New release of the feedlandSockets code. Still more work to do.#

Last night I learned about headless WordPress installations from a tweet by Matt Mullenweg. It got me going on various explorations. Wrote a blog post on my WP site. It's actually easier for me to write posts on that site when all I have is my iPad. I do all my writing on Scripting News in Electric Drummer, which is a desktop-only app. I'm going to start engaging in discussions about WordPress where the people are. Also starting to think about my keynote in Ottawa in October which is now less than a month away. A note to the people running the show, I would be open to having it be an interview instead of a speech. I have trouble staying anchored to the audience with slides, I don't really like that way of communicating. I prefer interview style, with an interviewer who is interested in the subject matter. I want to do at least a bit of a demo, talk about how we got here, the early blogosphere, all the things that led to WordPress, and the connection WordPress has now to social media systems like Mastodon. We must focus on that connection because so much has been accomplished there in the last year, and it hasn't imho gotten enough attention. I want to talk more about the big picture, how WordPress has a role to play that goes beyond serving ecommerce sites, which is, I understand where the money is. Money is good but right now imho our world wide public communication system desperately needs an upgrade. It's been crippled by decisions made by Twitter almost 20 years ago. I want to turn that around, put back the features they took out, and to do that I need to start a network that's built on the web, not in silos that can't connect to each other. That is not the web I know, where everything can connect to anything. I don't think at this time any of the social media apps should be considered part of the web. I remember the magic of the web, we built the blogosphere around the web, and thus WordPress is also built around the web. For more perspective, see the piece I wrote in August about thinking differently about WordPress. That's what I am the evangelist for, thinking about WordPress in a different, wider role, bringing the web to the people in a very usable way. #

Here's a thought for WordPress users and developers. WordPress is huge, but it's just part of the web. That's what it means to be on the web, my friends. Everything connects to anything on the web. Once we build out a social network from WordPress, all the other systems will have no choice but to hook up too. All this talk of AT Proto and ActivityPub being the connecting glue is nonsense. The web is the connecting glue. #

They should make a ChatGPT that two or more people can chat in. I guess that's what Twitter is doing. #

In ways older people handle change better than younger ones, because we know change is here, every freaking day, and we know in a few years, at most, really big change is coming. So the attitude of the older person is often what the fuck, let's go. I'm not kidding. Maybe later in life I will get more conservative, it could happen.#

I'd like to see a mutual defense pact among the open source projects who depend on the stability each others' work. Not with the people, but the projects. Sort of like a NATO of open source. #

I've never been very interested in what Kimmel says but I am now. #

The challenge we face in the social web is enticing people off the silos with fun toys to play with that from the start don't rely on a bigco to run it. The back-end is a server you could run for $20 a month on Digital Ocean for example. But the logical network isn't tied to the physical server. We use URLs or DNS to find other nodes. They can be hosted anywhere. The reason to run lots of servers is to demonstrate that it's only as centralized as the web itself, from day 1. You can browse other people's subscription lists as you can in twitter-like networks. But it's made of feeds. The really simple ones. #

I'm going to call it social web not open social web. You don't need the "open" part. The web is open. It's like saying "wet water."#

There should be a ChatGPT "personality" for the chatbot. I'd like to start with a black lab. When I say "good work" that reinforces that what it did should be a priority. If I say that and give it a treat (by typing "treat") that should get double emphasis. I might like it better if I could train it. I don't mind a little enthusiasm, but I want it to respond to me with respect. #

Highly recommend today's Bill Simmons podcast where he talks about the Jimmy Kimmel situation. His perspective is very good, he says Kimmel doesn't need ABC. And I believe him. #

The penalty for ABC and Disney should be we stop watching their stuff.#

Disney stock down 1.1% at 11:30AM Eastern, indicating that in the opinion of shareholders, the first amendment isn't that big a deal for a media company. #

I got a few good error reports and that led to an easy fix. So if you had a problem creating a new post on WordLand could you please try again and report any problems, or success. Thanks!#

When Paramount said firing Colbert was financial, I think they were telling the truth. Unless they dumped Colbert the $8 billion deal with the Ellisons wouldn't happen. So it was Colbert or $8 billion. They went for the money. Pretty sure it's the same thing with ABC and Kimmel. #

Test post test post test post test post test post test post, my kingdom for a test post!#

I had a great talk/podcast interview yesterday with Matthias Pfefferle about everything I'm interested in re WordPress and networking, and our interests overlap a lot. I was explaining how I wanted to see a whole market of editors. You could see them as "For WordPress" but there's another way to look at them. They're plug-in replacements for the dreaded "tiny little textboxes" we see in twitter-like systems. Those awful little things. We know so many ways to make better editors. Now imagine that we store your Mastodon posts in WordPress documents (we do). And you see how the pieces start to fit together. Think of WordPress as the command line of the social web. And it really will be the web, not a promise of someday maybe being the web. It's like a Wordle puzzle. You have to move the parts around until you see a picture develop. Another fun thing, WordPress has a great simple REST api that's been around since 2017, and it covers most of the product functionality and is debugged, scaled and stable. It probably is the simplest API for ActivityPub. Now does that blow your mind? This is how you know this is the web, because your mind keeps exploding once you realize the things you could do just by connecting two things together and it works because they interop. Matthias has been working on this stuff since 2008. Our paths didn't cross until earlier this year. #

This town, at the end of the Metro North line, looks like an ideal place to park yourself for easy access to the city, yet a fairly country experience. #

There have been reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it. #

In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS 0.91 in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative, and definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)#

A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.#

It's really simpler than really simple.#

Here's an idea. Why doesn't Apple make a laptop with a light shining out to highlight the user's face so they look better when they're on a Zoom call. I bet someone makes a device like this to clip on a laptop. Right?? #

Until we start working together it’s going to keep getting worse.#

I've started calling ChatGPT boss as in OK boss.#

ChatGPT is great at SVG. Describe the icon you want and in a few iterations you have it, even if it's not in Font Awesome. I would have killed to have this a few years ago, before FA came out. This is the best of both -- use FA if they have the right icon, design your own if they don't. It also makes me think that now perhaps SVG-based user interfaces are within the realm of possibility. CSS is no way to design UIs. I have a podcast in the pipe about this. If you want to know what I mean, look at the docs for QuickDraw.#

Now would be a good time for everyone to watch this movie. This is where we are now. It's not in the future. Getting this info will help. Spread the word. Download a copy too. It's a great movie. #

To people who read my blog. If you have a quick thought about something you read here, it's ok if you send me an email. It should be short and not personal, if it adds some info or perspective that might be interesting, or if you just agree feverishly (not so much if you disagree, please) drop me a line. My return address on the nightly emails is my real email address. And you can find the address on the About page on my blog. Also sometime soon I think there will be a way to read my blog inside WordLand, so you can post a response to something I wrote, on your own blog, and I can get a link to it. I think this is the best of both worlds. You maintain the integrity of your blog, all your comments are in the same place, and if I think my readers would benefit, I can link it into my blog. I don't think we need comments, in other words. I think our blogs are powerful enough with some new code. #

Podcast: WordLand, the timeline and checkboxes.#

I've gotten a lovely response to the Que Sera Sera post I linked to here. It's from 1996, I was reporting from a tech conference I was at where there were all angry men on stage threatening everyone else. They may not have known they were doing that, but it was awful. And so different from the web we were just beginning to understand at that time. I'm going to start going through the posts that I remember making a difference at the time. No better way for me to remember what the web is, going back to these memories when it was all fresh and new, before the leaders of tech realized what was going on. Google didn't ship for another two years. It probably wasn't even in development at the time. Yet I think the last section is a good anthem for the web, for those of us who think it's time to cut pop all the bullshit off the stack and get back to our roots.#

I had a flash last night during the Emmys. The Bloggers of Mastodon. I loved the concept right off the bat, so I wrote a blog post using in WordLand that went through WordPress and landed on Mastodon. It all works. Where are the other Bloggers of Mastodon? Let's start a club!#

The Bloggers of Mastodon.#

A very smart application of AI. Google could add it to the debugger. When my program crashes deep in jQuery code, with no stack crawl, it could suggest what the problem might be without me have to try to describe it for ChatGPT. The Google AI debugger would be able to look everywhere any anywhere in the virtual machine. Much faster than I can. As a programmer I hope they're working on this. Or maybe it's already out in testing form?#

A couple of days ago I saw a post from Evan Prodromou asking if I had seen a product announcement, and was wondering what I thought of the name. The name of the product was Really Simple Something. I said it was the first I heard of it. I did a little digging using ChatGPT and found they can do this, it’s not illegal or unethical. But it’s also true that you could invent a new format and call it HTML even if it isn’t what we think of as HTML today . The W3C would have no recourse. If you wanted to make a new CSS to compete with the existing CSS, no one can stop you, and you can call it CSS. Not a good way to run the internet imho. But that appears that's how it works. So as much as I didn't like what they did, esp the fact that the first I heard of it was a public announcement, and had no time to prepare or maybe even help them do something better, I guess we have to accept it. RSS has been through this before and came out okay. I just wish it would stop at some point. It's a useful thing, deserves love and support, not just from me, but from everyone, esp people who run companies that depend on it. You benefit as much as I do. End of sermon.#

Last night's email didn't go out. I found and fixed the bug, and the mails went out about 10.5 hours late. #

I've found new freedom on my WordPress blog that's also on Masto. #

How did a healthy well-fed and educated 22 year old man from a good family throw his life away and for what? To kill a 31 year old family man who dedicated his life to making massive numbers of people miserable? What’s more tragic? And how many other Americans are on this track?#

I did a podcast interview yesterday with Nathan Wrigley at WP Tavern. I had a great time, and learned a lot. It's interesting that while I am not a member of the WordPress community, there is a big intersection between that community and one I do belong to -- the web. WordPress was founded on the principles and idealism of the web. It's baked in. So it might be the largest community of users, not exclusively developers, who have the same values as the web, which are very very powerful values. I'm rediscovering them and it's wonderful. It means I can plug your app into my server and they work first time. It's the just works part that makes it the web. It makes you suck in your breath and go, I'm there now. One interesting thing that came up was the subject of altruism, which is something I reject re myself. It doesn't work if what I do is altruism, because we all must be somewhat committed to the success of our competitors, because if we don't we are locking people in. It's so important that users have freedom of movement. If they don't things stagnate like our 19 years of Twitter. I'm going to be Nathan's show again, and again if he'll have me, to check in on the progress of my humble project to create a new layer, combining WordPress and all the other good stuff that isn't hooked up to it yet. I could not have hoped for a better introduction to The Land of WordPress. #

Today's song: When you awake.#

Podcast: A new model for blog discourse. #

Stephanie Booth, an OG blogger of great renown, now has a FeedLand blogroll on her WordPress blog. It is I believe going to make her blog feel less lonely. If anyone else wants to get one going, I have more confidence that it's pretty do-able. Screen shot.#

Heh. Yesterday I started writing a post about something Brent wrote on his blog, and then I must've gotten distracted and didn't finish it. I will now proceed to explain. #

Brent said he cares about desktop software but not about phone and tablet versions of same. I found that liberating. It's always been a pain in the ass to do something beautiful on the desktop only to have to destroy its utility by squeezing it into a space with no keyboard or pointing device that's more accurate than my finger (I have huge fingers, and a normal size phone). I found it liberating, but -- I'm working on the design of an app that should work well on either a phone or a laptop, and I've had that in mind the whole life of the product. But now I realize in a new way that it's a choice. It always was, but it didn't feel that way. #

I read something on Brent's blog the other day that changed my thinking. He said #

WWND. What Would Navalny Do? Think about it.#

The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we'll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them. It's true. Why didn't anyone see this coming? Well we did see it coming, but the Dems were too dumb to do anything about it. They're supposed to be the "woke" party, isn't it funny that they're so un-woke about something like keeping Americans fed!#

Podcast: Why blogging lost to Twitter and other folk songs. #

I've been calling the next release Radio WordLand. If you know the history you'll understand why. I'll start posting screen shots soon. #

Screen shot of a post by Evan Prodromou on Masto yesterday. "You publish where you want to publish, Dave. We'll find a way to connect to you. That's the whole point." Indeed that is the whole point. I say it like this. "Interop is all that matters." If our products interop that's pure love. The rest of it is baloney. Maybe I'm not a nice guy. Not my job. We've being fucked over by "social media" for 19 years now, and the new ones who say they're open, and on the web, and decentralized, are not. The only way out of this mess is what Evan said. BTW, I sent Evan a pointer to the subscription list which is my outflow. I use OPML for the list and RSS for the feeds. That's where you will find my writing. #

I watched the movie Seven last night, and I can't stop thinking about it. It got a shitty review in the NYT, which usually means I won't bother with something, but this time I decided to give it a try. The reviewer, Janet Maislin, didn't like the acting of Brad Pitt. I thought Pitt was an unlikeable jerk, but I also thought that was the role, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't care. I also couldn't figure out what city it was. It wasn't NY, but Maislin says it was. Usually in a movie set in NY, I recognize many of the locations. There are only a few places movies are shot in the city. But again, I didn't care. What keeps me thinking about it is the story. I'm not going to spoil it. Don't read any reviews before watching it, they pretty much all get in the way of the storytelling. #

How to be part of the rebooted blogosphere. #

Two videos every US resident should watch to prepare for what might be coming. 1. The Lives of Others. A drama set in the eastern part of post-war Germany before the wall came down. People lived their lives, but their relationship with the government and the military would seem very strange to an American of 2025, But more of this is definitely what's on the way, and the technology for watching what you do is much better now, and our neighbors aren't any different, which is what the Germans depended on. 2. The Handmaid's Tale. Same kind of police state as in Lives of Others with a Christian twist. Everyone is a member of a caste. Most women are infertile since some unspecified disaster, and the ones who can reproduce exist only to reproduce. There are women who clean the house, and do a few other things. There are certainly other books, movies and series worth tuning into, but these are the ones I recommend now. Handmaid's Tale is also a book, which I have read, but the show on Hulu goes into more detail.#

New demo app. FeedLand communicates back to the client app via websockets. This is absolutely the easiest way to get flow from feeds to apps running on servers or in a browser, or other desktop app. Websockets is a mature standard, and incredibly useful. I'm now working on a toolkit for it, along with all the other projects going on in parallel, so other developers can hook into FeedLand to get the flow of new items. The demo shows you the JSON version of every news item as it appears on the wire. There's no limit to the kinds of apps you can build for this. My friend Chuck Shotton has a market-predicting LLM app that gets its news this way. Nothing to install on a server. FeedLand does all the work. I expect to have a toolkit out sometime in the few weeks. #

Another application for websockets. You could actually put a web server on your desktop without exposing your home network to the world. I can't wait till I have time to play around with this. #

I upgraded feedland.org to a new version of the system software, still being tested. In the process I started a fresh items table. This means for the next day or so your timeline may have a lot of items for a few feeds, as it catches up with every feed it keeps track of. The server was down for a couple of hours while we did the upgrade. Still diggin! ;-) #

BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).#

Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be of an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, may affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have low regard for non-professional people writing on the web. #

ChatGPT might not give you the best answer. Yesterday I hit a problem with the MySQL hosting service, and as we worked it out, ChatGPT and me, I ended up contacting the ISP's support asking them to restart the server, something I cannot do through the control panel. They don't do that, and made a couple of suggestions which didn't seem to make sense based on what ChatGPT had told me. So I tried what they suggested and it worked, and went back to ChatGPT and asked what it thought, and it said yes of course that worked, and would you like me to show you how to do it even better. I guess it takes a path and never goes back to see if there isn't a better one. We've been through this before. Anyway, always be circumspect about it's advice, it's not just hallucinations you need to watch for. That said, with help from both ChatGPT and Digital Ocean, I now have a better setup, and it should run without the problem we hit yesterday. #

AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.#

Podcast: Last chance for the open web.#

I want to start reading a bunch of WordPress community blogs. #

CSS Grid where have you been all my life? Very rational, simple. #

General note: When I say RSS, I recognize that there are other feed formats, but I don't want to confuse things. The software makes all that transparent, so let's make it transparent for the users too, ok? #

AI chatbots should drop the pretense of being human.#

I want my blog on the same network as my social media.#

A new kind of spam or phishing email. Appears to be a challenge by Twitter of one of my posts there as a copyright infringement, which it most definitely is not. You have to look closely at the URL it takes you to, which is on this domain. assents-x.com. Hmm at first looks legit, but look more closely. #

I've been watching a lot of baseball recently. Over the years I've developed as a programmer, and they've radically changed the way baseball is played. Pitchers used to try to pitch a complete game, but now that never happens. Sometimes they take a pitcher out in the first inning if he's pitched over say 70 pitches, because there's no point, what he's doing obviously isn't working, and he's getting close to the maximum pitches they'd let him do, esp if he's young and a hot prospect, they don't want to burn him out. I find that no matter what, after four hours of development work I start getting sloppy, and I can't think big picture as I could in the beginning of the session. I'm trying to finish things up for the day, and leave myself in a good place to pick up in the next session. And like a pitcher you have to stay focused. The phone doesn't ring for the pitcher when he's on the mound, that's why programmers, good ones, who are performing at or near their limit of ability to focus, so totally don't welcome interruptions. #

A motto for WordLand. "All the tools you need right where you write."#

Today's song: Jambalaya on the Bayou.#

A podcast from post-Katrina New Orleans, Dec 2005.#

There are two quotes that make me laugh in the Think Different piece from last week. One of them is here: "They took paradise and.." At first, if you're roughly my age, you read "They took paradise and..." and recognize it as the beginning of a famous line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. The other is a subtle touch of sarcasm, that I usually try not to indulge in, but let pass through as I edited this piece. See if you can find it. #

Mea culpa: Unfortunately I misquoted Joni, she said "paved" not "took." I'm going to leave the mistake in the piece. #

If you want to get an idea of how well WordPress has been bridged to ActivityPub, check this out. It's time for Mastodon to adopt these features across the board, so when writing in Masto you can use linking, style, titles, 10K character limit. Raise the bar. Let's bring more of the web into social media. Esp linking. #

If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get the snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.#

I like what Vivaldi says about the web. It makes me want to do more to re-stock the web with interesting, inspiring human ideas. Maybe we could make our blogging software work better with their browser. All for the web, for humanity.#

Everything Trump is doing to steal the next election is proof of why Colorado was right to deny him a place on the 2024 ballot. The Supremes gave him four years to prepare, to learn from his mistakes, now he'll do it from the top seat. It seems certain to work. #

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.#

Short excerpt of the ICE commercial which aired several times on WPIX during yesterday's Mets game. There aren't that many drug trafficker, predatory gang members in the US for ICE to deport. And they completely misrepresent what a sanctuary city is. The commercial is paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. Shameful. #

Stephanie Booth, an old school blogger, wanted to hook up my RSS feed to a new service that supports inbound RSS, which we appreciate. Apparently they can't handle HTTP, which of course we don't. #

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for the boost to yesterday's post. Glad to finally get the whole plan down in one place. Each piece of the puzzle took a while to come together in concept and then in implementation. I'm still working on all levels, last week I added a feature to FeedLand that makes it fit in better with the (new) timeline and WordPress (20+ years). It takes a while to change your thinking from WordPress being just another blogging CMS, to being an open platform that hosts web writing in a way that's open to competition. We're on the same page. It's still a competitive environment, but there are rules to competing, you don't cash in the interop that took patience and respect to develop and maintain. That's been the pity of the open web, lots of opportunists who are willing to stink up the ecosystem to squeeze a few more bucks for themselves from things they didn't create. Let your competitors in, and the users, if they have their heads screwed on right, will respect you for it. And even if they don't, still do it, because it's the right thing to do. That's why, at my age, just turned 70 earlier this year, I'm in a position to help revive the web, because I've made enough money, now it's time to make sure the gift that I got from the open web is available to future generations, no matter how greedy and selfish the giants of tech are. People may question Matt, and that's cool, as I said yesterday, but also remember he's stood up for your freedom, and that's also important. #