People are trying to figure out the answer to Substack. The answer
isn't that people should run their own servers or buy their own domains. You don't have to buy a bus to take a bus to work, you can rent a seat, it's a lot more economical. You don't have to find a place to park the bus, or pay to maintain it, someone else is happy to do that for you. What you need is a pass that lets you ride the bus. What that means for services like what Substack does, is you need a place to store your writing, that you pay for. And an app can get at (with your permission) and take a document that you specify and mail it to the people you allow to subscribe. You pay for that too, but it's not much because it doesn't cost much. The piece that's missing is storage you can pay for that doesn't come with a dot-com business model. That's the thing we really need to esccape from, being monetized. The only respectful way to be monetized is to pay for something worth paying for, roughly what it costs, plus a reasonable margin of profit.
#
It's good that people are thinking of
leaving Substack. I
didn't like what
they were doing because they were yet another place that
requires you to use their editor to publish through their platform, probably because their business model requires a fair amount of lock-in. I like using the editor that I do all my writing in, and I don't see why I can't just post directly from there. Even if they don't have an API, it's pretty easy to set it up so it posts from a
feed. If you're thinking about leaving Substack, good for you. Please insist that your new platform lets you post via a feed. If they say it's too hard, give them my email address, and I'll show them how to do it.
#
Fixed a bug in
news.scripting.com that caused it to display only the
All tab, leaving the other tabs inaccessible. Glad to get it fixed now and sorry for the breakage. Please keep the error
reports coming.
#
- I'd love to tell you a story about the time I had the authority to post to the Dean campaign home page, and they deleted a post I wrote on the night of the famous Dean Scream that might have saved the campaign. They were trying to make the story go away. As we know the story didn't go away. #
- 2008: "The campaign had video that showed clearly that the press was actively trying to kill his candidacy. They had a website, and they had enough money to pay for the bandwidth to run it. They knew what the press was trying to do. They could have fought it. But they didn't."#
- That night I became friends with Nicco Mele, he was the webmaster at Dean who gave me the power. I was in their Burlington headquarters at the moment the whole thing imploded, the night of the Iowa caucus. I've also become friends with Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for Dean in 2008. They probably accelerated the adoption of online media in American politics by a decade or more. However, a lot of the ideas from that time are gone, but hopefully not forever.#
- The biggest idea was that it gave people a sense of belonging, that they weren't powerless to influence or even control the US government. We all felt that the war in Iraq was wrong, Dean gave Americans a way to say that clearly, with their own actions. I think if we want to achieve our destiny in the 2024 election, we need to get some of that into the campaign, or democracy won't prevail.#
- There's a story about how Trump makes people feel like they belong in the Washington Post written by Philip Bump that Joe and Nicco should read if they haven't. This is something Trump gets that the Democrats have forgotten they know. People don't vote on policy, they vote to belong to something they believe might fix things, whatever that means to them.#
- PS: I also blogged about my adventure at the Dean campaign headquarters in January 2004 before and during the Iowa caucus and the Dean campaign implosion. #
- PPS: A picture of the blogging room in Burlington the night of the Iowa caucus in 2004.#
- PPPS: In February 2004, I wrote a piece summing up what we learned from Dean. "In a virtual sense, the Internet was looking for a candidate, and Howard Dean fit the bill. He was bloggable."#
It would be better if journalists did not gravitate to a Facebook-owned Twitter clone.
#
For a guy who likes to write, I am probably not a lot better about writing docs than most other developers. We're supposed to leave a good trail behind us, but I've only managed to do that in certain ways. For example, I have standardized on a
worknotes.md file for each of my projects and I'm pretty good about updating it. I also publish the OPML source of my code, which contains a lot more in the way of internal docs than the JavaScript files I publish alongside them, simply because the outline format lends itself to inline docs, and I have been doing that systematically for at least thirty years. And I now include the OPML source in most projects in a file called
source.opml. There's a big comment at the top of each of the files at the top that explains. If you're interested, work backward through the
directory of my repos.
#
- I spend a lot of time thinking about words, and when I hear a phrase that seems wrong to me, I'll work on it until I figure out why it seems wrong and what would be a better way to express the actual idea. #
- That said, I don't think Trump tried to "overturn an election."#
- More accurately, he tried to "overthrow the government."#
- Why I say that:#
- Overturn could be something you do legitimately. If you are convicted of a crime, you could appeal it, be exonerated, and the correct verb would be overturn. Overturn doesn't convey the illegitimacy of what Trump tried to do. The criminality of it. The abhorrence of it, by American values. He tried to "overturn" our most sacred ritual, the transfer of power from one person to another, based on the vote of the people. Overthrow is a much better word for what was done. #
- When you commit a crime, say for example killing someone, we don't say they tried to illegally use a weapon, that's too technical, we say they're "accused of murder." We focus on the consequences. There are lots of ways to illegally use a weapon, what matters is the intended result.#
- There is always exactly one president, at all times, in all circumstances. It's spelled out in the 20th Amendment.#
- On January 20, 2021, we had an actual peaceful transfer of power when Joe Biden took the oath, but the transfer actually took place before he took the oath, at 12PM exactly. #
- You can also look at the government as a continuous thing, the only difference is there is a new person occupying the office of president. Same government, the one defined by the Constitution. Always on. #
- So on January 6, 2021, the then-president Donald Trump, tried to destroy the government, replacing it with a new government, one that doesn't follow the Constitution. #
Twitter became a
hairball. I first heard this term in speeches given by a tech exec,
Scott McNealy, talking about a competitor's product. A hairball is something a cat coughs up. Very undesirable. Of course, given enough time all software becomes a hairball. As you refine your understanding of how the product is being used, versus how you thought it would be used, all the new paths through the code and UI become more crooked and impenetrable by a human mind, because you still have to do all the things you did before, unless you start over. There often is value in starting over. Now is a good time to be thinking about bare-bones social web apps. People are open to new ideas.
#
I asked "Is news copyrightable" on various social web sites because people aren't making a distinction between the expression and the underlying facts of news. If an AI bot reads a news article, and extracts the facts, then there's no problem, because no one owns the facts.
#
A puzzle about ChatGPT. How can it get something right that both Wikipedia and journalism get wrong? Journalism often uses Wikipedia as a source, thus propagating its lies and mistakes. I think this negates the idea that they're just scanning the news orgs to get their information. The method obviously is more sophisticated.
#
What about a LLM that is fed with the flow of your feed subscriptions?
#
I would like to give a LLM a pointer to a folder of my writing and say "learn this" and then a few hours or days later I'd be able to ask it questions about what I wrote. I also have folders of stuff my parents wrote. It would be kind of interesting to feed those into a LLM and then ask questions about them. Could be the equivalent of ten years of therapy.
#
I think Bluesky has a chance of being the place where journalists assemble in place of Twitter. I sincerely hope it's not on Facebook's Twitter replacement. That would like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss but much richer and better managed."
#
I had a couple of Papaya hot dogs. Sensually delicious.
#
I got a high compliment from my
OG friend and co-conspirator in podcasting
Chris Lydon. He said I was a good
sports writer and boasted of the current Celtics team (he's from Boston). They're worth boasting about. What a team, such depth and so many interesting players. They were great before they added
Kristaps Porzingis, who we know well in New York. He was our rookie unicorn and franchise player at the end of the Phil Jackson debacle. He's one of those ex-Knicks we still root for, so I feel an affinity for this year's Celtics. I would pay to see them kill a west coast team like the Warriors or Kings in this year's finals. Anyway, I write sports for people who are not sports fans, though I think everyone who loves politics or business should pay close attention to sports, because it all happens quickly in sport, and the human element is so visible and front and center. I'm glad Chris is a basketball fan. Maybe we can go to a Knicks-Celtics game sometime, either in Boston or NYC. The Knicks are getting good, and it likely would be a good game and Knicks could even win.
๐ฅ#
This year's Fargo is quite good. Even better than I thought when I realized that you have to watch each episode twice to get the jokes.
๐ #
Speaking of Fargo, at first I thought it was ridiculous to have
Jon Hamm cast as the fascist police chief of a small North Dakota town, but he's a really good actor (of course) and by episode 8, I'm convinced.
#
Saw
Jena Griswold, the Colorado Secretary of State,
on MSNBC on Thursday. She said something that I hadnโt heard before โ Trump actually has been found by a court to be an insurrectionist. Thatโs what happened in Colorado in their Supreme Court.
#
I love
this scene with Glenn Close and Robert Duvall about the relationship between journalists and billionaires.
#
The problem all billionaires have is there is
nothing they can buy with their
money that's worth owning.
#
- I've been blogging since 1994. #
- I once set a date that I would stop blogging. #
- It came and went. I didn't stop.#
- Some people are natural born bloggers -- they can't not blog.#
Julia Child as a blogger, as rendered by ChatGPT.
#
Rich Brown
reports a problem with the tabs on the Scripting News
home page on an Android tablet running Brave. It sounds like the problems were introduced when I did a rewrite of the tab code, and it's probably due to some code catching the click before it gets to the tab code. Once found, it's easy to fix. If you're running Brave or using an Android tablet, could you give it a try per Rich's description, see if you can reproduce. Also curious if there are error messages in the JavaScript console. Thanks!
#
- Caveat: This very likely already exists. #
- Random idea for my friends at Automattic. How about a theme for a WordPress site that's good for technical subjects. #
- It should have good default styles for code. Handle screen shot images gracefully. Basically a way of using WordPress for documenting the kinds of things we write up on GitHub because their editor is designed to work well for technical stuff. #
- Just thinking out loud. A good test case would be the RSS 2.0 spec, which doesn't look too great after years of no-updates (more than 20 years) and browser slippage? #
- It started life as a Manila site, transitioned to WordPress, and now I believe it's a static site. At one time it looked good in WordPress. It could totally use the kind of treatment Doc's blog got, but obviously it's serving a different purpose. #
- I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of a social network for writers. #
GPT rendering of "social network for writers."
#
I asked for a more racially diverse rendering.
#
The
RSS 2.0 roadmap is imho one of my best bits of writing, and has stood up pretty well. "RSS is by no means a perfect format, but it is very popular and widely supported. Having a settled spec is something RSS has needed for a long time. The purpose of this work is to help it become a unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats. Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1. We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format. Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names."
#
I am going to ask for a discussion about the
Wikipedia page for RSS, because I think it misses the significance of
RSS, how it became a big thing. It had little to do with the quality of the technical work, there wasn't much of that, and the
quality varied as has been pointed out many times. What made it happen was a vision by some exec at Netscape (whose name is never in the writeups, probably because it isn't on the Wikipedia page), a pitch, and a leap of faith by publishers: Salon, Red Herring, Wired and Motley Fool. And if they hadn't, there wouldn't have been anything worth fighting for. I never would have gotten involved, and blogging might not have been part of RSS, as it was. Then, a few years later, the NYT. And then everyone. It's an interesting story, imho -- and it would be good to make the story available to future would-be innovators. Don't design a perfect format and expect the world to beat a path to your door, it doesn't work that way. You have to keep coming back to the problem, try a new approach, gain some traction, and hope you're not going down a blind alley. The actual story of how it happened belongs on that page.
#
Good luck to everyone riding out the first winter storm of the season in NY and Mass.
#
Saw the Colorado Secretary of State on MSNBC just now and she said something that I hadnโt heard before โ Trump actually has been found by a court to have been an insurrectionist. Thatโs what happened in Colorado in their Supreme Court. Due process.
#
Every time a new writing environment comes along and gets popular but doesn't support linking, there's less hope for the open web. It's subtle but real.
#
One of the coolest things about driving a
muscle car that looks like a Toyota Camry is when you're merging into traffic on a freeway, and a big truck moves over into the left lane to let you on, a polite gesture, and you smoke him.
#
I know Elon Musk isn't popular, but I saw an older interview of his where he said something important that most people don't realize about technology. Sometimes we lose abilities we had in the past. His example was space travel. In the sixties we went to the moon. A decade later we could only put people in earth orbit. A few decades after that, not so much. I've seen this in software and networks. In some ways they have become far more powerful, in terms of bandwidth, CPU speed and the cost of storage. But software-wise, the runtime that we develop for today is a shadow of what it was in the 80s. We gave up a lot in going to the web, and made some terrible decisions, collectively, about languages and styling. JavaScript is horrendous for building complex systems, the worst language imaginable, but we use it as the default. And CSS, it's disgusting how hard it is to control, at things it claims to be good at. If only we were using C or Pascal, and
QuickDraw. When you study how these systems evolved, the discontinuities and how they were usually the result of a company trying to own something they could have let everyone build on (the Mac UI for example, and the networking built into every Mac). I've made some of these mistakes myself, so I'm not saying it's about quality of individuals. It's just that we don't think enough about what we're doing, and before you know it some things are tossed aside that were really good, and replaced them with systems that are grossly inadequate.
#
I always have multiple tabs open in my outliner. This tab, the one I'm writing into now, is for
Scripting News. I have one for my development work, general notes, not project-specific. And tabs for all the projects I've been working on in the last few days or in some cases weeks or months. From a writing standpoint, it doesn't matter whether they're on different sites, the idea of a site is not even in the user interface of my editor. In WordPress it's everything. The usual caveat: unless I'm missing something. I imagine people use browser tabs to work on more than one document at a time? I keep thinking there's a lot of stuff we can do to make WordPress work better for writers, I'm trying to be nice about this, but it doesn't work at all for me as a writer. I want it to work. I still can't believe there aren't a dozen different approaches to writing in WordPress. Seems like a fair amount of innovation is possible. I'm a writer who also is a developer. This has been bugging me for the last year or so. Why do I think WordPress is so important? 1. Obviously it has a huge installed base. If there's an opportunity to create something that even a small number of them would like, it's worth doing. 2. WordPress is the only product out there that supports
all the features of
textcasting. So If I want lots of outlets for basic text writing, you have to start somewhere. Luckily there's WordPress, sitting there, ready to be recast as a social media app. If you know me, you know I
love puzzles like this.
๐#
The usage of
news.scripting.com keeps going up. All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present. I'm interested in knowing what you think, what you like, what could be improved, does it give you ideas, how can we help. Here's a
place for comments.
#
A
discussion about whether a feed reader should support titleless items. It should, without question. The
spec is very clear. "All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present." It's how social media sites like Bluesky, Mastodon, et al hook up to the RSS network. Their posts not only don't require titles, they don't allow them, something I'd like to see them ease up on, per
textcasting. Let the writer decide if a post needs a title.
#
- A simple rule for designers of social web systems.#
- Let the writer decide if a post needs a title.#
- It isn't one-size-fits-all. Some posts will have titles, others won't.#
- PS: I think "Let the writer decide" has real potential as a slogan. ๐#
On Friday I asked ChatGPT for
1000 words on RSS. The bot sorted through all the nonsense, got the story, where
Wikipedia got
mired. They left out almost all of the interesting stuff relating to the way it was adopted by the publishing and blogging worlds. The format isn't all that important, see the
rules for standards-makers, what matters is the interop it delivers. The RSS 0.91 to 2.0 thread was what the market built around, because it was promoted to the market and
held steady for it. The other thread got bogged down in an
academic theory of how the web should evolve. Content syndication was a real application. That's the story, imho. There was no mention of the NYT in the Wikipedia piece, or Salon, Red Herring, Wired and Motley Fool. Or NPR in re podcasting, yet without the support of these news orgs, and of blogging software, there never would have been an RSS.
#
Basketball is the best game to watch because you get to know the players. Only five players on the court at once, they play both offense and defense, and they aren't wearing armor like football players, you see their faces, whether they're cool or hot, emotional or stoic, up or down. So when your team trades two of its best-known players for three players you've never heard of, to a team that's rebuilding, first you feel sad, and then you wonder what the new teams will be like. One of the traded players,
Immanuel Quickley, is a young, happy warrior with a deadly offense, but he was a Knicks bench player because they already had an All-Star quality player at his position, point guard, the quarterback of a basketball team. He led the second unit, and probably had a lot to do with the Knicks' success last year. I watched the Raptors game last night, and while the joy seemed to be gone from his demeanor, he was their starting point guard, and now he gets a chance to prove himself. The Knicks got something they needed, desperately, now that their defensive leader,
Mitchell Robinson, is injured and out for the season --
OG Anunoby -- who fit in so well into the starting lineup, in place of the other player the Knicks traded,
RJ Barrett, who never became the producer we hoped he would. The new Knicks starting five are a much better team than they were before the trade, or so it seems after one game. I admit, I had gotten bored with Knicks this season, but yesterday's game was interesting and exciting, and even better
the Knicks won, against one of the
best teams in the NBA. Yet we will miss
IQ in New York, and hope for him to have a great career in Toronto and beyond.
#
- I got this idea from Mike Masnick on Bluesky. #
- I asked ChatGPT if Steamboat Willie is now public domain. It said yes.#
- I asked if it could draw me a picture of SW saying he's now public domain.#
Not quite. Public dombat.
#
- Was that intentional, I asked?#
- No. Apology. Let's try again.#
Now he's public domant.
#
- But the pictures are cool!#
New FeedLand feature/fix. We now remove duplicates from feed lists. This can happen with the advent of reading lists, but it's realllly annoying. Finally got around to making this work in a more reasonable way.
#
Looking to the future, one thing that would help the web develop more quickly in a more open way for users and developers, with less reliance on the
kindness of
big tech companies -- a commercial identity and storage system that users pay for. There's no reason an independent developer such as myself should have to implement an identity system, and no reason a user should want me to. Yet there is no service that provides storage for users that is accessible to apps that the user chooses. There are a bunch of companies that have all the pieces. There would be so many benefits of this, it would help drive open standards, and make it possible for multiple apps to work on the same data. I don't know why this product doesn't exist. It should.
#
BTW, I wrote a wizzy writing tool for WordPress. Here's a
screen shot. I wanted something simpler for posting to feedland.blog. I think it could work even more smoothly, it was a first effort. One thing I don't understand is why aren't there a dozen such writing tools for WordPress. It has a great API, really easy to work with. It's a very versatile product, yet people seem to stick with the built-in writing interface. Curious.
#
Andrew Hickey is this year's
Blogger of the Year. He's a prototypical blogger, exactly the kind of person I hoped would
create their own media having profound positive impact on people's lives. People like me. His
500 Songs podcast, which I've written about
many times, focuses on a song in every episode and tells you how the pieces came together to create it. When a new episode comes out I greedily savor it, like a great
bagel from Zabar's or a new
Tarantino movie. Two recent episodes, one about the
Grateful Dead and the other about
Hey Jude, changed my views of each of the groups, in the first case confirming an intuition, and in the other showing me how naive my idea of how a song comes together. I am envious of how the musicians work together, it may be a cuthroat industry, but it seems incredibly collaborative compared to how tech works, where we all pretty much ignore each other. Hickey isn't just a podcaster, he's also a blogger, and he does it in an unusual place,
on Bluesky. He has things to say and that's of course what
NBB's are all about. You may not care for their opinions, but you will know what they are. Anyway, if you like the Beatles, I highly recommend the
latest episode, and if you like popular music,
subscribe to
500 Songs. And if you know of any podcasts like this, please let me know. I always want to add to my podcast reading list.
#
Hickey was
profiled in the New Yorker in July.
#
A quiet end for 2023. It was not a fantastic year, work-wise. I spent almost all my time working away from my interests. First project was completely replacing the identity system in the two apps I'm maintaining --
Drummer and
FeedLand, and letting the others end. No one ever says thanks for this kind of work, but it's as basic as converting a house from oil heat to a
heat pump. Some of the ducts still work, but things break in hard to find ways. I also converted FeedLand from a simple app that runs on a virtual server, to a scalable and durable app (we hope) that runs in a big cloud. This part was good, but again the work is far from where my expertise and interests lie. So at the beginning of a new year, I'm going to remind myself that I'm too old and not paid well enough (I'm not paid at all, heh) to do another year of this kind of work. I should be making writing and reading tools work better on the web. That's my mission. If it isn't related to that, please understand when I don't give it a high priority. Just one person here. Surprisingly resilient, but also quite tired.
#
Sometimes I wonder if dying is like waking from from a dream, hopefully with friends and loved ones waiting for you, like going to a diner after seeing a movie together and you all talk about how you liked it, and if you want to see it again.
#
Here's the
JSON spec for news.scripting.com. Not done yet, still more stuff to add, and possibly change, but I think it looks pretty good so far. The previous version depended on OPML, and I wanted to move to JSON because OPML already has plenty to do in our world.
๐#
When I say
textcasting is "applying the philosophy of podcasting to text" -- what I mean in practical terms is that my flow of ideas is available "where ever you get your text." Choice in subscribing has to be that fluid, commonsense, and choice is something people feel entitled to, as they do with podcasts. I've been told people would never understand the philosophy of podcasting, but they do, they understand they're entitled to choice in how to listen and thus producers are free to choose where to publish. Somehow text, which is so much easier to transmit than audio, is far less flexible. That's a mistake I want to undo, but I can't do it alone. I need to work with other people who have writing and reading tools, and people who have something to say and want all the features of writing to be at their disposal, and for it to be easy, inexpensive but not free of charge, and not owned by the titans of tech. Another
song comes to mind. "You can get it if you really want."
#
Yesterday I wrote that
working together is the challenge for open tech developers. If you're waiting for a big company to work with you, and we all are, the answer is you'll probably wait a long time, and you probably won't get there. It's not impossible, but it is improbable. So while you're waiting, why not work with a peer on solving a problem you both have in somewhat different ways, but make what you do compatible. That's what working together is about. It's not just that the people did it, but you created something that lives on that works together. There's even a
song that goes with this. "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."
#
There's been a bit of trouble on my servers the last couple of days, and as a result a couple of domains are not working for everyone, or are behaving in mysterious ways. I moved
textcasting.org to a server that has a copy of
Caddy installed, and therefore supports HTTPS. I am able to see the domain on my local machines, but not on my phone, and I'm getting reports that other people are getting empty pages. And theoretically there should be no way that people should get a non-HTTPS version of
news.scripting.com, but I'm seeing hits for the HTTP version in my log. Very weird. If you can shed any light on the problems from your end, please post a note
here. Thanks! What a way to end a year. Oy.
#
At the end of another year, network writing is still
broken and the bigger problem is we don't work together. And we've gotten out of the habit of trying out new ideas with our networks. And we're building systems that depend on the kindness of our peers and big companies, and keep learning that this is not a kind world. All this is why we've been spinning our wheels for 17 years, and unless we start working together, for real, we'll just keep spinning.
#
The new version of
news.scripting.com has been running for a couple of days, and seems to be working well. But I'm not sure everyone is seeing the new version. In the new version there are
icons on each tab. If you're seeing the icons, all is good, if not, try clearing your DNS cache? The domain should point to 143.198.165.199. A
place to comment.
#
The state of networked writing at the end of 2023 -- broken, in many cases, no doubt, deliberately, to keep networks from interoperating. One system allows multiple tags per item, another limits it to one. One has a limit of 280 chars, another 500, but if you pay 10,000. There is no interop, we all write in silos. The basic feature of the web, linking, is especially broken. These are all incredibly simple features requiring practically no resources., This must be deliberate, because the problem is so easily solved. Most people can't see the potential of the open internet as a fantastic writing environment, but it can be one, but only if we want it.
#
The
NYT is suing ChatGPT for ingesting their archive. I understand why they would sue now, for legal reasons, but before they had their own service up, assuming they are developing one, it's kind of selfish of them to keep the Times content out of the mix. We're failing at a number of big challenges (climate, guns, abortion, democracy, racial hate, wars), with everyone's future at stake. They could grant ChatGPT a license until at least they had their own product up. That would send the right message, our journalism is an aid to our survival, and we wanted to be sure you had access to the paper of record, now and in the future. Instead they want to take their data out of the mix, and who knows if they ever plan to get it back in. This is a far cry from the NYT that helped get our news systems on the web established in the 90s and 00s.
#
I'm going to write rebuttals to important Wikipedia pages that get the story wrong. In the past this was pointless, because search engines ranked them so high, but now I find that ChatGPT figures out the real story somehow, almost always, even if Wikipedia is wildly wrong. I figure our blogging helps.
#
- Okay the new version of news.scripting.com is up. #
- Here's what's new.#
- When you click on a tab, we change the URL in the address bar to point to the tab, the same way we do on the Scripting News home page. If you bookmark that link, you'll go to that tab.#
- Click the white-on-orange XML icon to get an OPML subscription list for the feeds with the category of the current selected tab. #
- The four buttons below each item now work. #
- It should work reasonably well on phones and tablets.#
- It's served with HTTPS because in upcoming versions you'll be able to log in. #
- And that's about it, in terms of visible features. Behind the scenes there's a new tab manager. I figured since all my apps use tabs these days, I should make the investment of having a single tab manager that has all the bells and whistles, invoked by setting an option.#
- The customary screen shot. #
- A thread for any questions.#
So much of the history isn't covered on the
Wikipedia page on RSS, for example, the apps that got the ball rolling in the spring of 1999: my.netscape and my.userland and the four pioneering web pubs: Salon, Wired, Motley Fool and Red Herring. We immediately put new feed support into Manila and the early versions of Radio and were followed by Blogger, Movable Type and basically the whole blogging world (WordPress was still a few years in the future). It was all that adoption in a short period of time that made RSS a big thing. Professional and amateur writers in one space. When you went to see what's new, the web did the surfing for you. For me it was the continuation of a story that goes back to the San Francisco
newspaper strike in 1994. And it's still happening today on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon. It's a continuing story. Not over by a lot.
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In the early 80s, my main development machine was an Apple II, believe it or not. Sometimes the machine would just refuse to boot, so I'd get on
El Camino to
Computer Plus in Sunnyvale, which was the main developer store in the Valley, owned by Dick and Lucy Applebaum and
Mark Wozniak. Very often when I got to the store and plugged the machine in, it would start right up. That became a superstition, if your computer won't launch take it for a ride in the car. Anyway, this morning, in 2023, my web app, the new version of
news.scripting.com that I'm working on was in a state that was really depressing. I was working on making it mobile-friendly and nothing I did would make the timeline fit into the alotted space. I was at my wits end, thinking maybe I'd have to revert my changes and try another approach. So I went out for a walk, it's a nice day, kind of warm, and the air is clear, no rain, and there are even some trees in bloom which is weird considering that it's
the day after Christmas for crying out loud. But it was a good thing to do, when I got back I had a plan for how to go forward. My brain was now clear. I got myself a nice bowl of fruit salad and a glass of water, and sat down and rolled up my sleeves, and I bet by now dear reader you've figured out the punchline. It worked. I did nothing. Every bit showed up in the right place, more or less (modulo some tweaking). Back with Apple II in the 80s it wasn't really magic. The chips weren't soldered into the motherboard on the machine, and they would get pretty hot, and when you'd turn the computer off and on, it would go hot and cold, which meant the pins on the chips would expand and contract and in doing so, over months, one could unseat. A trip in the car might just jog it back into its socket. The same way, forty years later, if you get up from the computer and go for a walk, when you come back, cached requests have now aged-out and the files that weren't getting refreshed are now up to date, and it turns out I wasn't crazy or incompetent, and it probably wasn't some kind of act of god, it's just the internet being the internet.
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I believe that, with yesterday's
change, images are now loading
properly in emails transmitted over GMail.
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Happy Christmas everyone who celebrates. I have a little business to do here on
my blog today, then the regular holiday schedule will begin starting tomorrow and probably go through the first week of January.
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This period is often a time of innovation in the world of blogs, podcasting and feeds. For me this year, I'm using the time to do more work on CSS and basic user interface stuff for
FeedLand and for news products like
news.scripting.com, which has been surprisingly popular. The new stuff will start showing up first in that site, pretty soon. The goal is to build on its popularity, to bootstrap a new platform.
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I also want to write a bit more about RSS support in Bluesky, what it means, and ideas for next steps. BTW, here's a
screen shot of the email I sent to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on Dec 12, asking for
RSS 2.0 support, which was released publicly ten days later on
Dec 22.
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I made a change to how images are served from this blog, to see if the images are still blocked by GMail. Previously we redirected to an
S3 file, so we could use HTTPS and but not have to have the bits flow through one of my Digital Ocean servers, which after this change, they now do. For most of you this will be blah blah whatever blah blah zzzz, but some people may find it interesting.
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Bluesky has RSS 2.0 feeds for every user,
built-in. Now we have a basis for interop between Mastodon and Bluesky. Important milestone. What can we build with this? Start thinking, building.
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Is there an
Amazon Echo in the
form factor of a battery operated wifi speaker? Such an obvious product. Everyone would get one.
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In the reporting on the
Colorado Supreme Court and the 14th Amendment, I've not heard the most basic reason why Trump can't be President. Here's why. He took an
oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He did the opposite, he attacked the Constitution. So how can we ask him to take the same oath again, the one that he violated the last time he took it. The Constitution is very wise, it's what
Maya Angelou taught -- when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. That's why he can't be president again. He can't be believed when he takes the oath, and if he can't take the oath he can't be President.
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- I've been playing Wordle again for the last two months. I'm much better at it this go-around than the last time. Generally I can get it done in three or four moves. If it takes five it's because I made a mistake or took a gamble on the second move that didn't work out. These days I don't even try for the second move, but this morning, on the first move I got four out of the five letters, and got the correct position of two of the four. It took a couple of seconds to see that there was really only one answer, so I decided to risk it, and there was this moment we yearn for when the letters reveal one at a time, all green, a final correct move, in two. First time I've ever gotten that result. I wasn't even sure it was possible. Well there it is. Almost perfect. Nothing more to say than Yay Me! #
- Conversation has a place, but I think we've explored that pretty well, and now I want to create better publishing and reading systems, that are as fast as social web systems, but place less emphasis on replies that can be seen by everyone, because that often is not really conversation, it's spam. #
- I think ultimately we'll be disappointed with federation for all the reasons we're frustrated with earlier social web systems. People trying to get attention for their ideas, which often are spam or trolling. I also think this means RSS will be more valuable going forward because it's great at publishing, checking all the textcasting boxes. #
- I plan to build with and around WordPress. I think of WordPress as a basic platform the way I saw Twitter between 2006 and 2022. Now the question is what are the steps to use WordPress as the back-end of a social communication system. Behind the scenes, its database has all the capabilities we need to provide the tools writers need. And it has excellent RSS support. It all runs at scale and has a mature yet simple API. That is all we need to form a hub.#
This is the time of year every day feels like Saturday.
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- People who don't program must not have any idea how much of a boon ChatGPT is to us programmers. #
- I am doing CSS coding far in advance of my previous capability. When I know something is possible, but I haven't the slightest idea how to specify it, I just ask, in my own words. #
- For example, a very common thing to want to do is to put a : after the text in the first column every row of a table. #
- So I asked ChatGPT how to do it, in English, as I did above. This is what it came up with:#
tr td:first-child::after {content: ":";}
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- When you see it like that you can almost figure out what's going on if you squint and close one eye. #
- And it works. I literally shrieked when it did. #
- Now I am the boss of CSS.. #
- Nice.#
A beautiful and weird visualization of FeedLand.
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If we had met in the late 80s and early 90s and we were talking about where technology should go next, I would have talked endlessly about creating apps out of apps. It means being able to write scripts that use an application as a scriptable toolbox, going behind the user interface. I was developing a product around that idea called Frontier. It all happened, and played a big role in making the Mac the ideal development platform for the web when it came along, in the early-late 90s. Unfortunately
Apple's top people didn't get this, and wiped out the whole developer community in one press conference. The ideas were still useful and we're using them every day, but not really aware of it. End of speech.
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I asked ChatGPT for a
list of Motown songs with a strong fast beat good for dancing. Now I want to play the list in Amazon music. Is there a way to do this?
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Technical note: I've observed that GMail is refusing to show the images on my nightly emails, when
viewed on my iPad, both in the Safari browser and in the iOS GMail app. I'd like to know if this is happening for other people, and then run an experiment to see if we can figure out what it is they don't like about the images. Here's a
place to comment.
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After all the disappointments in our country's response to Homegrown Hitler from Queens, a personality I recognize from the neighborhood I grew up in which is just
four miles from
where Trump grew up, what a nice unexpected surprise that one holiday season Tuesday night, I'd turn on the news on MSNBC at the exact moment the host says "Hold on, breaking news" (I sighed, no it's not) only to learn yes, it was. The state of Colorado had decided to use one of the
guardrail buttons to extinguish the candidacy of HH, just like that. This morning I woke with a smile on my face and thought, hey it could happen, it
should happen. If the Supreme Court doesn't want to become the
Nazi-style ratifier of a holocaust, this is their moment to act. It's possible they'll decide that the Constitution applies to every officer of the United States government except the president and vice-president, I'd love to hear the reason, and if they do, we'll know that we've already lost.
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If journalism wants to help inform the populace of the stakes, I'd like them to stop using the term neo-Nazi. There's nothing new about being a Nazi. It adds a tiny bit of confusion at exactly the point where you want zero confusion. It took journalism a long time to use the term insurrection about the January 6 events, that hurt us too. Understand where the path we're on leads, and don't give people a reason to hope that it's not as serious as it is.
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- Assume that FB doesn't really want to interop, so that's why there's a year timeline on developing AP functionality. No rush. Let's keep growing and later on we can have an app store that only lets certain sites into our world, subject to our turning them off at any time. #
- Assuming this is true, RSS is their worst nightmare. It's implemented in a week, if you're really careful and there are good toolkits for every platform, and lots of developers know what to do with it, and even worse, there already is a huge installed base of such apps and they all have vociferous users who would be thrilled to be heard, because they largely feel like they're pissing in the wind. I am doing CSS coding far in advance of my previous capability, when I know something is possible, but I haven't the slightest idea how to specify it. #
- Remember they said RSS is Dead. I always felt that was aimed at me, but it was aimed at them too, even more so.#
- The thing to do, build -- intelligently, slowly, showing interop at every step. Watch out for people who take stuff out with out putting back. #
A
suggestion to ActivityPub enthusiasts -- a very simple, highly factored toolkit for posting via ActivityPub might unleash a flood of compatible software, depending on how many obstacles can be removed. I've tried to evangelize the idea, but it didn't happen. In the end I punted, and used Mastodon's API, and thus
my software only works with services that implement their API.
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- I've been watching the news tonight, when there's some actual news, and it's good news. #
- What they're not saying is that the US has the tools to defend itself from enemies like Trump, and finally we're starting to use them. Not impotent tools, like congressional hearings or impeachment, but the actual guardrail meant to serve as a last resort to keep a nightmare out of the government. An insurrectionist should be dealt with a lot more swiftly than Trump has and the penalty should be harsh to warn off other would-be coup plotters. But -- better late than never. #
- And if they want to have a civil war, okay -- better to do it when the military is under constitutional control, at least theoretically. Tell the Republicans to try again, now before any primary votes have been cast. This candidate is prohibited from being president, as if he were born outside the United States. Not qualified. #
- I wanted a simple chicken soup recipe, so I entered.#
- And hit Return.#
- It started drawing a picture. #
- I was fascinated, wondering what will it draw?#
Here is an image of a cozy, homestyle bowl of chicken soup.
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- The caption was written by the AI.#
- Very different from previous cartoonish pictures.#
- I asked for the ingredients and got the recipe I sought.#
- I have a private group on Facebook, and just got this notice.#
- "Join the waitlist for Meta AI in your group! Meta AI can save you time and spark conversations by answering questions posted in your group, linking people to the posts they find most helpful, and more. Sign up your group to be the first to get access when it becomes available in your region."#
- When I clicked on the Learn More button, this is what came back.#
- A new way to get questions answered#
- Meta AI will comment on questions that haven't gotten an answer after one hour#
- Keep members engaged#
- Meta AI's answers will summarize earlier group discussions and share past posts from the group, helping to build community and spark discussion#
- Stay in control#
- You'll be able to delete any of Meta AI's comments, turn it off anytime, and customize it for your group#
- A thought -- this kind of feature could not have been offered a year ago. The online world and journalism would never have accepted it from Facebook. But now they're called Meta and that seems to matter. ChatGPT has created a new opening. Not sure I'm going to like it, esp since this is mostly a one-way group. It's not for discussions. But it's the only group they offered to, and I love this stuff and want to know more.#
- I haven't told the members of the group that I've requested this. Am I obligated to do that? #
- Also in private groups where people reveal personal info (not the purpose of this group) I could see where this would be very controversial.#
- I went to my first since-pandemic live show, at The Colony in Woodstock. It's small venue that goes way back. It's basically a bar, with a stage and a small seating area which can hold about 50 people, seated at tables. Very comfortable space. Woodstock as you might imagine is a great place for live music, one of the reasons I moved here, the other being that it's a magnet for creative people, like a lot of the other places I've lived (New Orleans, Cambridge, Berkeley, Madison, Seattle, New York). But the pandemic squashed that, now maybe we're starting to come back. #
The Levin Brothers band at The Colony, Sunday night.
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- I decided to risk it because a friend was playing last night, Tony Levin, who I know through his wife, Andi. When I first met Tony, at a birthday dinner last year, I thought he was a banker. He's tall, an impressive-looking person, like the people who rose to be an executive at companies like IBM in the 80s. Just shows how deceiving appearances can be. He's an accomplished musician, and a very sweet, quiet person. Probably about as far from an IBM exec or banker as you can get. Until Sunday I had never seen him perform. #
- The group I was with arrived early, and Tony was at the front door, greeting people as we entered, and immediately he made a very different impression. He seemed soft, hippieish, relaxed, smiling. Later I realized this may have been the first time I'd seen him in his element. And the show, a four-piece jazz band, with his brother Pete Levin on piano, started off playing (to my uneducated ear) pretty plain improvisational jazz. But as the show went on, I could see that this music had been composed, and had all kinds of themes running through it. It seemed to me the music had been cultivated over many years? #
- The Levins and friends, are roughly my age. I imagined they had been playing together as long as I have been making software. And I felt certain what I was seeing here were two very talented brothers, who have been performing together their whole lives, and there was something I had been trying to understand about myself, how I feel about my art, almost fifty years after I started. There is an important difference in how I do it at 68 vs how I did it when I was 22. Exactly how it is different, I'm probably too close to it to really understand, but seeing what I imagined to being something similar in two people I kind of know, that was thought-provoking.#
- To me, music is as software probably is to most people who use it. I love it, but I don't have much of an idea of how it's made. The last few years I've been reintroduced to it in a new way, thanks to the Get Back documentary, which gave us a view into the Beatles' creative process, something I wish I could have seen when I was much younger. The Beatles were the music my generation grew up with, but I never really even understood that there was a difference between a John song and a Paul song. #
- The second great influence has been Andrew Hickey's 500 songs podcast. Now I have so many more stories to go with the music that my life was formed by. And I have a feeling that attending this event on Sunday will turn out to be a similar influence. #
- Now, what music should I go see next? ๐ฅ#
- PS: The concert was reviewed by a professional.#
We're easing into the holiday period now, just had my last meeting in 2023. I want to thank the people at
Automattic who helped get us over the top with FeedLand running in their fantastic cloud. The software is
finished running now, modulo bug fixes, docs, examples, developer tools, user evangelism, and working with other developers to make feeds live up to the enormous potential, which imho has been laying dormant for far too many years. Specifically thanks to
Christie Wright for taking this project under her wing. I can't believe how fast the software runs in its
new home. We're set up for a great 2024.
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