Dave's Micro Blog

April 2024
  April 7
    Okay just one more, then I have to sign off for the night. Back in the 80s I wrote a bulletin-board system that was based on ThinkTank, the outliner I did for VisiCorp, and then started Living Videotext with. It was the ThinkTank codebase, with a dialup interface, and a layer of UI (you couldn't do an expand/collapse interface over a 300 baud modem line and an Apple II with 48K of usable app memory). It meant that threads were easy to write, because I had an outliner right there. I think it would be nice to have an outliner interface on a system like micro.blog which is, in many ways, like the BBS communities of the early 80s. Since we're starting to use OPML again (something that makes me happy!) maybe we could work out some interfaces here. I have an open source outliner, and lots of good example code. An idea for future development perhaps.
    Okay one more post. I usually don't start watching baseball until the basketball season is over. I'm very modal with my sports. But for some reason last night I tuned into the Mets game, in the last half of the 8th inning. When the inning started the Mets were up by two, by the end they were down by five! A complete meltdown. Errors, stupid mistakes, bad pitching, a total mess. The Mets were supposed to be good this year, but ever since they started spending money like the freaking Yankees, I've been somehwat conflicted, because I don't mind that much if the Mets lose, but I can't abide them becoming the YANKEES. Please. Anyway, I'm going to stay away from the Mets until July or whenever the Knicks are eliminated, and hope we can recover from my having tuned in early. Yes I am mystical about sports. It makes up for how analytic I have to be about software.
    I have the smoothest way imaginable to post to micro.blog, thanks to an innovation Manton did, while I was paying attention to fighting early fires in the release of Drummer a couple of years ago. Here's a screen shot. I wish it was this easy for me to write for all the other platforms.
    With ActivityPub you know who's following you and in RSS you don't. This may sound like a negative until you think about it from the user's standpoint: no spam, spyware, etc. Which is probably why Google didn't like RSS btw.
March 2024
  March 20
    It's not just Meta
      Manton responds to my post about his post about Facebook (some people call them Meta). I can never remember how to enter a comment over there, so I'll post this on my micro.blog.
      The thing is, it's very difficult for any tech company to break out of the tech industry pattern, because people move between companies all the time. The board members, the ones from the industry come from tech companies, and many serve on boards of other tech companies.
      I spent ten years in the system, and was for a while trying to start one of these companies. Eventually I sold out to one, and was on the board, and got a look inside. Later, as the web was starting up, first I tried to raise VC, but found the terms onerous, I also saw first-hand what they did to founders. It's designed to produce one kind of output. One that piles up value and then sells it to the public. There have been later twists, but ultimately once you have the huge cash flow a company like Facebook has, and your shareholders have expectations of great returns, you basically have no choice. You have to run your company by the rules.
      However! It is possible to get truly open ideas out there, and the ideas can survive. So let's do more of that, and don't depend on S
  March 15
    Next steps in social blogrolls
      The dust is settling on the rollout of the new blogroll on scripting.com.
      I'm starting to work on next steps, learning how to host blogrolls for other people.
      I have one set up for Manton, and I'm interested in doing the same for people with interesting blogrolls on micro.blog.
      If you'd like to see your list rendered on blogroll.social, post a comment here with a link to your micro.blog site. I can take it from there.
      I think this would be fun and memorable, and would help us all learn how this stuff works.
      Thanks in advance!
      Dave
  March 13
    Welcome to the modern age of blogrolls
      My blog once again has a blogroll.
      I wanted to post about it here on micro.blog because it has basic compatibility with the stuff Manton rolled out a couple of days ago.
      Once I'm confident the new stuff works on scripting.com, I'm going to get Manton's site working in my world, so we can see what that looks like.
      We're back in the zone. A new mind bomb every day! :-)
  March 12
    This is a cross-post of something I just wrote on my main blog. I wanted it to be in the flow here too.
    Manton is doing great work.
    His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.
    We've been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.
    That's imho the best part.
    PS: Blogrolls are where the social web started.
    PPS: I have to write a short "what is a blogroll" doc, re OPML and RSS. There's not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.
    PPPS: I'm having flashbacks to "Manila". We're using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software.
  March 5
    The new version of news.scripting.com is up. It's been a long time coming. It looks a lot like the previous version. But it's faster. And if you poke around you'll find some new stuff. There's an About page, linked into the info icon at the top of the page. Basically the dust is settling on the big work we did last year, and now things are starting to feel more like products. I don't doubt there will be problems, as they say, still diggin! 😄
February 2024
  February 19
    Random thought -- maybe the fastest way to get full ActivityPub support for WordPress is to offer a feature in any WP site to cross-post to a Mastodon gateway operated by Automattic. It's possible I don't understand the problem of course. But Mastodon is open source, so it's not like depending on another vendor to do this for you. And then you avoid all the hassles with having to say what part of the protocol is ActivityPub and what part is Mastodon's API.
  February 8
    What tool would you use to create and edit a blog roll?
      Suppose I asked you to create a machine-readable blogroll.
      For each blog you had to include a link to either:
        1. its HTML home page with the assumption that the home page had a element pointing to the feed, or
        2. a pointer to the feed, with the assumption that the top-level element points to the HTML home page.
      You could include other data for each site, but those are minimal.
      Think quickly -- what tool would you use to create this data file/document?
      If this tool isn't ideal, what would be?
      PS: Obviously you could do it with an outliner, I'm interested in hearing from people who don't think in terms of outliners.
      PPS: I also asked this question on GitHub, with a place to comment.
January 2024
  January 31
    Looking for bloggers, developers, reporters, columnists, who focus on new applications of AI. Please post a link here. If you have the URL for a feed, that would be best. Thanks!
  January 30
    When you're making the rounds of various Twitter-inspired systems, which do you go to first, which do you find the most interesting stuff on?
  January 12
    What's Manton's new killer feature?
      Manton has been teasing a new feature coming for micro.blog in the next few weeks.
      I wonder if there's been any speculation on what it is?
      I have a theory, or a hope at least -- that it's a nicely lock-in-free way to publish a newsletter.
      That it will work in concert with all the other APIs that micro.blog supports.
      I know it would be a timely offering because people are thinking of leaving Substack these days because of their Nazi Problem.
      What do you think the killer feature is?? 😀
December 2023
  December 30
    Writer-friendly services & textcasting
      It's been a while since I posted here. I wanted to take a step back because I getting an idea that no one was listening. I made a lot of inquiries about ways we could collaborate, but they never went anywhere. However I have seen signs lately that there may be a little interest. So maybe I should put some of my ideas here as well as on my blog.
      What I have been advocating, for many years, but just recently gave a name to, is textcasting.
      This came from the experience we all had trying to cross-post to a variety of different places. For me the places I wanted to cross-post were Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Medium and obviously RSS and HTML. But they never came together, there were always such substantial differences between the different views they took of a post, that if I tried to write for the lowest common denominator, it just wouldn't work. There was no middle ground. And if tried for a subset, well I couldn't use links, could never give a piece a title, no styling, and on and on.
      Compared to graphic PCs, the web was always limited in the styling it could use, but the social media products took most of the rest of it out. And we accepted it. And even now we're so confused, we're missing out on the opportunity to create a small network of writer-friendly services. We could have always done that, but we were always waiting for something better to come along from the big companies. We're still waiting.
September 2023
  September 17
    It seems like HTTP requests these days, generally, don't come with a referer header? Links and ideas on my blog.
  September 15
    I asked ChatGPT how I used OPML to share lists of feeds. The story it came back with is amazing. I asked for the list in OPML. I opened it in Drummer.
  September 5
    Back in the 1970s when SQL was new, it was touted as an English-like database language. Now with ChatGPT you really can do database queries in actual English and it understands. Whether the info is accurate or not (I suspect it is) is beside the point. It's doing something with language that has not been possible before. Check out this query. "Make a table of 15 oscar-winning actors and actresses ranked by number of nominations, also include a column with the names of at most three of the movies they made that won best picture." It worked.
  September 3
    I've used plain old HTTP on scripting.com since 1994.
August 2023
  August 26
    Someday there will be a new twitter-like service with one feature that will blow the doors off this hugely dormant product area. Just support Markdown in your posts. That's it.
  August 23
    A WordPress plugin that adds the source:markdown element to RSS feeds from the special projects group at Automattic. I've wanted to see RSS and Markdown get together. We put support for it in FeedLand, and now there's a way to add it to any WordPress site. This will, long-term, add styling and links to RSS feeds, without opening the door to all the nasty stuff.
  August 21
    A few weeks ago my news product passed the home page in daily reloads. As of yesterday it's more than double flow. It makes sense. The news changes more frequently, includes everything that's on the home page and much more. It of course was created and managed by FeedLand.
  August 8
    I'm doing a demo for a friend of how I post from Drummer to micro.blog.
  August 3
    It's been a while since I looked at the everything timeline in FeedLand. In the interim, a bunch of people have subscribed to Bluesky feeds, and they are the most active, and also support rssCloud (!) so the list is skewed toward Bluesky posts from people who are on now.
July 2023
  July 27
    I've been writing for my micro.blog site alongside my main blog, Scripting News, and my developer notebook. It's always the third tab. I try to put something here every few days, as you can see in this screen shot. Anyway I was just looking at the outline and thought it would be interesting to share, for those of you who have software that can read OPML files. The bridge between Drummer and micro.blog was created by Manton when Drummer was first shipping. I want to be sure he sees that I appreciate the effort. :smile:
  July 24
    An open voicemail to Manton Reece, developer of micro.blog, about creating a common API for social media apps.
  July 16
    If Facebook really loved the open web they'd hook Facebook itself up to it. Support RSS feeds in and out. Let users have rich text and links. I've been asking them to do that for over ten years, and sometimes it gets somewhere, there are people inside the company who believe in the open web, but somewhere near the top the idea always dies.
  July 12
    I've seen people use the term social web where previously they'd say social media. I like this. Going in the right direction. Let's try to bring everything back to the web. I bet most people who use the web these days only have a vague idea of what it is.
  July 11
    New way of displaying posts without titles in FeedLand. Also a better way to See more and less.
  July 10
    I'm echoing my blog posts on a WordPress site. I recently got my connection to WordPress going again. It all looks pretty good, and I get to edit my posts in my outliner.
  July 9
    On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon and I did the first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence. I did a 10-minute podcast on what I remember of that moment, and how surprising it was to hear the idea I had been evangelizing come to life.
  July 7
    There’s hope for a bootstrap pairing of the open web and social nets to create a pretty good writing platform that doesn’t lock users into one platform or another.
  July 4
    All my freedom as a developer comes from the integrity of the web. More here.
June 2023
  June 20
    Write specs for humans
      I like to write specs for humans.
      Imho too many specs are organized the way a computer would want them, the way software is organized. Establish basic vocabulary in layers then and assume the human reader will know how to put the pieces together to do things. Never answer questions a busy developer would have.
      Humans like it the other way around. Show me how to do X, Y and Z, the most common things people want to do with the API, and then later explain how the pieces fit together. The hello world approach.
      With the arrival of AI, computers can now read what humans read. So you should just write your specs for humans and it'll work fine for computers too!
      Gotta change with the times. 😀
      PS: This should probably be filed under Rules for standards-makers.
  June 14
    If I would describe a human co-worker as "intelligent" then I would use the same word to describe ChatGPT if it does the same work.
  June 1
    Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter should not be silos relative to each other. I'm starting to post links to Masto on Twitter, and links to Twitter on Bluesky. All combos. I realized I was, in my mind, assuming these were silos. I think other people do too. That's not a good limit to impose, doesn't work in our interests, as users and developers.
May 2023
  May 29
    Bluesky People Browser: I'm playing with ideas of how to browse around a network of followers on a social media platform. Bluesky is the first that I've had an OPML interface to work with. So I created an outliner for walking the structure of people and who they follow on Bluesky.
  May 26
    My linkblog flows through WordPress. It's a social networking app too. Also flows through Mastodon and Bluesky. 😀
  May 24
    Now that we have RSS feeds and OPML subscription lists for Bluesky, I can start developing apps that use that data. It's the first social network to have this feature. Of course it already works with FeedLand. If you want to subscribe to my Bluesky list, here's the command, and this is the URL of the list. You're now following everyone I follow on Bluesky, in FeedLand. The future works! 😀
  May 17
    We need a new MetaWeblog API to cover all social networks APIs. It's gotta happen. The sooner we do it the more we can do before all this gets complicated. 😀
  May 15
    Apparently, all of a sudden, with almost no fanfare, the Bluesky folks have released their code under the most liberal MIT License. I assume this means we will immediately see more nodes, and anyone can have a Bluesky account? Let me know if you have a server up and running.
    Toward a common API in social web apps
      Demo of Firesky, a firehose for Bluesky. It quickly scrolls all posts on Bluesky through a vertical window. New messages appear at the bottom and scroll off the top.
      From there, the author, John Spurlock has added, with my help, RSS feeds from the same stream of posts. So you can follow me in your feed reader.
      This is important for two reasons:
        1. At this time Bluesky is still private, so if I give you a pointer to something I wrote there, you won't be able to see it. The feed gets around that restriction.
        2. Because Mastodon also has RSS feeds, I can read both social nets with the same API. It gives us a common language, and is the next step in bootstrapping RSS support in all social media apps. Once that happens, we, writers and readers, will be able to use our own writing tools, and give readers choice of where to read. This is the key feature in textcasting, ie applying the philosophy of podcasting to text. It is possible, it requires users to want it, insist on it. We're getting a bit closer to that today.
  May 11
    How I edit my micro.blog posts
      Every so often I feel a post that I've written on Scripting should also be on micro.blog, as I get a better understanding of Manton's site, and as it evolves which it is doing rapidly now.
      Anyway I thought it would be interesting to share a screen shot, and the outline I edit from. You can also view the outline in Drummer by clicking this link. And btw, this is all possible because Manton's site unlike most social media sites, accepts HTML links. This is something I as a blogger insist on, but so far the request hasn't been picked up by very many networks. Some Mastodon installations accept Markdown, for example.
      I write in Electric Drummer, the desktop version of the Drummer outliner for the Mac, in a tab next to the outline I write Scripting News on.
    I think we should work together to create a great library of Hello World apps for all social networks, regardless of our feelings about their value. Some people value Nostr, some like Bluesky. I know people who believe in Twitter. Why should our software care? I want to make all these systems equal in some way. It's a good time to be inclusive, imho. Hello World-level interop is a good place to start.
  May 10
    As a writer, these are the features I want all social media apps to support. It's a good time to be thinking about this.
  May 3
    Quitting Twitter doesn't protect from what Musk is threatening NPR with. Not hard to imagine how that could be abused.
  May 1
    It's time to completely reconstitute the Supreme Court.
April 2023
  April 18
    A new role for micro.blog?
      I'm getting ready to switch over to the new linkblogging code that's built into FeedLand, in place of the Radio3.io app, which depended on Twitter for identity. It was one of the first JavaScript apps I wrote in 2014, so it was due for a rewrite, given how much I've learned.
      Anyway, in the process, we need a new way to post to Mastodon, so I was looking for services that did that for users, to recommend to FeedLand users, and there's one a lot of users seem to like, but the problem is that no one knows who makes it, and that's a lot of trust to give some anonymous people.
      Then I realized, with a loud slap to my forehead, that micro.blog could completely fill the bill. Here's how.
        1. micro.blog can monitor RSS feeds, which is good because that's what a FeedLand linkblog is, an RSS feed.
        2. micro.blog is a master of ActivityPub, which among other things, gives it the power to post to Mastodon.
      Voila! The connection we need is there. And of course we know and trust Manton to take good care of the users. 😀
      Since there is a group of people who use micro.blog and FeedLand it seemed to make sense to test this here on micro.blog, with the new FeedLand linkblogger, and verify that it works.
      Here's a place to discuss on GitHub.
  April 15
    Developer response to Twitter cutoff
      It's been interesting to contrast various developer's responses to Twitter cutting off their use of the API.
        * NetNewsWire appears to have had just one connection to Twitter, the ability to subscribe to a Twitter feed the same way you'd sub to an RSS or Atom feed. They accepted the cutoff, and don't re-up as a developer, to pay the fee, or convert to the new API.
        * On the other hand micro.blog appears to not only have maintained their connection to Twitter, which means cross-posting to it (much like Radio3) but they have also added the ability to download the user's Twitter archive into their database. That was a surprise.
        * Between the three efforts, I have far more connections to Twitter, created over many years of being an enthusiastic supporter of the API, but like NetNewsWire, I have decided not to go further down the road with the new Twitter. I transitioned Drummer and FeedLand to email based identity, where previously they were using Twitter, and let all the other products fail when Twitter cut off the API
      I'm not complaining, btw -- this is what it's like to be a developer, and be a user of developer-created products. Corporate platforms always fail, given enough time. The Twitter API had a good run. Now the deck is clear, and there's room to make some new stuff, or just take a break and smell the roses a bit, or go for a bike ride. 🤪
  April 9
    New feature: Embedding Mastodon toots in Drummer blogs.
  April 4
    I asked ChatGPT to write a story containing 75 words to use in a test post for a new FeedLand feature I'm working on.
March 2023
  March 20
    A cool feature for FeedLand users. When you Like an item, it's automatically added to two feeds -- one for your likes, and one for all likes of all users on your FeedLand server. It's basically a single-gesture linkblog. There's a lot of that in FeedLand, where things have been factored to a point where they couldn't possibly be simpler. Of course since they're standard RSS feeds, you could follow them from any feed reader.
  March 8
    While my posts on Mastodon tend to be better-distributed than my Twitter posts, the "discussion" there is every bit as insipid and pointless as it ever was on Twitter. People don't read the posts, don't click the links, ask impossible-to-parse questions, I have no idea why they bother.
  March 7
    I asked ChatGPT what was the first weblog. And note, the response is archived on my own site, statically rendered, in HTML. Makes it easier to share results, and for those results to get into search engines. Screen shots are bullshit.
    Manton is our eyes and ears from BlueSkyLand. I applied for a beta, but wasn't given one. Just as well, I'm kind of loaded up to my ears with other stuff.
  March 5
    NetNewsWire will support Markdown in the 6.2 release. Brent Simmons describes it here. This is excellent. Markdown and RSS belong together. Interop is the way you move a standard forward. Now, the most popular feed reader on the Mac will include Markdown support. 💥
  March 2
    I made some improvements to Manton's Drummer-to-Micro.blog work he did last year. I've been using it to do my posts here. It's part of my basic set of open Drummer outlines. There's a thread where people can ask questions.
  March 1
    December 28: Writing on the web could be much better than it is. I have always believed that the web was the ultimate writers platform. But if every means of distribution requires that you use their writing tools, it can't come close to its potential.
February 2023
  February 28
    Good morning. I've been asking about where we meet to discuss ideas on my blog. A place we can talk about making our products do more interesting things working together. Not by capitulating, by cooperating. Sorry micro.blog people, that is not the place. If I disagree with Manton, and explain why -- all I get back is that I must have misunderstood what he's saying. That's not constructive. Also something of an ad hominem. And btw, I think I understand better than most. I've been immersed in writing on the web since shortly after the inception of the web, 30 years ago.
  February 27
    Manton is a friend, but I don't agree with him on character limits in blog posts.. I hope in a few years all these discussions about what's the optimal number of characters for a post will be seen as farce, like the scene in Amadeus where the Emperor says Mozart's opera has too many notes. I don't think it's up to Emperors or software developers to have opinions on what's the right number of characters in my writing. What if in turn, as a writer, I said Manton's code couldn't have more 500 characters per file. What's the likelihood that my edict would make any sense? Hopefully that puts it in perspective. There's a simple solution available to everyone, a More link at some arbitrary breakpoint, that does enough to encourage short posts if that's what you're after. And it also makes sense to writers.
    After a 20-day absence my micro.blog is back. I think finally all the corner-turns are done. It took months to get Twitter-dependence out of Drummer and FeedLand. But it appears to be done now. The final piece, Electric Drummer, my desktop multi-tab outliner, now works for updating all the different types of documents I use it to write for and it's a long list. If this works, I now have it hooked up again to micro.blog. Conclusion, you can lift up a big piece of software, put in a new foundation and put it back down and have everything more or less work. But it's all the breakage caused by "more or less" that gets you. And before that, being able to imagine how the software will work in its new form, for users, before having anything functional to look at. I'm accustomed to layering in stages. This goes totally against my normal process. So every step had to be done very deliberately with lots of things being undone because it didn't lead in a good direction. To a user this might look easy, that was the point. Keeping the suspension of disbelief enough so people will believe it's the same piece of software, when in some important ways, it's not.
  February 7
    You can’t trust corporate APIs. The only ones you can trust are open APIs that aren’t owned by anyone -- like the web, http, html, rss. You have to watch out because the bigco’s will try to own those too. To a large extent Google already owns the web. And they are throwing their weight around in much more consequential ways than twitter. But Google is invisble to the press. That will end someday.
  February 6
    A little story I probably have written before. I once made an exciting product called Frontier just for the Mac, and this turned out to be a mistake, because while I was making the product, Apple changed, and they eventually attacked and destroyed my investment, which was considerable, and also set us back a long way, all of us, imho. I'm typing this on a Mac b/c right now this is the best computer for me to use. But what Apple did to us was terrible. This is life. You have to deal with it.
  February 1
    I can now settle the age-old debate about what is and isn't a podcast. If at the end of your podcast, and in promos, you say "Available where ever you get your podcasts," then it's a podcast! If you don't say it, then it ain't a podcast! To illustrate, here's the shortest podcast ever.
    Eli Pariser: "First thoughts on Artifact, the new news reader from the Instagram guys. Right now it feels like a slick, maybe more personalized rewrite of Apple News. But not much serendipity—it’s all pretty narrowly tailored to what I indicated as my tastes, and I haven’t discovered much that’s surprising or interesting there."
January 2023
  January 30
    To anyone who cares about ActivityPub, Peter Zingg provides a great roadmap for what's needed to get serious adoption.
  January 28
    The last few minutes of an NBA game are the best. You can space out till then.
  January 27
    The open source release of FeedLand is on the way. 🚀
    I did a top level demo of FeedLand for a friend all in one Mastodon post. Having 500 chars to work with makes a big difference as you can see. 😀
  January 26
    Who owns the web?
      I asked ChatGPT who owns the web. This is what it said.
        The World Wide Web is not owned by any single person or organization. It is a decentralized system of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The Web is maintained and developed by a community of individuals, companies, and organizations, who contribute to its growth and evolution. The core technology of the Web, including the HTTP and HTML standards, is developed and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, the web is also regulated by different countries with different laws and regulations, but no one owns the Web.
  January 24
    Clearly what will drive the microblogging market outside Twitter is Mastodon not ActivityPub. Here's a short thread that explains.
    New version of davemail package. Since this is part of FeedLand it means that we can send confirmation emails via SMTP, not just SES.
  January 20
    Why aren't we marching over the Dobbs decision?
  January 18
    My apps still work with the Twitter API. I don't think any developer should try to make hay out of the pain of another developer. I wouldn't do that to you, even if I had questions about the foundation of your product. You see this in sports, no one puts down a competitive team just because one of their star players is injured. For good reason -- it can happen to you too and you don't want to see people do that to you. Remember this isn't just about Twitter, it's about developers too.
  January 17
    I work for the betterment of the network we all share. I'm not trying to get rich or famous, just fix the stuff that's broken. I hope you are doing that too. Keep on truckin.
  January 16
    We have too many timelines. One is the right number. :-)
  January 15
    A new this.how doc: Rule 1 means no breakage.
  January 11
    Even though I have far fewer followers on Masto, I get much more engagement there than on Twitter. Has it been productive? Hmmm, not sure about that. But I have hope that it will result in collaboration.
  January 10
    I'd like to have a personal social net that's coffee house size. Play a few tunes, have a couple of drinks, tell a few stories, and come back tomorrow and the night after that. There's a bouncer at the door so if you come in all nasty and shit, we kick your ass out.
  January 9
    Likes in FeedLand
      When you Like something in FeedLand it is added to two feeds:
        A Like feed for all FeedLand users.
        A Like feed for the person who did the Like.
      This is where my personal Likes feed is.
      And the feed for all users of my FeedLand.
    Likes considered harmful?
      On Micro.blog there's a debate about whether Likes are harmful.
      Some of my observations from the thread, all in favor of Likes.
        * The Like button on various systems is a way of acknowledging that you saw something and thought it was noteworthy. Since micro.blog doesn't have a Like button, what's the proper way of saying that?
        * As a person who writes posts that get zero response here (and not on other systems) I wish people had a less-committed way of saying they saw something I wrote. That would be a little bit of feedback where currently I get none.
        * If I see something on Micro.blog that I would Like on another system, I don't comment, I just do nothing, not because I'm bashful or overly quiet, rather because this is a language, and a comment has different meaning from a Like.
        * In face-to-face conversation there's all kinds of non-verbal communication. you can nod your head, smile. We've come up with a similar language online, I don't think there's any more meaning in this. We're being human. Not a huge surprise.
        * Here's a parallel. My TV doesn't have a brightness control. It's an expensive screen, and I imagine that the designers of the system figured "we have a computer in this that knows how to automatically adjust brightness based on room light." But it doesn't work properly, I don't know what the problem is, but there are times the TV is useless because you just can't see what's on the screen, because the lack of a brightness control. Maybe if TVs never had brightness controls I wouldn't miss it, but they do in my mind, require one. Same thing here. Like is something that's part of the language of social media. To try to deny that at this stage is kind of pointless imho.
        * I've been in this position myself in the past, trying to buck a larger trend, and the pressure really does get you to support the common way, the sooner you do it, the sooner the pain goes away.
      BTW, "considered harmful" is borrowed from a famous letter by Edsger Dijkstra entitled "goto statement considered harmful."
  January 7
    My view of how blogging should work is you start with twitter-size nuggets, write another and another and if you find you're written a full scale wordpress-like blog post you just move the nuggets under a new headline, click publish, and that's all you have to do.
    A MetaWeblog API ==> ActivityPub gateway in Node.js would be just the thing.
  January 6
    What we have needed for many years: A simple user-facing storage system that apps can be given access to via OAuth. All the hard stuff like assigning a domain is done through the user interface. Cost per month about what Dropbox costs.
    Tantek is right. Read every word in this piece. The only thing I'd change is calling this "IndieWeb" -- which is imho redundant. It's like saying WetRain. Everything he says that applies to "Indie" applies to the web as a whole. Otherwise, right on.
  January 4
    I think the posts look better in the Posts list, than they do in the blog rendering.
    Since Micro.blog supports Markdown I can get indentation by typing *'s in front of each would-be indented line. Of course I also get bullets, which isn't terrible but also isn't what I wanted. :-)
    I am in interop mode
      Looking for products that can interop on the basis of RSS or OPML primarily. That's what I've invested in most heavily.
        * FeedLand for RSS.
        * Drummer for OPML.
      Though there is crossover.
        * Drummer can read an RSS feed.
        * FeedLand produces OPML feed lists.
    What's cool about watching the Speaker rollcall for the fourth time is that we get to review the sheer size of the House, hearing the name and voice of every member. It's real, a new kind of programming. Perhaps the last time this happened was on Jan 6, 2021.
    I want to find Drummer or FeedLand users who are on Micro.blog so I can follow. If you see this please post a reply. Thanks! 💥
  January 3
    BTW, to Mason, there's a lot of nice stuff we could do in the Drummer ==> Micro.blog interface, if you're ever interested in this. Indentation to start. When I make a list and indent it, it should indent in the post. Lots of other stuff like that. Happy to share working code examples. Old School which does all this stuff, is open source. A Node.js app. I cribbed big pieces of it for FeedLand. Happy to help you do the same. :smile:
    A new year's resolution for developers -- find someone whose product yours can interop with, say hey want to connect our products? And take yes for an answer. 😀
  January 2
    I hear there is an update to the logging function so I may get more info after writing this post.
    Thanks to @sod I now have a link to the micro.blog log for my blog. Let's see what shows up there when I publish this post. ;-)
    Another test post. Let's see if this shows up in the time timeline immediately. )
    Making it update immediately
      In this thread, Manton says I can make the RSS reader in MB read the feed for this blog immediately.
        You can send a ping to micro.blog/ping with a POST url parameter of the RSS feed. That'll make it update right away. Otherwise Micro.blog should check every few minutes unless something has gone wrong.
      Not sure what he means -- is it a POST request. I tried to use a GET request and it seems to have worked.
        http://micro.blog/ping?url=https://dave.micro.blog/feed.xml
      Could just be a coincidence that it checked the feed around the time I sent it the request (via the browser).
      I'm going to try modifying my script to see if I can have it do both pings in the same icon click.
      Update -- it does seem to have been a coincidence. Now how to do a POST request from Drummer's scripting language?
    Does this work?
      Now the question -- does this connection between Drummer and Micro.blog mean that effectively this outline has an address on the same network as Mastodon?
      Let's see...
  January 1
    Observations on Drummer => Micro.blog
      As I've said before, it's a very nice implementation by Manton. Drummer scripting is patterned after Frontier, and Manton was part of the Frontier developer community so it's not surprising that he did such a nice job.
      However -- here are a few rough spots I hit.
        * I forgot to set the urlPublic head-level attribute on my microblog.opml file, and there was no error message saying that I did anything wrong, in fact the dialog claimed that my blog had been published when it hadn't. I modified the script he provided to that check.
        * There shouldn't be a dialog on success, that isn't how we do publishing in Drummer. It should just do a speaker.beep () call. Save the dialogs for errors. I don't need to pause to read that it updated, I do lots of updates while I'm writing. A beep sound is enough notice that it worked.
        * I did not understand that the Micro.blog timeline was only a feed reader. I assumed that if my blog were hosted by Micro.blog that it would shortcut that for me, maybe provide a checkbox where I could turn it off, but by default it would be on. As someone who designs these kinds of things, that's how I would've done it.
        * I would love to see a link in the left margin entitled Ask Manton -- so I could quickly ask him a question. I know it's rude to ask for this, but I really had this strong feeling. Maybe some of my products should have an Ask Dave button. Hah. Probably not. :-)
        * Once I figured that I have to add the feed link to the page of links it links to my account, I was surprised to see that I have to reload the feed manually to get it to update immediately. rssCloud support would be nice here, but also would be quick and easy to link the ping that I'm already sending to force a read of the feed. Since the same piece of software is generating the feed and reading the feed. But there's the shortcut thing again. I come from the 80s where in software everything was about cutting out steps, making things easier for the user. This is not so much a part of the 2020's culture it seems.
        * Another thing -- I wish it understood outline indentation, and some of the attributes we put on outlines in Drummer, like flBulletedSubs, for this list, which is clearly a list in the outline, but not at all in the rendering on Micro.blog.
      On the whole though -- I love the interface, and the fact that I can write for Micro.blog where I do all my writing -- in Drummer. This is a huge deal. It's how I express the goal of this layer of software we're building now, in Writers Deserve Better.
        We'll know it's working if most people feel their best place to write is their blog, where the editing tools work just as they like them to, and there are no boundaries to where those ideas can be published.
    I got an email back from Manton confirming what I had figured out. The Timeline in micro.blog is in fact a feed reader. I never understood that.
    I tried updating the previous post to see if it would show up in the post. It did. So I get to update stuff here. That's one of the items on the Textcasting checklist. I wonder if it updated on the timeline too. Let's find out. (Surprising. The text did not update but there's a link in the item pointing to the blog post, indicating that it updated.)
    I sent a question to the Help email address for Micro.blog. I wanted to know how to make items from dave.micro.blog to appear on the timeline. I may have found a roundabout way to do that by taking the RSS feed for that blog and piping it to the timeline. Let's see if it worked. Update: It worked.
    My first post of 2023 on Micro.blog via Drummer.
December 2022
  December 31
    Testing Micro.blog and Drummer
      I tried it back in October, but I had so many ways to post to micro.blog, it was too much, so eventually I shut it all down, and just read for a while, and I think this is the best way for me to proceed with MB. Why? Because Drummer is where I do my writing. I've been focused on writing a lot in the last few months, trying to come at everything from a writer's point of view. I realize I've always been doing that, but never so conscious of it. And that's led me to realize I should stop compromising on my writing. I have my place to write. I can publish from here to any place that will accept my writing. I can publish it in a lot of standard forms, RSS, OPML, JSON, HTML, and if something simple were to come along I could post that way too. So here I am writing again on micro.blog, I hope. Let's see if this works. 😀
October 2022
  October 13
    Now I just wonder where the post went?
      I posted something a minute ago, and by all indications it went through.
    I am using Drummer to post to Micro.blog
      Manton's instructions were very easy, the design is beautiful.
      Now, let's see if it works! :boom: