Once again I'm doing a fresh build of the Scripting News home page.

That's why you see a post in the stream called About Scripting News.

We have many mottoes, but the title of this post is the one constant.

Sometimes I think the life of a developer consists of moving a pile of dirt from one place to another, and then back again.

Always diggin, until you're not diggin anymore. ;-)

PS: Here's a snapshot of the last pre-Fargo home page.

PPS: And my notes on the transition.

 8/4/2013; 3:02:02 PM.

Bootstrapping the blog revolutions

Natural-born blogger

About about pages

My favorite mottos, slogans and ideas

Thanks to

 8/4/2013; 2:58:20 PM.

First if you don't like any of this there's a simple solution -- unsubscribe. And don't slam the door on your way out.

When I point to something that doesn't mean I agree with it. It also does not mean I've read it. I use my linkblog as a way to remember to read something, the way people used del.icio.us.

People have a need to vent. Fine. But do it to the world, not to any one person in particular.

I don't care if what I said is the same thing you think someone I despise said. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Don't say I'm lame without saying what you think, so we can judge how lame you are.

I voted for Obama and gave him money and yes I think he's a failure as President.

But then I think we're all failures as American citizens. So I don't just blame Obama.

 8/4/2013; 9:28:53 AM.

Note: these are my opinions only.

Another topic at breakfast this morning with Rex was the spying the NSA is doing on all of us.

I think, if the President decided that it was more important to level with us than continue to deceive us, which they have been doing, there's no way of denying it now (and they haven't tried to), this is what he'd have to say.

We can't change any of these things. We will have an economic collapse. The climate will disrupt our lives in unimaginable ways. And hackers will rule us. All this will happen. So if you believe this, how do you prepare for it, such that the people who control the US govt have a chance to survive with their lifestyles intact? That's why Obama supports NSA spying. His bosses ordered him to.

What should we do about it? Probably nothing. Both of us, Rex and I, are in our late 50s. This stuff will play out over the next 20 years or so. Neither of us has enough of a stake in it to devote serious energy to it, esp if the younger people, who really do have a stake in the outcome continue to be uninterested.

I thought it was notable that they blame us, the boomer generation, for the mess we're in. When we were younger we did protest. Study the history. We were even effective at stopping the war we objected to. Our crime, if you want to think of it as that, is that we became middle-aged, and decided to live our lives instead of trying to change the world. We created the networks they love so much, and think we don't understand. So on the whole, I'd say we did okay. Not great, but not too bad. The question is why are today's young people acting so middle-aged? :-)

BTW, the President going on camera and telling us a big truth is not unprecedented. Check out Eisenhower's farewell address. It's amazing how he laid it out there. If only we had listened. It's the beginning of an incredible movie called Why We Fight. Highly recommended.

 8/3/2013; 5:14:55 PM.

My friend Rex Hammock from Nashville was in town this weekend and we went for a couple of bike rides. It's all good. Last summer I visited Rex and his wife Ann in their home town, and we did bike rides there too.

Rex is a publisher. He does magazines and turns them into blogs. He's parked in an interesting place and has been for quite a few years. He's smart, but keeps it simple. And he reads my blog, and I his. ;-)

A couple of pieces caught his attention last week. One about scripting in Fargo, and the other about ignoring what you don't understand. Rex has a funny sense of humor so I can't always tell when he's serious. But he says in a self-deprecating way that there's a lot of stuff he doesn't understand, but he asks questions, and I usually try to answer them when I can.

So he wanted to know about scripting in Fargo this morning. I tabled the discussion because I was enjoying Brooklyn Diner corned beef hash with poached eggs. We went on to other topics, and I realized later that I forgot to answer his question! Ouch.

Better late than never. Here's the deal on scripting in Fargo.

It occurred to me that given what Rex does, #2 might actually turn out to be important.

 8/3/2013; 2:53:43 PM.

The NYT sold the Boston Globe to the owner of the Boston Red Sox for $70 million.

$70 million was an incredibly good price for the Globe. Media properties are worth a lot. For example, according to Forbes, the Red Sox are worth $1.3 billion.

 8/3/2013; 2:12:17 PM.

Thanks to Beth Coll for the link to lorempixel.com.

Another one -- placehold.it.

How about a nice kitten?

 8/2/2013; 2:58:09 PM.

When CitiBike was first booting up at the beginning of the summer, a bunch people in the Village complained they didn't want bike stations near their houses. I thought this was reactionary and not at all futuristic. The stations will increase the value of the places they're near because it makes it possible for bike riders to get there more easily.

I can see a circumstance where businesses even pay for their own CitiBike stations. For example, there are interesting outdoor bars and restaurants on the water, on the Hudson. There's one in the 30s, just north of Chelsea Piers. It's on a boat. I've always thought it would be an interesting place to hang out, but it's hard to get to if you don't have a bike. But if they had a CitiBike station there, it would be a great destination for after-work drinks, even for people who don't work in the immediate neighborhood.

There are a couple of interesting places to eat in Riverside Park. One at 79th and the other south of there. Neither have CitiBike stations anywhere nearby. But they should! What a great way to spend an afternoon. Pick up a bike in the middle of the biggest urban center in the US, and ride to a breezy sunny place on the river to hang out and enjoy the summer breeze. When you're ready to return, pick up a bike and ride back.

I'm sure someone has demographics on it, but I bet CitiBike users are very good people to have as customers. ;-)

 8/2/2013; 11:26:59 AM.

Make the title of your HTML page the text of a tweet.

Great example, this Economist piece.

The Economist explains: How will Uruguay’s marijuana law work?

Perfecto. Now I don't mind editing a bit. But the less editing the better.

I passed that one along exactly as they spec'd it.

BTW, it's great to see countries marketing themselves. A liberal marijuana law is likely to get some great publicity for a country like Uruguay that doesn't get a whole lot of publicity.

Offering freedom and liberty. What a concept.

One more thing. Why do Repubs hate the word liberal so much. The root of the word is liberty. Something they supposedly adore.

I'm rambling as I'm wont to do. ;-)

 8/2/2013; 11:06:44 AM.

See also yesterday's blog post on this topic.

 8/2/2013; 10:57:59 AM.

There's a long tradition of editors doubling as programming environments. The first editor I used, on Unix, was built around that idea. When I was working on outliners on the PC and Mac in the 80s, we had a side project called Betty, which was a scripting language and outliner in one. After selling the company, I started UserLand to fully develop that idea. The result was Frontier, a scripting language built around an outliner.

That was in the 90s. Fargo shipped earlier this year, and last week it got the ability to script itself. This time I didn't have to write a scripting language, because we just use JavaScript. Makes my job that much easier because I don't have to sell you on a new language. These days JavaScript is very acceptable. :-)

Here's how it works. There's a special outline called menubar.opml. When you edit it, you're editing a set of menus that go at the end of the Fargo menu bar. Each of the menu commands contains a script that runs when you choose the command from the menu. The menu is "live," so as you make changes to the outline, the menu rebuilds to reflect the changes.

I wrote a tutorial on it, called Introduction to Fargo Scripting. It's a sweet idea, but not new. Frontier started with this idea, and it developed into a protocol called menu sharing, which allowed users to edit menus in all apps that were compatible. It was very broadly supported in the Mac market in the early web days. Even Netscape and Microsoft supported menu sharing in their browsers. We even found a way to hack it into the Finder (thanks to Steve Zellers).

Today's new thing is the ability to post from Fargo to WordPress by script. This should help open up the use of Fargo as a WordPress blog editor. Currently you're limited to a single blog. But the ability to write custom scripts should blow by this limit.

BTW, one of the cool things about the post is how the source code is displayed. It's taken a few years of experimenting to get that down, and I think it's finally there.

I don't at this time have any docs on the verb set, but you can see the whole list in this JS file.

We've got the pump primed now, and a nice little community.

I wonder if you can all see how this is developing as a really interesting runtime and editing environment, with the web all around you, and esp with Dropbox doing the synchronization, and a content management system hooked in, it's really a whole new layer on what we used to think of as the net.

Mind bombs everywhere you look. ;-)

PS: Here's a quick video demo...

 8/1/2013; 6:59:10 PM.

Every tech company, large or small, seems to be playing for world domination. That's okay I guess, if they have any hope of achieving it. But even the biggest most monster-like companies fall down when that's their goal, so what hope do you have? And what kind of adolescent dream is it that you would be the last man standing? What's wrong with playing nice with others?

I mention it because it's one month after RSS was set free by the entity that did actually achieve world domination (only to realize they didn't want it), and I don't see any evidence that any of the vendors are doing anything but thinking about what they can do to better hold on to their users, and perhaps capture the other guys' users. Maybe this is the right thing to do in a stagnant market with no growth possible, but a much better approach, imho, for RSS in 2013, would be to put our heads together and figure out how, quickly, we could make RSS more competitive with its competition -- Twitter and Facebook. Grow the market, as quickly as possible. Strike while the iron is hot. Make hay while the sun shines. Etc.

When you've chosen to be independent, not part of a big world-domination-bound entity, the Amazons, Apples, Googles, Intels, etc. then you have, it seems to me, bet your company on interop. You can't do it all. Your users will want to use your product with other peoples' products. They will appreciate it, if it's well-communicated, that you acted in the interest of their power and freedom, rather than in the interest of owning them.

People have minds. They read the news, they're aware of how tech is letting them down, aligning with the government, using their love of technology to undermine their freedom. Maybe not everyone believes this, but I think if you're seriously paying attention, you do.

So I choose to invest in user freedom. This leads me to interop and independence, not world domination. I want to have fun building hugely powerful communication systems, by working with others.

 8/1/2013; 11:23:15 AM.

This should be a basic law of the Internet, if it isn't already.

It's what we do in RSS, or any XML-based format. If you encounter something you don't understand, don't worry, just ignore it. The person who put it there was depending on you doing that. You shouldn't call it an error. No need to freak out.

You don't have to understand everything. No one does! :-)

This is one of those universal rules, much larger than just for techies. When we first introduced RSS, I wanted to link to the feed directly from my home page, with a little white on orange XML icon. The browser guys said "This won't do, people will see it and freak out." So they obscured it. Tried to make it look like a web page. It had the exact same content as the page you came from, but without the color and layout. It was even more confusing. Funny how that works.

When you make something look like something it isn't people get confused.

Imagine if you lifted the hood on your car, and instead of seeing an engine, a battery, a bunch of wires and tubes that you have no idea what they do (if you're like me) you saw another car interior. Seats, a steering wheel, a radio, etc. What would you think of that?

I like machinery that looks like machinery. I like the fact that I can lift the hood on my car and see what's in there. Maybe someday I'll be inspired to learn how it works. And then I'll know how to find it. In the meantime, because I don't understand it, I just ignore it.

I encounter that in the user community for Fargo, which is a very diverse group of people, with widely varying interests and skills. Some are writers, and use the tools at a totally conceptual level, and others aren't writers at all, and like the software because it's like a Lego set, where you can put the pieces together in a lot of different ways. Because they all use the same tools, we get to have fun together. But sometimes the writers think they have to understand something technical. I try to say that they don't have to understand it -- but someone has to understand it for the whole thing to work.

So the rule applies to our user community. There's never any harm in asking what something's about. Anyone can understand any of it, with enough time and work. But if you don't understand something, feel free to ignore it. ;-)

 7/31/2013; 2:04:51 PM.

They just announced a release candidate (or I just heard about it) and spent a bit of time this evening checking it out. The way I do that is by putting together a demo app that does something basic, that we already use Bootstrap 2 for, to see what the differences are.

http://bootstrap3.smallpict.com/modalDialogDemo

That's the "modal demo" -- sort of the Hello World of Bootstrap testing.

I think it looks nicer than Boostrap 2, which of course it should. ;-)

 7/30/2013; 10:08:54 PM.

No one seems to be getting this to work. :-(

So here's the step by step instructions.

I did it on this post. It worked! :-)

 7/30/2013; 5:43:26 PM.

I might be missing something, but Chrome on Android and on the iPad is missing something that every other browser has. Why no icons at the top of the window?

For example, this is what the browser window I'm using now has in its chrome.

This kind of bookmark is so basic, so ubiquitous, why doesn't Chrome have it in their tablet browsers? That's the thing that's making it so hard for me to set up my new Nexus 7 the way I'd like to set it up, so I can use it for all the things I want to use it for.

Even better -- synch with the toolbar bookmarks for Chrome on the desktop! :-)

This seems so obvious, there must be a patent in here preventing them from doing it.

See also, my earlier piece about the role of the Nexus 7, after one day of use.

 7/30/2013; 5:30:00 PM.

Yesterday I got a new Nexus 7 from Google via Amazon.

I hadn't been this excited about a new product in a very long time. Maybe "excited" is too strong a word. Maybe interested would be more accurate. Somewhere between excited and interested.

I use a tablet for reading, watching TV and movies, browsing the web, keeping up on news, and the occasional linkblog post. If I have to do some serious writing, I go to a laptop or desktop (usually the desktop, unless I'm traveling).

So now I have three tablets vying for my attention:

I rate them in that order for utility. The full-size iPad does more than any of the others. It's set up with Safari, with bookmarks to all my frequently-accessed sites.

The mini iPad is a snapshot of the big one, from a few months back when I got it, so it does most of what the full-size one does. In a more convenient form-factor, but without the beauty of the retina display.

The Nexus 7 comes to me as a snapshot of my Nexus 4 phone. So it has a lot of the apps I use there. But remember, it's a phone and this is a tablet. I use it for a whole other set of tasks than the tablet. There maps is the most important app. Followed by mapmyride (which I had to switch to over Cyclemeter, which I paid for, when I switched from iPhone to Android). I use the Citibike app over there a lot too.

So last night when I started reading I did it with the Nexus 7. It has a gorgeous display. Very nice for reading, with one caveat. The screen doesn't go all the way to the top of the device. So I find myself clicking up there with nothing happening. I'm afraid they'll teach my lower brain this way of working, to click well below the top of the device, and that will screw up my use of every other device.

When it came to doing things other than reading, oy -- it's a void -- a barren desert. None of the functionality of the iPad. True, I will be able to, over time, build it up over there. But that involves learning a new way of doing things, and actually doing all the work, work that I've already done in iPad-land. The question is -- will I do it?

And that's where I stop right now. I don't know the answer. I wasn't willing to do the work for the Amazon tablet I bought, nice though it is. It sits in the closet, not even making #4 on my list. It does nothing more than read Kindle books and play Amazon movies, and that's not enough to charge it up and take it with me. Again, I could set it up to do all those things, but for that device, clearly it wasn't worth the effort, or I would have done it. It's always been easier to just grab an iPad.

BTW, one thing that really irritated me about the device is the way it defaulted to setting up Google Play or whatever they call it for playing videos on the home screen of the device. I had to figure out how to get rid of it before I could do anything else. And it wasn't easy to get rid of, in fact I'm not sure I actually have.

 7/30/2013; 11:28:10 AM.

This morning there are a couple of new features in the Scripting News feed.

The features are those explained in a post on July 28.

The new channel-level elements

What can you do with them?

Philosophy

What's next?

Why?

 7/30/2013; 10:21:20 AM.

One of the reasons I like reading on a Kindle is that I can look up words I don't know by clicking and holding. It's a way to increase my vocabulary, and decrease my frustration. It's especially useful when reading a book like Game of Thrones where the author uses a lot of old words that aren't used that often.

Here's the idea: Let the book author load up the dictionary with the names of characters and places. Books like GoT that have a huge number of characters, often include a chart at the beginning of the book explaining all the relationships between the characters. Wouldn't it be great if this information were baked into the dictionary as you're reading the book? Of course someday it will be. ;-)

 7/29/2013; 1:36:38 PM.

The changes are detailed on the Worknotes page for Fargo 0.98.

As with 0.97, these are nice-to-have fixes and little features that make Fargo a little easier to use. This is the place I like to get to with a product. The basics are working. Now we're gaining experience, and slowly smoothing things out.

So many developers stop when they reach the top of the mountain. But that's just when the fun starts. Imho of course. ;-)

We're getting close to 1.0, which means I have to say that in this way of doing things, the numbers don't mean what they used to. There will be, after 1.0, immediately (knock wood) a 1.01 and 1.02. They're just serial numbers. We should probably, at some time drop the decimal point.

On the other hand, I want to use this as an opportunity to reorganize the docs, and get everything off the old content management system and onto the new Fargo-based system. We should be using the product to document itself now. I also want to do some work on the home page for smallpicture.com. It's time to tell people what we do there. ;-)

 7/29/2013; 12:46:12 PM.

Moderator: Now we have reached the point in the debate where the candidates take out their penises and show them to the audience. I'll ask for a bit of polite applause, no cheering or booing please.

Christine Quinn: Excuse me.

 7/29/2013; 9:15:16 AM.

Regarding Disqus comments:

 7/29/2013; 8:44:22 AM.

I'm discussing a project with my friend Jason Pontin at MIT Technology Review. He was lamenting how he has to go around his own people to get this done. That reminded me of a Jean-Louis Gassee story, the legendary former head of product at Apple in the late 80s.

Jason, you're in good company.

In 1988, I had lunch with my friend Jean Louis-Gassee at Apple. He was in charge of products.

He wanted me to do a scripting language for the Mac.

I said "But Uncle Jean-Louis, you are head of the biggest greatest tech innovator in all the land, why don't you just command your minions to create a scripting language for the Mac?"

:-)

 7/28/2013; 11:58:47 AM.

I gotta say, now that the Trex server is humming, I have never been happier with a writing environment. The fact that I have the ability to improve it myself is just icing on the cake. It's as if this were designed just for me (reality-check: it was). When I have something to say, I just click the + icon, and off I go.

People who are getting comfortable with Fargo alongside me, may just beginning to realize that there's a breakthrough here that we haven't made a big deal about. It came up in a demo I was doing the other day. The person receiving the demo, a programmer, thought each post was a file, and that the UI was a way of viewing a file system. Screen shot. I showed him that was not the case. The whole site is in a single file, and it's not a database, it's just a simple XML-based format that's been around forever, OPML.

You could build a whole industry around this idea, and I sincerely hope one does develop. Open formats and protocols are a lot more work, but they're worth it.

BTW, one of my main projects now is to develop the verb set for scripting Fargo, so other programmers can easily add features to the app. The outliner is now mature enough.

 7/27/2013; 9:58:04 AM.

You know what would be cool?

If you have an idea that would improve RSS for everyone, how about writing a blog post about it so we can all give it consideration, think about it, and possibly support your idea?

I've given this a lot of thought, and more than a meetup, what we need are people putting serious stakes in the ground. Interop they're willing to work on. Investments they're ready to make that could benefit their competitors possibly more than themselves.

We don't need 20 companies vying to be the 800-pound gorilla. We need an NBA or Major League Baseball. Some new rules that help our sport work better for the fans and the players.

In a blog post I wrote before RSS even existed, I said this:

If there's going to be some new growth in RSS it's going to have to benefit everyone not just you. If you're willing to step up, now's a great time to do it.

PS: Here's an example of the kind of post I'm looking for. Nothing earth-shaking. The simpler the better. The idea is to build new interop.

I'm going to accumulate links to posts here. Hopefully the list gets reallllly long! :-)

 7/26/2013; 12:57:38 PM.