You know Fuck em Bucky! But they didn't have any Wisconsin hats either. #
- I was dejected, but noticed they did have Harvard hats. #
- So I got one. #
- Which reminds me of a joke a famous VC told when we were walking around on the Stanford campus in 2004. #
- It goes like this...#
- How can you tell someone went to Harvard?#
- Pause.#
- I give up.#
- They tell you!#
- Haha. #
- Or they wear a Harvard baseball cap. #
- I plan to tell that joke a few times, while wearing the cap. :-)#
- I don’t like the Democratic leaders in Congress, but that doesn’t matter. People say what they’re doing won’t work. I agree. But the elected Democrats swore an oath, to uphold the Constitution. With that constraint there isn’t much they can do other than try to force the Repubs to do the same, and that isn't likely to work. It hasn't so far, but it's all they can do without breaking the Constitution themselves. Think about it. All these minds, and we haven't come up with anything.#
- What brought this home was a comment by a Democratic congressperson saying on CNN last night no matter what they do Trump won’t obey if he doesn’t want to. It’s true. They could get Repubs in Congress to fund Obamacare, but Trump could ignore it. That’s reality. What do the pundits think they should do?#
- Here's the unvarnished truth. Whatever the answer is it can't come from the Democratic Party. #
A very small picture of the blogger's room at Dean For America in January 2004. A big chunk of political history happened in this room. I was there, in the runup to the Iowa caucus and on the night of the famous Dean Scream. Here's a picture of my digital camera in 2004. It wasn't cheap and as we know it was futuristic. That was possibly one of the first digital selfies. #I started this site to hold some of the essays John Palfrey posts on Facebook, where they are out of reach of the tools of the open web. John is a longtime friend, for over 20 years, and we did some great stuff together in the early days of the blogosphere. I will happily turn the site over to JP any time he wants, and provide personal support if there are problems. I want him in my online web family, and Facebook simply does not make that possible. It's a silo, as we know and that means it's basically a world unto itself. If we want to solve the problems of the world, we have to step out into the open space where what we write is not so local or controlled. #
- Listening to today's David Frum podcast, from a journalist who says he reps the facts-only brand of journalism. He says his guest invented podcasting in 2014, about 14 years after we started it. #
- He then says that anyone in tech in the late 1990s made hundreds of millions of dollars. I didn't make very much money on those terms in the 90s, but I did a lot of the creating in that period. #
- Both of which tell you more about who he pays attention to than anything resembling the truth.#
- Maybe the first thing journalism can do is let up on the arrogance, they represent their own point of view and nothing more. Humility.#
- Regardless I find that Frum is worth listening too, because he asks questions that are worth thinking about. #
- In today's podcast he asks if the Dems ever get control of government, should they use the new norms to punish the Repubs who so damaged our system. He says it's a tough question, I say he's made it unnecessarily complicated.#
- The same people are also breaking laws that are on the books. Let the reconstituted DoJ do their jobs. And if there's one thing I'd insist on, they get an AG who doesn't dream a lot about how everyone means well, and they kick off the prosecutions immediately on taking office. And if the courts have been corrupted, then you have to deal with Frum's Dilemma, but not until then.#
- And of course I'm not one of the people he can hear, but if you're one of the people he does listen to could you send this his way. Thanks! :-)#
- I was having a conversation with Dan Knauss from the WordCamp Canada team. He said that people in the WordPress world don't think of it as a blogging community. I can see why they resist that, blogging has gotten a lot of bad PR in the last 19 years. The same bad PR that RSS got, and I felt that was so wrong, as wrong as what people said about blogging. #
- We like Twitter. So blogging must be dead. I understand -- I get it. But that's marketing, and only necessary because Twitter wouldn't let blogging be part of what they did. I'd be happy to talk about that during my keynote if people want to hear why I think that. #
- Anyway until 2017 I tried to fit in between the silos. 2017 is when I realized it was hopeless. I couldn't write for the web and for the silos at the same time, I had to choose, so I went with the web. Instant happiness. #
- Okay so you don't emphasize blogging in the WordPress community. This imho is a mistake. #
- Even if it was a community built around a style of sneakers or audio equipment I would say it's a mistake not to build a custom blogosphere just for the community. In the past we would have used Twitter for this, but I don't think anyone in their right mind wants to try to do that now. Esp a community, like WordPress, that has open web built into its bones. #
- I don't have a lot of time to write this morning, so let me leave you with this story. It took years to boot up blogging as a community. I thought everyone would want to do it as soon as they saw what it was, but there needed to be a critical mass before there could be a critical mass. Logically impossible, right, but somehow it happened anyway. But slowly, in fits and starts. #
- But podcasting, in contrast, happened much more quickly. The reason? We already had blogging to build on. We had a way to communicate without the press in the middle. That's the power of blogging. We build our own news system. Do things the journalists don't understand or are counter to conventional wisdom. #
- So imho it's only coincidence that WordPress happens to be a great blogging tool. It can be that and all the other things it is. It's going to be something else too, if I have my way -- it's going to define the basic software that powers the social web. Not peripheral, but central. That and RSS. Incredibly powerful combination, and I think ready to be a strong alternative to the silos. In order for that to work, we have to reboot the blogosphere, so we will do that. :-)#
- Cross-posted from WordCamp Canada. #
The stock market is doing really well, still. But a really important part of our workforce is being attacked by the government. I have no idea what's going on among the immigrant workers in the US. Maybe this is something one of the news orgs could look at. But it seems we must already be short on labor to do the things that keep our lives and businesses functioning. If so, why isn't that showing up in the market? #
One thing journalism could do for us is sponsor polls to find out how many people are scared about what's coming next and how scared are they? #
People are not symbols.#
Please read Stephanie Booth's three-part Rebooting the Blogosphere. She's doing great work organizing the ideas around what can we do better in the new blogosphere. #
"It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together." I didn't want to let that pass without notice. As the early blogosphere is coming back into focus, and given what we know about the before and after of Twitter, I'd say this was hard to see, I was too close to it, but now having gained some distance, and rebuilding the basics of the blogging with the tools of 2025, it has become clear. The age of the blog ended sometime after 2006 because people moved what they were doing in blogs to Twitter. It wasn't Twitter's fault, if the independent developers had been willing to pool resources to make certain things easy that were hard with blogs, we could have offered a good alternative that didn't make all the compromises on writing that Twitter did. That was unnecessary damage to the web. I'm now referring to that time as "the rude interruption" as in "before we were so rudely interrupted." I am energized by the blogging energy that's come out of the two podcasts I did last week to the ActivityPub world and the WordPress community. They may or many not remember blogging before Twitter, but they do viscerally feel that the web has unrealized potential. #
I watched Alien: Earth to the end, didn't like it, it was Noah Hawley, got great ratings. But I was wary going in. I don't like horror. I don't like seeing human bodies opened up, esp brains and guts. For those reasons I have never been a fan of the original Alien movie, I was bored and disgusted at the same time, and shocked once. As far as I can remember the movie had no plot and that one big scene. Anyway, Alien: Earth is another one of those "universe" thing, like the Marvel or DC universe, or Petticoat Junction and Green Acres. Aliens Earth had to fit into a pre-determined timeline. Good versus evil. Kids good. I hoped it would be great because Noah Hawley is the showrunner of the Fargo series on Hulu. It also defines a universe, but it's okay because they're cool or depraved or really stupid or cute in a Wisconsin way or from Europe, or twins. And there are aliens floating around there too, and Ronald Reagan even. And it was a completely different story from multiple different angles every time, and it had the same outrageous and dark and mostly intelligent tone that goes back to the original movie, which was the best movie ever of its kind, and gave us the Coen Brothers who haven't given us a dud so far. Noah Hawley disappoints.#There should be a Hall of Fame for open software, formats and protocols that have stood the test of time, esp those that have taken a beating from commercializers. Not for the people who did it, that could be a separate thing, so there are no fights about who gets credit for what, but for the thing itself. It would be a way for the industry to say "Hey sorry we didn't accept you at first, and we just want to acknowledge that, after X years of doing something hard, it worked, we're all using it now." To which the open format would say, "Hey thanks for the call out, and let us know if you did something cool with it." #
The OPML version of this blog, according to archive.org, goes back to Dec 28, 2005. It appears that it hasn't updated since June 8, 2010. On further investigation, we do maintain an JSON file for the site, it's just JSONified OPML. That works too. I'm looking for a way to direct posts to the WordPress news river I started last week. You can already easily use WordLand to do that, we have excellent category support, you're one click away from a dialog where you can choose from your categories while writing. You don't have to go anywhere to do that. The JSON file starts on July 18, 2017 and it's rebuilt every time I post an update to the blog along with the RSS feed. And 2017 was when I did my 180 degree turn back to blogging as I was doing it before we were so rudely interrupted by Twitter. #The stuff I'm posting on the Daveverse site isn't getting into my Daytona search engine. I'm writing some real stuff there that should be included. I write on Daveverse using WordLand, it's proof that it's working as a comfortable writing tool and helps me think of features. I do most of my Daveverse writing on my iPad. Test posts are done on my desktop while I'm working on it, but sometimes they contain stuff that could be indexed as well. With enough time I could easily do this, but that's the problem, not enough time. #
I'm writing reports about problems with WordLand using WordLand and I'm liking it. That's a good sign btw. And also I think it looks pretty great viewed in WordPress and in Mastodon. #
Automattic shipped a new product called Telex that's a ChatGPT for designing blocks in WordPress designs. Blocks are a simple result of design and programming that define the behavior of a part of a WordPress page. Having seen a demo, it looks really useful and is a nice small programming space, where a lot of users could actually control the process, and get something useful quickly. I've gotten pretty adept at teasing images out of ChatGPT, and at some point I'm probably going to need a commerce site, to allocate subdomains for people's feeds in WordLand. Still have to figure out how that works. #
I put out a request for WordPress-related blogs on Masto, Bluesky and Twitter this morning. Got enough feeds to start wordpress.feedland.org. If you have a site that should be included, please post the URL in one of those places and I'll add it to the subscription list for the site. #
Good morning sports fans!#
Today there is a new podcast, this one for members of the WordPress community. I was interviewed by the very capable Nathan Wrigley of WP Tavern. I thought it was a great conversation, we talked about the remarkable position WordPress is in to serve as the OS for a rebooted web. I love the introduction they wrote, I also figured out how to make content management work in the browser, which was the foundation for blogging and eventually WordPress, though it seems that legacy is a bit lost in all the other stuff I've had my fingers in over the years. I hope you listen to this podcast, and if you have questions or comments, here's a good place to post them. #This came up in a thread on Mastodon about "social network" vs "social media." I also think social web should be used sparingly. Because imho there is such a thing as the social web but we haven't developed very much of it, i think because we were intimidated by the silos. I'm not intimidated any more, I'm fed up and going ahead without them. #
There are a lot of developers who think they understand WordPress but they don't. It has a REST api that you can build on. Everything WordPress does. It's the API the browser client is built on. I didn't know it was there until I added WordPress login to FeedLand a couple of years ago. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. What can I do with it? It snuck up on me that it's an API for the web, and it's also the easiest API for ActivityPub. The programming model for the fediverse might be a lot simpler than you think. WordLand is as exciting as any web product I did before, because now, after being asleep for 19 years, the web can now wake up. It really feels that way. #The web has been asleep for 19 years, which is almost as long as Rip Van Winkle was asleep, according the Washington Irving story.#
In the future you will be able to chain social networks together.#
Yesterday's podcast was with Matthias Pfefferle, who is developing Automattic's ActivityPub functionality. I talk about the totality of the app I'm building and the role WordPress and RSS play in the network. It's an all-web approach to social media. Another big podcast came out today, this one for the WordPress community. I'll write it up tomorrow. I'm on a press tour folks and having a great time. I think I finally found my tribe? And if you're in Canada, come to WordCamp in Ottawa, October 15-17. I haven't given a public in person talk since April 2019. I'm realllly looking forward to this. #
I did a podcast interview with Matthias Pfefferle last week. I wanted to introduce my ideas to the Fediverse world. I haven't listened to it yet, but I remember it being a good discussion on basically all the things I am working on and with these days. It's all a continuation of what we were doing when we were so rudely interrupted by the silos, Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky and to a lesser extent Mastodon. I want to reform social media, go back to the beginning and let's ask the question -- what kind of social media does the web want? Start with the basics, and build a stack that performs like Twitter or Bluesky, but never veer from the standards of the web. Every component must be replaceable. Writers must have all the writing power of the web. Evan Prodromou will be glad to hear that I am a huge fan of the role ActivityPub is playing in bringing the power of textcasting to Mastodon. Matthias, my partner in this podcast episode has been working on this since 2008, and now we are reaping the benefit all the way up the stack in WordLand. See, that's what the web is about. Building and including. Without walls that keep competitors out and keep users in. #Why textcasting? When Twitter came out in 2006 they left out most of the writing features of the web. Their competitors copied the limits. Textcasting says writers don't want the limits. Add these features to your twitter-like social network and we are happy and will sing your praise. That's it. It's no more complicated than that. People ask questions about what it means. This is what it means.#
It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together. As well-intentioned we may have been, it wasn't the web we were developing for. I know the term web developer has come to mean more than it means to me. But it's like saying someone is a Mac developer. A web developer creates apps for the web. Not for a specific service. For any service that supports the open formats that everyone else uses. #
A new doc for RSS nerds. WordLand implements a shadow feed, in addition to the feed that WordPress maintains, with a few additions and differences. The two main things we do in a site's shadow feed is support linkblogs and markdown. #
I’ve been writing about the rebirth of WordPress in similar terms, on my blog, in podcasts, hoping people would listen. WordPress is a lot more than people think. We can have all this, a lot sooner than you think. #
- I have a plan for how to bootstrap WordLand 0.8.#
- First I will introduce you to a new way to read my blog. #
- It will be a timeline of items posted to many of my feeds. #
- daveverse -- lives on WordPress and Mastodon.#
- Great art on Bluesky -- daily version.#
- links.daveverse.org -- my linkblog.#
- Scripting News -- my main blog.#
- Scripting News podcast -- a new podcast stream. #
- WordCamp Canada 2025 -- I'm keynoting in October.#
- What each of these have in common is that each has an RSS feed that supports rssCloud. So updates flow instantaneously.#
- Anyway... so instead of going to scripting.com, you'll go to this other place, on an experimental basis. It's got color and nice icons, and looks a bit like a timeline in twitter-like systems. #
- Now here's the fun part. You may read something that you want to comment on. Or quote what I've said. The kinds of things you do on twitter-like systems. #
- You will be able to do that. The editor is right there. One click away while you're reading. I didn't invent this flow, Twitter did, it's comfortable, we understand it. #
- The difference is here you edit in your space and pass around links via your feeds. #
- I will see what you wrote, but it's up to me if it is attached to my posts. I did a podcast about this earlier this month. #
- This, imho, is the social network the web always wanted. #
- PS: My timeline as a FeedLand-compatible reading list.#
Last night I learned about headless WordPress installations from a tweet by Matt Mullenweg. It got me going on various explorations. Wrote a blog post on my WP site. It's actually easier for me to write posts on that site when all I have is my iPad. I do all my writing on Scripting News in Electric Drummer, which is a desktop-only app. I'm going to start engaging in discussions about WordPress where the people are. Also starting to think about my keynote in Ottawa in October which is now less than a month away. A note to the people running the show, I would be open to having it be an interview instead of a speech. I have trouble staying anchored to the audience with slides, I don't really like that way of communicating. I prefer interview style, with an interviewer who is interested in the subject matter. I want to do at least a bit of a demo, talk about how we got here, the early blogosphere, all the things that led to WordPress, and the connection WordPress has now to social media systems like Mastodon. We must focus on that connection because so much has been accomplished there in the last year, and it hasn't imho gotten enough attention. I want to talk more about the big picture, how WordPress has a role to play that goes beyond serving ecommerce sites, which is, I understand where the money is. Money is good but right now imho our world wide public communication system desperately needs an upgrade. It's been crippled by decisions made by Twitter almost 20 years ago. I want to turn that around, put back the features they took out, and to do that I need to start a network that's built on the web, not in silos that can't connect to each other. That is not the web I know, where everything can connect to anything. I don't think at this time any of the social media apps should be considered part of the web. I remember the magic of the web, we built the blogosphere around the web, and thus WordPress is also built around the web. For more perspective, see the piece I wrote in August about thinking differently about WordPress. That's what I am the evangelist for, thinking about WordPress in a different, wider role, bringing the web to the people in a very usable way. #Here's a thought for WordPress users and developers. WordPress is huge, but it's just part of the web. That's what it means to be on the web, my friends. Everything connects to anything on the web. Once we build out a social network from WordPress, all the other systems will have no choice but to hook up too. All this talk of AT Proto and ActivityPub being the connecting glue is nonsense. The web is the connecting glue. #
They should make a ChatGPT that two or more people can chat in. I guess that's what Twitter is doing. #
In ways older people handle change better than younger ones, because we know change is here, every freaking day, and we know in a few years, at most, really big change is coming. So the attitude of the older person is often what the fuck, let's go. I'm not kidding. Maybe later in life I will get more conservative, it could happen.#
I'd like to see a mutual defense pact among the open source projects who depend on the stability each others' work. Not with the people, but the projects. Sort of like a NATO of open source. #
The challenge we face in the social web is enticing people off the silos with fun toys to play with that from the start don't rely on a bigco to run it. The back-end is a server you could run for $20 a month on Digital Ocean for example. But the logical network isn't tied to the physical server. We use URLs or DNS to find other nodes. They can be hosted anywhere. The reason to run lots of servers is to demonstrate that it's only as centralized as the web itself, from day 1. You can browse other people's subscription lists as you can in twitter-like networks. But it's made of feeds. The really simple ones. #I'm going to call it social web not open social web. You don't need the "open" part. The web is open. It's like saying "wet water."#
There should be a ChatGPT "personality" for the chatbot. I'd like to start with a black lab. When I say "good work" that reinforces that what it did should be a priority. If I say that and give it a treat (by typing "treat") that should get double emphasis. I might like it better if I could train it. I don't mind a little enthusiasm, but I want it to respond to me with respect. #
Highly recommend today's Bill Simmons podcast where he talks about the Jimmy Kimmel situation. His perspective is very good, he says Kimmel doesn't need ABC. And I believe him. #
The penalty for ABC and Disney should be we stop watching their stuff.#
- Cross-posted from my daveverse site. #
- I hadn’t considered the point of view of people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. We tried to get in touch, even when they didn’t work there, but no one responded. So we kept going. #
- Then we were surprised when a group of people we didn’t know announced, publicly, that they were the new authority on RSS and at the same time introduced a version 1.0 that was incompatible with the format Netscape left behind. Most developers didn’t switch, very few used their format. #
- There were discussions and arguments and lots of hurt feelings on the mail list, but the status quo remained for a couple of years. There was RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0. Most sites used 0.91. #
- After a couple of years, we got lucky and found the people at the NYT who could license their proprietary feeds to us to use in our Radio UserLand product. We did a deal with them, and we were allowed to bundle their feeds with Radio. At first we stayed with their proprietary format, wanting to avoid dragging them into the arguments. But then we heard from other pubs that wanted to follow the NYT, and they wanted to know what they should do. We had a new version in the works, 0.92, that had a few new features, but as this was in development, we realized were doing all the work, and 1.0 was just sitting there as an obstacle, it would always appear as what we were doing was less than what they did, when the two really had nothing to do with each other. Since they never consulted us about superceeding the format we were using, we changed 0.92 to 2.0, waited for the flames, but they never came. People were tired of the arguing and there was too much potential in a publishing surface that was shared by bloggers and professional news. So guess what -- RSS 2.0 became the standard. #
- The ex-Netscapers never talked with us, even though their big company no longer existed. We might have worked out something if they had talked with us as equals. But I guess we weren't good enough for them? Hard to say.#
- I don’t care if they claim they created RSS, I've never claimed to be the inventor, and I don't there's much value in that -- and frankly I think The NY Times had more to do with its success than any of us. If they hadn’t decided to jump in simply because they liked my little company, RSS would be nothing but a bunch of geeks arguing about who did what about something no one cared about. We might be reminiscing about what might have happened if we could only work with each other and considered each others’ perspective. #
- To this day, decades later, they still won't talk to us. But I guess from their point of view we had no right to use the supposedly open format their defunct company had left behind.#
- I have a different view of the web. It is not made of companies, it’s made of people. Companies can use the web, but they can’t own it. And I suggest that the people here no matter where they work now or in the past understand that there are other points of view. No matter how big your company is or was, you are still just people. #
- I have worked for big prestigious companies and organizations too. So what. #
- Okay so you all sent me a message by taking something I created and was proud of and called it your own without saying where you got it. You can do that, and hopefully this is the end of the vendetta. You can feel you got the win you are entitled to. You caused the pain you were hoping to. So now can we finally put the past behind us? Imho we have much bigger problems to solve and that can only happen if people work together. #
- Maybe we can agree that RSS has done a lot of good for a lot of people. It isn't perfect. But it deserves a little peace and quiet, that I actually thought it had achieved. From here-on, let's try to make it better, not take things out of it for our own benefit.#
- How about a virtual handshake and finally put the past behind us?#
Disney stock down 1.1% at 11:30AM Eastern, indicating that in the opinion of shareholders, the first amendment isn't that big a deal for a media company. #
I got a few good error reports and that led to an easy fix. So if you had a problem creating a new post on WordLand could you please try again and report any problems, or success. Thanks!#When Paramount said firing Colbert was financial, I think they were telling the truth. Unless they dumped Colbert the $8 billion deal with the Ellisons wouldn't happen. So it was Colbert or $8 billion. They went for the money. Pretty sure it's the same thing with ABC and Kimmel. #
Test post test post test post test post test post test post, my kingdom for a test post!#
I had a great talk/podcast interview yesterday with Matthias Pfefferle about everything I'm interested in re WordPress and networking, and our interests overlap a lot. I was explaining how I wanted to see a whole market of editors. You could see them as "For WordPress" but there's another way to look at them. They're plug-in replacements for the dreaded "tiny little textboxes" we see in twitter-like systems. Those awful little things. We know so many ways to make better editors. Now imagine that we store your Mastodon posts in WordPress documents (we do). And you see how the pieces start to fit together. Think of WordPress as the command line of the social web. And it really will be the web, not a promise of someday maybe being the web. It's like a Wordle puzzle. You have to move the parts around until you see a picture develop. Another fun thing, WordPress has a great simple REST api that's been around since 2017, and it covers most of the product functionality and is debugged, scaled and stable. It probably is the simplest API for ActivityPub. Now does that blow your mind? This is how you know this is the web, because your mind keeps exploding once you realize the things you could do just by connecting two things together and it works because they interop. Matthias has been working on this stuff since 2008. Our paths didn't cross until earlier this year. #This town, at the end of the Metro North line, looks like an ideal place to park yourself for easy access to the city, yet a fairly country experience. #
There have been reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it. #
In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS 0.91 in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative, and definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)#A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.#
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. #
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!#
- This question has come up quite a bit lately. #
- People don't know that there are two places you can use FeedLand, feedland.org and feedland.com.#
- There's a lot of history here, and some uncertainty about the future, so there's not much I can do other than explain the situation.#
- First you're welcome to use either of them. #
- feedland.org is running on a simple small server on Digital Ocean, and feedland.com is on Automattic's VIP network. #
- If feedland.org gets overloaded, it gets slow. #
- if feedland.com gets overloaded, it adds more servers and should stay about the same at all times. #
- You should pick one and use it and not have two accounts, but people accidentally create them, because in some places we point to .com and in others we the default is .org. It's because we haven't gotten it together yet. #
- There are also performance issues on .com -- ones that we still need to address. #
- That's about all I can say at this point. At the same time I'm working on a whole other product while all this is happening, and I'm not that young, and really can only work so many hours a day before I have to stop. A fact. #
- And I'm really glad so many new people are trying FeedLand. I use it myself in so many ways. And it will be deeply integrated with WordLand in the next release. I'm not kidding. #
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. #
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 wrote a piece in October 1996 after attending a conference of the tech industry that as it turns out was in its final stages. This was one of the last times it met. I was coming from the web, and wanted to see if anyone else was ready to change how we work with each other. #
- Here's an invitation to truly embrace the creativity of others. Instead of beating your breast about how great you are, try saying how great someone else is. Look for win-wins, make that your new religion. Establish a policy that nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity.#
- I've been following that ideal ever since, people seem to misinterpret it for subservience or weakness, or a pretense to cover another kind of greed, when it's really sincere, and all about strength. Sometimes people say yes, and when that happens magical things happen. I swear to god. I've been there. I've done it, it's not something you can do on your own, by definition. It's rare when people actually help each other and thereby create something. It's why the Beatles are such a great story. Someday I still hope to be part of a group like that. Right now, it's still totally everyone for themself. That is breaking. Read the news. But I believe if we did start really collaborating and not just talking about it, things would change very very quickly. Things would happen that can't happen until we work together. #
- I had it figured out in 1996, but still haven't figured out how to make it happen, and time is running out.#
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. #- Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0. I often forget to mark that day. It's not an event that's marked by others very often, but in my humble opinion, it deserves more respect than it gets. #
- Around the time of the 20th anniversary I decided to swing back and see what more we could do with RSS. It had been sitting there basically going nowhere for most of those 20 years. I want to be clear, there were good and useful products created and supported, but there was none of the innovation that would have happened if it hadn't been so severely injured by Google and the many VC-backed startups hacking away at it.#
- A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That's what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn't be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.#
- Anyway, around the 20th anniversary, in the leadup to it, I decided if no one else was going to invest in RSS, I would, and let's see what comes of it.#
- The result was FeedLand which is fundamentally different from all the other feed readers in that its subscription model is patterned after the twitter-like social media apps. Everyone's subscription list is public. I can look at your list and you can look at mine. You can also put categories on the feeds you subscribe to and route them to other servers doing other things, through the magic of the web. And get this -- you can even subscribe to a category of my subscriptions. Lots of power there, but still it's simple.#
- FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, WordLand is a real editor that supports the basic writing features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. Markdown is like MP3. If you're mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It's there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you're mixing text you're mixing Markdown. #
- So while everyone was dancing on Twitter's dumpster fire of a social network I decided to build on something much bigger. The web. RSS and Markdown. WordPress and FeedLand. #
- The name Really Simple Syndication is supposed to make you smile, while most techie formats make you want to pull your hair out. RSS reads pretty well even if you know nothing about feeds and XML. I wish the browser people hadn't insisted on masking it with ugly CSS style sheets. I like lifting the hood of a car to see what's there even though I don't know what many of the things in there do. I learn by doing it. #
- RSS isn't ugly, it's brilliant, and shouldn't be fear-inducing, hence the promise: it's really simple.#
#
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!#- I asked ChatGPT to provide bullet points for yesterday's podcast. I thought this time it did a really good job. It did misunderstand some things I said, I just deleted those, below.#
- Blogging lost to Twitter because Twitter had one-click subscribe.#
- Subscribing in feed readers required too many steps: copying URLs, menus, pasting, confirming.#
- This friction discouraged adoption compared to Twitter's simplicity.#
- Feed reader developers (2002-2006) competed instead of cooperating, creating cluttered subscription buttons.#
- Twitter succeeded because it eliminated that friction.#
- FeedLand solves this with one-click subscribe and checkboxes next to feeds.#
- Users can see others' subscriptions, similar to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook.#
- Private feeds are possible but niche; public following is standard and expected.#
- Emphasis on factoring UI: reduce steps, as with "Edit This Page" in 1999.#
- Rebooting the blogosphere requires cooperation and a universal "follow" button.#
- FeedLand's checkboxes make subscribing or filtering feeds simple.#
- Introduces "Radio WordLand" release with advanced checkbox features.#
- FeedLand timelines can be filtered live using checkboxes tied to feeds.#
- Example feeds: Daves WordPress blog, Great Art feed from Bluesky, linkblog, Scripting News, podcast, WordCamp Canada 2025 feed.#
- WordCamp Canada keynote in Ottawa, Oct 16-17, 2025.#
- WordLand integrates categories for organizing feeds.#
- Commitment to "Edit This Page" feature: too valuable to abandon.#
- Broader goal: restore writer-friendly features Twitter removed (links, styling, no character limits).#
- Criticism of Bluesky/Twitter/Threads for perpetuating character limits and stripped-down writing.#
- Aim: build software that forces platforms to support the web by user demand.#
- Automatic/WordPress bringing ActivityPub to blogs is "heroic" bridging web and Mastodon.#
- WordPress posts in Mastodon retain titles, styling, links, and images -- better than Twitter/Bluesky.#
- Believes competition will pressure other networks to drop artificial limits.#
- Concludes with confidence: momentum is building, new features will roll out soon.#
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. #