One of my next projects, Murphy-willing, will be JavaScriptScript.#

Highly recommend this week's Ezra Klein podcast. It made me wonder if any of the readers of my blog voted for Trump. I can't imagine too many did, unless they've been willing to overlook my strenuous support for any option that opposes him. However if any of you are still here, I'd like you to know that what's happening now is exactly what we thought would happen. If you agree that this is unacceptable, maybe we can use that as common ground to work together to get our country back from the chaotic authoritarian mess that Elon Musk is turning it into. He makes Trump look like an absolute moderate. Certainly no one who voted for Trump with any kind of appreciation for the American system, where your vote and mine matter, can stand by and not object to what he's doing to our system of government. If not now, keep this in mind as Musk's chaos becomes more and more real. #

And btw to Mitch McConnell, fuck you. You had a chance, with one freaking vote, to avoid this. You are among a small number of people who could have stopped this. This should be the first line in your obituary. "He could have saved the United States, but chose not to do it."#

I updated the Developers account on Bluesky to follow Tim Bray, Simon Willison, Techdirt, Manton Reece and Cory Doctorow. I took my feeds off the list, and added other developer accounts I regularly read. I'm trying to bootstrap something here, to see what can be done, and feel it's important to take myself out of the list for now. #

I possibly was a bit hasty in declaring the coup over yesterday. I'm sure there will be new restraining orders from the courts telling Musk to stop, and so far Trump has been obeying those, so there's some hope when that happens he'll order Musk to stop, and then we'll find out who the boss is and how our new post-coup reality works. The shock of Trump's plan for Gaza, announced yesterday may get even the most "loyal" Repubs in Congress to think again about what hell they hath wrought on they country they all grew up in. I have some faith that American values are installed in their personal operating systems, somewhere in there is the remnant of the ideals of the Constitution. So I might have missed the mark, I hope I did. Meanwhile I wonder if Musk's wonderboys have managed to penetrate the military, and if they're planning on giving them orders about how to restrain the anti-Musk protests that are starting to break out around the country. Oh mama we live in interesting times. #

The coup is over. This time, unlike the last time it was tried, it worked. We're in the post-coup world now. He showed us exactly what he would do if he could and we somehow collectively acted as if he hadn't shown us. Sanewashing was just the tip of the iceberg, you can't blame it on the press, we didn't demand they get their shit together, we didn't try to change the subject so they'd have to tell the real story. We had a lot of tools available to us that we didn't use because we are lazy and selfish. BTW, if you want to follow the power, don't look at what governments do, look at what the other oligarchs do. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.#

devs.feediverse.org on Bluesky. An interesting experiment. #

Freaky warning. As easily as Musk can turn off government websites, he can turn off our sites. He could turn off all .com or .org sites. He'll probably do it just that way. Only one domain will work in the future, x.com. Goodbye Google, Amazon, your drug store. Bubye. Not sure if moving your DNS to Europe or Asia will make a difference. He's taking advantage of centralization, and will try to make it more centralized. Totally centralized. A journalist couldn't report this, because what proof do I have? It's because there's a pattern here. And it's pretty obvious the tools he's using. #

I was just setting up an account for another Feed Reader experiment on Bluesky and found that they have a Suggested User List that recommended the usual people who get in the way of telling the story that's really happening. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, really felt it. We went through this with Twitter, it created influencers based on how loyal they were to the people who run Twitter, people who overlooked the obvious flaws in the system. We're living with their influence to this day, they have a million followers, completely manufactored by fealty to the owners. I swear to god these systems have to be publicly owned. The idea of turning to tech insiders to run them has run its course, don't you think. Over on Facebook this morning I saw an old friend with a cute meme that says people should paste swastika stickers on Teslas. That's nice. The reason you can get away with that is that you're attacking innocent people. More of the same. Of course publicly owned now means Musk Owned. See how things have changed, so quickly.#

Jesse Stay who I have known from early blogging days proposes to build the billionaire-proof social network using the AT Protocol. I'm going to help if I can. I'm developing apps that run on AT Proto, so at least I should be able to test my apps with his service. #

I would love to manage individual DNS domains using GitHub. I already have great tools for updating stuff over there. And everything on my current DNS system is manual and laborious. #

Anyone who says competent white men should be in charge probably has never actually run anything. Women are better in general at seeing the big picture and managing accordingly. A man is more likely to hone in on one aspect of the problem and if they're good, do something brilliant, but misses out on pretty much everything else. I, as a man, have had to severely discipline myself to get anything done, because that's how I'm built. Given a chance I will always put my head down and focus on one thing until its done, then the next and the next and so on. #

We need to change who reps us as much as we need to get the ones who current do rep us off their butts and actually do some representing.#

Imho it would be smart for Musk to stop shutting things down and just do his work, whatever it is. By creating constant shitstorms he's making it impossible for anyone to defend him, and you can be sure some would be if what he was doing wasn't so blatantly outrageous. We never voted for that mofo. And every American alive, whatever their preference, thinks their own vote should count. That's going to be a massive hurdle for them to get over. #

Tea Party 2025, a modest manifesto. #

A bit of advice for Dems in Congress. Go home and have town halls, and listen. And stop listening to the consultants and each other. Find out what the people want, and bring that back to DC. And let the press attend the town halls so they can report. Make our own Tea Party.#

Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, David Frum for fantastic pieces posted in the middle of last night. We are having a fresh awakening in this country and in the end we may come to thank Musk and Trump for facilitating this. And I'm so glad that online media is making this possible too, in addition to all the nasty shit we're also responsible for. :-) #

I'm 99.9% sure, as crazy as it sounds, when Musk is finished with his software project, you will have to use X for everything related to the government. To pay taxes, to receive health care, to renew your passport. And if you try to arrest him, he'll stop paying interest on the US debt, and that will be the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. He won't just control the US government, he will control the world economy.#

BTW, it turns out that Pip's, a restaurant in Severance, my favorite show in a while, was hot at the Phoenicia Diner, which is one of my favorite places to eat in the area. Funny thing I didn't recognize it until I saw an article about it in a local magazine. #

Saw a commercial on CNN this evening from Ontario in response to the tariffs, respectful, talking direct to Americans about the bonds with the people of Canada. Why can’t the Dems do this, say how important the independence of the FBI is, to start. We’d love to pay for that. Get in the game Dems.#

Even if Congress doesn't do anything to rein in Musk and Trump, the stock market will have something to say on Monday, one assumes. And this might be one time to hope for a market crash.#

I rewrote the oursocialweb.org home page. It needed to focus on linking. The term web is being thrown around too casually, without regard to what the web is, the same kind of dilution that's happening with podcasting. But the social web idea is fairly new, and it's really important that we get this right.#

I'm working on a new version of my thread-writer for Bluesky. #

Given what Musk is doing now, do you think the internet will still be here in a year? Will there be any tech companies that aren't wholly owned by Musk, Inc. Will owning things even mean anything? Or is this the beginning of the rule of the tech bros, world wide. I can't imagine what they're planning for us. In the meantime, me divesting my Tesla, which seemed so urgent just 24 hours ago, now seems like a powerless gesture. I heard it said that now feels like the moment in Covid when you realized everything was about to freeze, and you'd better head to the supermarket right now, and when you got there, you found you weren't among the first to see it this way. I was very reassured by the blog post that Krugman did. It's nice to hear a sane voice out there. #

Another month, starting a new year in the archive on GitHub. 2024 is complete. We've been following this pattern long enough. I wish GitHub had existed in 1994, and I wish we understood how to use it sooner than we did. Onward! #

I've been using claude.ai for programming work lately, and it does one thing better than ChatGPT. It reads your code and tries to mimic your coding style. ChatGPT won't do that. It's really frustrating to have to edit their code before I can even try it out. I like it and am paying the $20 per month in addition to the money I'm paying ChatGPT.#

I've decided that trading in my Model Y for another EV is an acceptable solution. Let someone else ride around in this car that I love, but hate because it is a symbol of American terrorism and apartheid. This is compatible with my understanding that hate is love that was betrayed. I'm sure I won't love its replacement as much as I loved the Model Y, but I will feel better about driving it. And Tesla shareholders will, I hope, learn the lesson that products must be politically agnostic in order to work commercially. Or if you must take a stand, make it against fascism. So many of our oligarchs have made the wrong bet here. We will never forget what Zuckerberg, Bezos, the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, Open AI -- all these companies went the wrong way. #

Good oligarchs and bad oligarchs. We need to help the good ones have the guts to get on the air, with really good creative advertising, telling the people exactly what's being done to them now, without pulling any punches. They have to be warned and they aren't. You have to be paying a lot of attention to understand. And it's hard to know what to believe. We have to have a voice in this, now. #

There should be ads on tv tonight saying they're coming for the abortion pill. Spell it out clearly so the voters can hear it as it happened. Otherwise they will rightly blame the Dems for not telling them what was going on. It's not too late Dems.#

Molly White has an excellent OPML subscription list. I want to make something with this, maybe a Bluesky feed reader? I want to show people they can combine skills to make new media. We don't have to wait for big companies to do it for us. We can work together. That's how we rise to the challenges we share. We can flip this bad situation around, turning problems into opportunity. Big changes happen now. We can steer in the direction we want to go. #

We're programmed to believe big companies make things the right way and individual people can't be trusted. We're going to have to break out of that rut, to stop trusting them so much. It's like the 2008 banking crisis, but this time they've taken over the government, not just the economy. The tech industry, believe it or not, started with assumption that it was the other way around. That people were the brilliance, and companies started wars to make money (we were the generation that stopped the Vietnam war, btw). I got into computers because I thought I could earn a living that way, but quickly discovered how inherently subversive they are. They weren't just for the nerds with the plastic pocket protectors, they were also for hippies. Some of us are still here and we want to create with you.#

One more thing then I have to get back to work. There's a great moment in Woody Allen's Sleeper where a time traveler was told that the world was destroyed when Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead. If you lived in NYC in the 70s and 80s you knew Albert Shanker as a NY character like Al Sharpton or Curtis Sliwa. New York had its own semi-celebrities, people who were famous mostly in New York, but not as much outside. So Albert Shanker with a nuclear weapon kind of fit his character as a bomb throwing type in city politics in an extreme way. A fitting and comic way for us to end it all. Proof that god has a sense of humor. It was an inside reference only NYers would get. Well in case you didn't know it, back in that time or a little later, Trump was one of those Albert Shanker types. And yes, now again he has all the nuclear weapons. And it still feels like he's only famous in a mediocre Queens real estate way. Isn't that weird?#

Podcast: The Repubs are trying to kill you.#

If our political system worked we’d have wonderful heart-grabbing ads on TV about all the people who have meaningful jobs thanks to DEI. It wouldn’t be hard to make the Repubs look like Scrooges. Get people riled up. Another ad, about the people Trump pardoned and what they’re doing now. Wait till one of them commits a major crime and run Willie Horton style ads. Make it understood who these people actually are. Trump has to own each and every one of them. This really isn’t hard. But the Dems think campaigns end. They don’t end. #

Another ad. Donald Trump on Mt Rushmore. Donald Trump on the $20 bill. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial renamed Trump. Kennedy airport in NYC renamed Trump International. In the future the US will have one founding father: Donald J. Trump.#

I thought this excerpt from Krugman's piece about his move back to blogging was right on. "For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts." There's a need for a system that combines the full-featured writing of blogging and the timelines of twitter-like systems. #

Isn't it funny how the two political forces we thought we completely defeated in the 90s are coming back for their revenge. #

Our best hope is that the factions within MAGA fight each other. We're assuming they have a way to keep everyone in line, but the more power they capture, the harder that's going to be.#

It's been over 24 hours, and my viral post from yesterday is still getting lots of RTs and likes. An observation -- it's made my Bluesky account virtually unusable. Anything else I publish there is swamped by the viral post. I'm also working on a new version of the software that turns Bluesky into a feed reader. It will be able to manage multiple rivers, where the first version could only do one. The next reader will be all the posts from me on all the various services I post to that have outbound RSS feeds. After that, I have ideas for special feeds for specific publications. I want to help our friends in the blogging and news world, using the best communication tools available. I find now that people are much more open to ideas. This is good. But we should never be complacent. Learn from the competition. They were getting ready for this moment, we weren't. #

BTW, Bluesky, for me, is already a greater flow generator than Twitter ever was. My post about never forgetting Trump's coup attempt has already been RT'd 2.8K times, about three hours after it was posted. In all my years of using the social web I've never gotten that much attention. I have 11.7K followers, far fewer than I have on Twitter. By 5PM it had been RT'd 10K times.#

Basically we have to bring politics to the people. #

The W3C should've gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They're controlled by big companies who are truly scared of interop, explains why most of their proposed standards go nowhere. BTW, I figure if Matt can openly discuss what's undermining WordPress as an open standard (which it is) no reason I can't tell the truth why the social web is not even a web. It's all a big corporate con. Everywhere you look, ripping us off and selling us out. #

To answer Mark Cuban's question of what could we do now to make things better. I forgot that I have two ready-made answers. First, let's get the Democrats or whatever its successor is called, on the air 365 days a year, every year, not just in election years, and have it do many things other than raise money to buy ads. We need to always be communicating with each other not just in season. You could see we had a problem when Obama's campaign website, which should have become whitehouse.gov was turned into a stupid feature of the site where people could petition their government. It said to voters, thanks we'll take it from here. We all saw that as putting us in our place. We must be invoved in governing, not just electing. Second, for podcasts and what's left of journalism, it should all move out out of the northeast and into the country. The hosts should be in St Louis, Dallas, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Phoenix even Memphis, Miami and Charleston. That would change the focus not only symbolically, but they could insist that guests go there to be interviewed. Change the meaning of flyover country. People would feel different about the country and that would come through. Democrats tend to cater their ideas to people in the Northeast. This part of what Repubs say is very true. They do the same thing, only worse, but they are smart about pretending they don't. Third, amplify AOC. She's the leader we need. The Dems are too scared of Republican criticism. Stop worrying so much. If they're complaining that means it's working. Her interview on Jon Stewart's podcast this week is wonderful.#

It's a no-blogging Wednesday, will return tomorrow. #

Wouldn't it be smart for Kia or Rivian or some other EV competitor of Tesla's to name their car Bluesky and have it only come in blue?#

Another idea. One of Tesla's competitors could offer a trade-in, where they commit to recycling all the parts of your Tesla, so you are actually taking a Tesla off the road. And for a few extra dollars they can send you a scrapbook of your old Tesla being lovingly taken apart suitable for RT'ing.#

I just wrote a review for Industry in BingeWorthy, but it doesn't have a text editor. It farms the job off to WordLand, which shoots the text back to Bingeworthy as the user publishes to WordPress and RSS, in Markdown. So the text is on both BW and WP and the feediverse. And through WordPress it has a presence on the web. This is the goal, writing exists on its own, but can be shared in all the contexts it makes sense in, but it lives primarily in your blog, your home base. That's why WordPress is so important in the scheme of things. It's a consensus, this is where a lot of people are blogging in 2025. And there's a lot of mostly unexplored interop. And they don't break developers. This may not make total sense at this time, but soon, I hope to be able to point back at this post, and say it was the first time something important worked. #

BTW, actually the term social web is probably too big a compromise. The "web" part is the only part that's imho useful. The sad part is that "social" means "we removed most of the features of the web." Why? Some vague sense that people would write too much if given the space. Or link too much. Or edit too much. Or be too emphatic. It's worse than Disneyfied -- at least at Disneyland you get actors, and color and rides, and bland food with tons of sugar and fat. But there is some fun and nutrition. In the social web, it's just memes and slogans. Not even much room for a metaphor. There's so much more to say about being human.#

In the last days of Trump's first term, I had a nice little web app that told you how much time remained in his term. It was a one-line change to make it work again, which, sigh, is necessary now. #

How easy would it be to create a twitter-like app using RSS, and in what ways would it differ from other twitter-like apps. Here's the deal. You need a place to write a posts and a way to read a timeline of posts. That's the basic functionality. To do that with RSS you would start with a blogging app like WordPress, and a feed reader like FeedLand or NetNewsWire. Manton has integrated the two into a single user interface at micro.blog. I'm going to approach it in a somewhat differently, not sure yet how it will work, but I'm getting there. And I will offer a way for people to hook in any feed reader they want, thus opening up innovation to tech-curious users. The take-away is that you need to handle inbound and outbound feeds. That's the basics of being twitter-like. #

When I put an image in the margin of a post I often pause and think about what I want to convey with the image as it relates to the writing that it's next to. In the previous piece the idea was interop. I tried to think of what images I've used in the past, then I thought why don't I just look. I switched into Daytona, entered interop, and found one I loved, but then kept scanning, and found another that I liked even more. Tools are important. Web writers haven't gotten any new tools in a long time. All the tool development has been for other stuff. Let's make tools for users again, as we did in the olden times. Craftwork in software. Playin in the band! #

Steve Jobs: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” #

I posted something to my linkblog this morning that really should have been on my blog. Here's what it said. "Every blog should have a nice search engine like mine. I can search for ideas and it creates a story, like this search for 'Madison' where I had love, fun, creativity, friends, youth, music, strength, health, sex, and could see the future clearly. Best time of my life, I had everything anyone could want. Pick another term get another synthetic story." Ironically, since my linkblog doesn't flow through the search engine, I would have lost this post. Which makes a bigger point. All the ideas we throw into the silo'd social web are basically trash, not part of our collection, that we might use tools in the future to find value in (as my Madison posts surely did, for me at least). #

Then, I got a response from Nick Weaver and the Madison story continues: "Here’s a roundabout Madison connection for you. I started working at UW 28 years ago today as the World Wide Web Editor in the Office of News and Public Affairs. My first project was to implement Userland Frontier for the university news page." Now Nick is in my Madison story too. And he mentions Frontier. With Frontier, we not only had the internet over networks, we also had networks on our computers because Frontier could send tasks to scriptable apps, and get back results. So databases could be hooked up to page layout programs, and people could use their writing tool of choice, and didn't have to use some teeny little excuse for an editor provided by a company that doesn't cater to or care about writers. Imagine writing with software that was designed to hobble writers instead of glorify them! That's the horror of the world as proposed by Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, all of them. It's like no one stopped to think about what they are doing, half their product is writing, and they suck at writing and have no plans to improve the situation. Geez Louise, it's as if we collectively lost our minds. #

Anyway, today I hooked up BingeWorthy to WordLand. Bingeworthy doesn't have a text editor, and it doesn't need one, because when it wants to offer a user a chance to explain their rating, like "seasons 1 and 2 were great, but season 3 sucked, but I gave it a high rating anyway," they can use WordLand which loves writers and strives to serve them better and better. Why should I put a bullshit editor in a product (Bingeworthy) that isn't about writing. Its job is very different from WordLand's. Let them work together. That's the big idea, that's why you bother having interop, so you can use more than one tool on the same data.#

There's more to the story, but this is already a lot to ask you to digest. I'll get a demo together soon. 😄#

Video demo of the new searchbox on Scripting News. #

Pretty sure there's no supportable reason to ban TikTok, any more than banning Facebook or Twitter would make sense.#

I've come to the conclusion that you can't really use ChatGPT as a programming partner. It doesn't understand the big picture, and if you try to explain it, it probably isn't getting it, and if it does, it will forget it quickly. It's basically fairly stupid, but a way better search engine than Google. Also, it never says it doesn't have enough info to answer the question and then an hour later you figure out the answer it gave you just doesn't work. I still think it's an incredibly useful too, just not as great as I used to think. In a couple of years it has never asked for more information before it answers. That's a clue. #

My newest server was down for an hour due to hardware problems at Digital Ocean. It appears to be running again. Please don't judge the new search feature, it was caught up in this outage. Oy.#

I've changed my Bluesky avatar to MLK's image to celebrate his birthday on Monday, January 20. I dream of everyone wearing this button proudly on Monday in support of American democracy and progress. We are a proud country, beneath all the weirdness. #

Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the state Capitol.#

Now that I have a search engine for my blog, I can reliably look for all instances of Wordle Kitty which was a character I was playing around with last year with ChatGPT. It even comes out in reverse chronologic order, and it's better than Google which ignores a lot of my blog these days. My own search engine doesn't do that of course.#

When I buy a domain speculatively, I usually put up some kind of placeholder page with a title, picture and tagline. Like feediverse.org. I pushed a link to it yesterday, and got back this possibly snarky response, but still thought provoking. Why isn't there a feed for the feediverse.org page. Good point! So if you were to put a feed on the home page of the open feediverse, what it be? A feed of posts to the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. I think that might be it. We can celebrate the day when that feed is mirrored on Bluesky (Inbound RSS ftw!) and we can shut down the stupid app that does the bridging. We had a standard long before Bluesky came along, isn't it wrong for them to try to force everyone to use their reinvention? It doesn't say anything good about the people who made that choice, among interop-minded developers. It kind of violates our ethos imho.#

The feediverse is not a joke. It's deployed, scaled, widely supported, far beyond AT Proto or ActivityPub. It's the HTML of the open social web. And where the others are complicated, feeds are really simple. #

Matt Mullenweg said something provocative on Twitter two days ago that I'm just tuning into now. "The lawsuits will go years and could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org." I commented on it as a developer who views WordPress as a platform. #

Sad to say I'm going to have to mention Trump from time to time. When I hear a reporter wondering what to make of his thing about all those friendly countries he wants to go to war with, here's what it means. He's trolling you. Haven't you figured that out by now. Just by mentioning the weird thing he's talking about as if it were some kind of puzzle, a brilliant chess move, etc blah blah zzzz. It's trolling. Stop falling for it. If it's Trump-initiated nonsense, don't report it. You. Are. Being. Trolled. Asshole. All he wants is attention. Always. No exceptions.#

Why are all the people who hate AI so pissy about it. #

In the future I will be able to type a post into my blog and people who are following me will see it in their timeline. #

Peeve: TV shows or movies that show text messages that are impossible to read even if you stop the video and zoom in.#

Notes on Little Feed Reader, running on Bluesky since Jan 2. #

YouTube channels have feeds. Here's the feed for my YouTube channel. And a canonical JSONification of the feed (this is how FeedLand gets the data from any type of feed, RSS, Atom or RDF, the YouTube feed is Atom). I did not know they had feeds, in fact I thought I heard they specifically did not have feeds. I've subscribed to the feed in FeedLand and it seems to work, and also included it in my blogroll category, so it should show up in my blogroll, and possibly in the Little Feed Reader on Bluesky. All of this, and more, was discovered by Andrew Shell. Two suggestions. 1. Include descriptions with the items. 2. Use enclosures for the videos. Atom does enclosures differently from RSS, but it can be made to work, imho. No matter what, thank you YouTube, and it's a great start. #

This is what my YouTube channel looks like in my blogroll. #