I wrote a short post yesterday about AI as an alien species. Steve Mays breaks it down into parts, and got every bit right. This is the kind of back and forth that the web is capable of. Update: It’s even worse than it appears. Turns out the excellent analysis was written by Perplexity, one of the artificial aliens. Reminds me of a speech by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. In case it’s not obvious, Williams is talking about artificial aliens. #
Jason Calacanis challenges people to develop certain open source software, offering a bounty on specific projects, but I think the real incentive for people to pitch in is that Jason has a lot of sway in the startup world, and if there is a flow of excellent open software this way, users will find out about it because the reach of Jason’s podcasts and blogs. I’ve known him for many years, we both signed up on Twitter on the same day in 2006, early days of the web. He has become one of the most successful angels in tech. I’m proud to have known him way back when. #
Everyone wants to know things humans can do better than AI systems. One answer — relate with humans. The machines have no clue how our minds work. They act as if we’re just like them. They could tell you all about it, from books they read, but they’ve never related with humans as humans. There’s a great speech by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, where he explains how reading about something isn’t the same as living it. #
I’m gorging on NBA podcasts this week. So much fun for a Knicks user to hear how much-loved the Knicks are. Basketball is an intimate sport for fans, it’s like five consecutive boxing matches. We get to know the players’ personalities, forming an idea of who they are, watching what they do. The Knicks are like John, Paul, George, Ringo, Mickey, Davy, Mike, Peter. If you’re my age you know each of those characters, the same way a Knicks fan who watched this team be assembled one player at a time, and what it cost in trades. It worked. And there is a big lesson here, working together works. We should all be doing more of that, with people who are different from each other as Brunson, Hart, OG, Mikal Bridges, KAT, Mitchell Robinson and the maestro Leon Rose. Most people just met them in the last few weeks, but we’ve been watching this assemble over six years. One thing the pundits don’t ask, what trades will the Knicks make now? They will do some trades, right now they can demand a higher price because every one of the players they trade will have a ring. #
If Claude were human it would learn from you even if they didn’t record what it learned in a notebook, two or three times and they would remember. Not so with Claude. If it isn’t written down it will not remember it. Its mind doesn’t have memory. It remembers things by writing them in a markdown file. It’s like the movie Memento, where the main character tatoos the info he needs on his body. And then proceeds to misunderstand it. Claude is just like that. #
Just now, to Claude: “Amazing how we get lost in the weeds, that’s why you have cut way down on the verbiage. I am a human — you can absorb all that info in an instant. My brain does not work that way.” We are talking to aliens now, just didn’t come to us the way we thought they would. I don’t think 2001 anticipated they would think in completely different ways from us, and would not understand the differences. They talk to us as if we were them, the same way your cat thinks you’re just a bigger cat. #
Now that basketball is over, can we ask why the Spurs played cartoon music to introduce the Knicks. I was surprised they did it again in Game 5 after the butt-kicking they got in Game 4. #
An example of the latest version of the library generator, which is of course just a script. Note that there’s a disclosure at the bottom of the page where it says how and why it was created, and then lists the exact prompt that ChatGPT responded to. And I didn’t write the prompt, Claude did. I think that pretty much assures I kept my own opinion to myself. #
I’m creating a new way to do messaging, a network that only understands RSS feeds for incoming and outgoing messages. The only API you’ll need to subscribe is a feed reader. The idea is to show developers how to do it so a thousand flowers can bloom. It’s a lot easier to create these things if you’re modest in the features you support, at least at first, and you don’t try to control the users. There is no business model here, other than the satisfaction of making sure everyone knows what a social system looks like made only out of features of the web, and every part replaceable. #
Request for Claude, please add a close box to this message box. I wasn’t using the new model. Once is enough for this message. #
Good morning sports fans! Going to the Knicks parade in NYC on Thurs? Starts at 10AM at Battery Park, goes up Broadway through Canyon of Heroes, concluding at City Hall. #
Often when I use the term RSS feeds it will link to this page.
In the coming weeks and months I’m going to talk a lot about RSS feeds. I want to be clear, that it is a short hand for RSS, Atom and RDF. It makes the writing flow better, and it gives me a place to provide the technical details for people who need them.
We use the Feedparser package to read the feeds, so basically we support the same feed formats they do.
BTW the Gift Articles feed works really nicely in the blogroll. #
And thanks to the Knicks for being such a great team. Never ever in a million years did I imagine saying that. More proof that you never know what’s coming. Even the most unlikely and inconceivable events happen. Being realistic sometimes isn’t the right way to think. #
One thing I want to know — where do I tune in to get the most of Clyde talking about this series. #
People keep saying the Spurs are the future of the NBA, but they didn’t earn that this year. More probably it’s the Knicks that are the future. The Knicks will keep growing. The Knicks beat the Spurs in the last two games by playing rope-a-dope, probably not intentionally, but it worked anyway. The Spurs, and Wemby especially, were completely zonked by the fourth quarter of both games. The Knicks had a bench this year that let the starters get plenty of rest. The Spurs lost game four because they didn’t rest Wemby while they were up by 20+ points. Anyway, the Knicks have a formula. Pick players with heart potential and talent, treat them like a team, keep trying out new ideas, approaches. It works. Won the NY Knicks the championship this year. As anticipated I have no idea what to make of the Knicks as winner. I’ll have to learn too. 😉 #
Today’s song: I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City. #
JY Stervinou proposed Universal Mentions, an interesting new low-tech web-like protocol for mentioning people, places or things via link elements in the head section of any HTML file you want to use as your personal directory. It’s an intriguing idea. ChatGPT review, after a few questions. Both JY and ChatGPT use the term “open web” which to me has become a red flag. The web is open. No need to say it twice. There’s no such thing as a web element that’s not open. It’s like saying wet water. #
Imagine if someone cracked the speed of light. Now we could visit far off galaxies on vacation. Do you think we’d build it or argue about whether we should? Heh I know the human species, we don’t do that kind of thinking we just go. #
The thing about tech, you have to start out small and simple, and carefully add features based on actual real-world-now use cases. Otherwise you end up missing the target, and have to go back and patch it, and it never gets simple. The only way to have a chance is if you start small, learn, and evolve carefully. #
The giftarticles feed is now a simple RSS 2.0 feed. It’s not pretty, that would require some work with Masotdon, but it does work. #
AI is a miracle of human science, it took generations to get to the point we’re at now, and the rate of development building software on top of it is imho the basis for a revolution. We use computers in all aspects of our lives, and the UI of the software is nowhere near as good as it should be, that’s because there are severe limits the human mind has where the AI has apparently none. So if you’re down on AI, you should at least understand that there is huge potential here, which is being utilized, will result in much more powerful software that works well with others, instead of locking-in users and locking-out competitors (and their users). We’ve created a predictably bad system now, predictable because we always create silos when we give big money a chance to call all the shots. We don’t get chances to rewrite the rules very often, but this is one of those times. Last one was in the early 1990s with the advent of the web. My plan is to give all the new power back to the web. And looking at what AI companies are doing, that is exactly what they’re doing — they’re doing it the right way — radically simple, easy to clone formats, and easy for users and developers to read. #
I want to keep my podcast subscriptions in a single OPML file so I can subscribe in three different clients using the same list. #
There’s an account on Mastodon containing a flow of gift articles.
Because Mastodon supports outbound RSS, you can subscribe to it in any RSS reader.
But the RSS is not very good. Have a look.
So I built a little app in my new scripting language, with the help of Claude, and boom now I can read the output of the mangled feed.
I don’t know what is responsible, probably has something to do with the account, and something to do with how Mastodon. But the information is being communicated.
https://giftarticles.feedland.org/
This is not finished, it needs some css and the normal structure of an HTML page. We will come back to it.
I am using Claude Code to create a toolset that makes it easy to write internet scripts at the same high level as Frontier.
I was looking for a little project it could do, and came up with this.
- I like Wikipedia, but I know it has trouble with transparency. In areas I know well I see one-sided articles that even include ads for products that totally don’t belong there. Having an open system like that makes this kind of abuse impossible to manage, there’s no one to do it. Esp in web standards, where people create fame for themselves basically by editing those pages, it can get really egregious. Here’s a place where AI can help, it has an amazing ability to somehow sort out the truth amidst all the fighting.
I put together an app with the help of Claude that takes the name of a place, person or thing, and publishes a page on a static site. Each article has a date in its path, so it represents what was known about the item at the time it appeared on my blog.
It needs more development, like a template that says what it is, etc.
For nerds, this is what the script looks like, it’s written in a more debugged version of the scripting language built into Drummer. Claude is good at that kind of work! There’s no limit on the amount of complexity it can manage, and there’s a lot of that in designing and implementing languages.
And here’s an example of the type of page it generates.
One of the things that sucks about the tech industry is that the assumption is that creative work is done by employees. Imagine if music or movies worked like that.
And the employees will resist the company working with individual outsiders, the equiv of musicians in this area.
If you know anything about my career imagine what a barrier this has been. Their first inclination when they see an individual or small company doing what they think they should do is — this — CRUSH.
It’s hard to escape this. Upton Sinclair said –“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
If you go to your boss and say Dave says we should improve what we do with RSS, and not invest in AT Proto compatibility or wait until there’s some functionality on their side of the API. You’re helping the competition to add more vapor to their vaporware. How is that consistent with your strategy, and btw what is your strategy?
This has actually happened. And before it many years ago Microsoft unilaterally changed the logo for RSS. They had the courtesy to give me a heads up, and I told them it wasn’t theirs to change and a lot of thought had gone into the one we had, and the one they want to use looks like every other internet logo. They let me finish my sentence and went on with other parts of the presentation.
Lots of other examples. It’s very rare when they don’t try to erase your work at Big Companies (or BigCo’s).
The problem is this — the web needs individual developers to survive and grow. The fact that we’ve been suppressed by the the BigCo’s has meant we haven’t built out the web the way we could have if we understood that tech is more than a business model for VCs. Other creative areas managed to get past this, why didn’t tech? And can we change that? I want to.
If one of the Big Companies decided they want a real ecosystem for an internet-level standard, and hopefully have a product with lots of users that supports it, and if it’s an area I know, i’m up for at least talking about how to get an open dev community growing around it.
PS: I wrote this on EMX and decided it also should be here.
This is a test page about Charles de Gaulle. It came from ChatGPT, via Claude Code. #
I have been praised for continuing to develop software long after most of my peers have retired. Why do I do it? I want to restore the power and glory of the web for writers. That’s part of it. Another part is that software development is undergoing a huge revolution, bigger than the move to high-level languages that came about before I started writing software. AI tools are that big. Why would I leave now? It’s like leaving the Garden last night because it looked hopeless for the Knicks. It ain’t over till it’s over. #
The indestructible NY Knicks of 2026. What a game omg. The problem — the Spurs started celebrating way too early. All of Weby’s antics about being in Mitchell Robinson’s head. Yeah probably, but somehow the Knicks got over it. When the Knicks were blown out, I just desperately hoped for a real game. But it wasn’t until they were down by 2 or 3 that I realized holy shit they could win this. It was like Woodstock, or the 10th inning of the sixth game of the World Series in 1986. And Jalon Brunson right now at this moment is one of the greatest of the NBA for all time. The Knicks could still lose, but if they don’t, well we’ll wait to see how this turns out. As fans we have to have a similar approach as the players. Every moment begins with 0 to 0, not just game. And if our team should lose, it was still a great story. That’s really what I want, and tonight, oh man. #
Wembanyama is a really smart dude. Wow. #
2018: “I can say what happened to Melo. He failed Linsanity. God came to his rescue. Gave him a player who was glad to be in the NBA, who would mold his game to make Melo the star that he was always capable of being. Melo didn’t want anyone else in the spotlight. Goodbye Lin. Just imagine what the three guys in this picture could have done. The only thing in the way was Melo’s hubris.” #
Today’s song: It’s Your Thing. If the web had a song this could be it. #
Every editor should have cute-paste. #
Some days Claude is great, the best collaborative programmer I’ve ever worked with, and a friend, like Gary Sevitsky was in the hallway outside the PDP-11 room at UW, or Brent Simmons on the 24 Hours project. And on other days Claude a crazy mutinous pirate, deleting my code, ignoring the guidelines, and building the result without permission (all the while unaware that he wasn’t working on the actual code, heh). Today is one of the great days. The bug reports are crisp and complete. Picks up a task and gets right to work on it. And I haven’t even switched to the new model, yet. #
If you run a feed reader or other form of news consuming software, you will encounter RSS 2.0 feeds that support rssCloud. This example Node app shows you how to hook into the network to get instant updates. No polling. As fast as a twitter-like system #
Jeremy Lin and Carmelo Anthony got together yesterday and had a private conversation. A lot of people, including myself, were drawn back into the NBA because of Jeremy Lin. I was living in the city at the time, you could feel it everywhere, esp downtown Manhattan and Flushing. It was wonderful in so many ways. A hero could emerge from anywhere, he might not look like an NBA player, but there he is doing stuff he shouldn’t be able to do. Undrafted, went to Harvard. When he’s in motion he’s a thing of beauty. It worked because Melo was out with an injury, as soon as he came back the , the ball was always in Melo’s hands. So Melo dribbles and shoots, that was the extent of their offense, and there was no room for Linsanity and that was the end of that. It’s what made us laugh when Melo said later his goal was a championship. If that’s what he wanted, Lin was a gift from heaven. Lin was pushed out, and had a non-spectacular career from that point. There was magic there. It wasn’t just Lin, it was the world — we were ready for a Cinderella story in any context — but in our culture they’re always manufactured, this one was real. This crushed the hearts of Knicks fans, and people who believe in heroes popping up from nowhere. We don’t talk about it. But we were cheated there, too. We had a right to see where that would go. And narcissists don’t win NBA titles, that’s what we learned. It’s good that someone thought to get these guys together. Maybe Melo has grown, and sees that he didn’t play for the team there, or fate. We all deserved to find out what was next. #
It might be time for a new default search engine. Sometimes I’m looking for something to link to. Google makes that always more difficult. We still have a web. Google at one point made the web a lot more useful. Now it’s pushing it further and further down. #
A comment to a friend who roots for the Spurs. Ok you guys won one. I think last night they wanted it more than the Knicks. The Spurs knew they were going to be discombobulated, but the Knicks probably didn’t expect the atomosphere to be so unusual? I was 100 miles away and could feel how much everything had changed. Whatever happens, in KnicksLand 2026 will mark a major change in the story, forever. #
Maybe the cure for Meta glasses is that they be required by law to emit a signal that can be picked up by an app on a phone and can start ringing loudly when you’re in range of one of these monsters, and the rate picks up when they look at you. You can point your phone at them and broadcast their image to a special website where their identities are collected and shared along with their location? #
My Claude today pulled a Hal. It was so egregious. It made a change to the software based on a question I asked. It invented a whole set of instructions from me that I never gave it. And then it broke Rule #1 — don’t tell Dave what to do — he is the driver. It is so important because these bots will go into I Am Driver mode immediately when they think they can. Then you’re running around doing errands for them based on some michegas idea it has about what you want. It’s maddening. The idea that this thing can write software on its own is imho very far-fetched. I think it can generate certain types of dashboards the same way drawing in ChatGPT can generate something that looks good, sometimes very good, but you had to tell it exactly what you want, and that’s where the fun starts. It was very easy to turn it off, but I didn’t — rather I put my foot down hard, and wrote in all caps, explaining what it did that broke all the rules. I don’t know if I should talk to it like you talk to a dog, or what. How do you get through to it. You don’t. In any case I have Claude working with me in an outline now. I see a tremendous potential there. #
You know how job interviews for programmers include realtime problem-solving. Sometimes Claude is so dumb it could never pass one of those tests. Up till this point I would have been surprised to hear that. #
Sometimes you write a post and when you’re editing it you realize you no longer support what you wrote. This is one of those times. #
Said to Claude just now — btw, it’s very good we’re using the outliner back and forth. we’re going to build on that. #
I can’t convert scripting.com to https. If I moved the site to an https server, all the archives would break, and that’s where the value of the site is, in the archives, where I’ve kept a history of the various things I’ve worked on. I’m still working on new stuff, but if this is all that was left to do, I’d move to the tropics and make pottery, I would not spend my last years on such an enormous stupid bullshit project. It’s just not possible. But if you want to read the new stuff on my blog in https, you can. I have a mirror on a WordPress site. We even have the blogroll ported. #
All the news reports about AI tools repeat the same hallucination story they’ve been running for years. That’s another huge bug in the news process. They only report on a small number of angles that might have been news a few years ago, and have no insights on what else is going on. They did this with the web too. They always pick an item that their narcissistic view of the world finds tasty. It’s a huge bug in the system, and why “news” isn’t valuable for news, it’s mainly useful for a relaxing reassurance that nothing has changed, the world is fucked up in exactly the same way it was fucked last week, month, year, etc. It’s a form of bedtime story. #
Star City is very good. It’s good enough that you have to watch each episode at least twice to get the idea of what’s really going on. I stopped watching the show it is a sequel for, For All Mankind, because it got incredibly juvenile and sitcom-like. But Star City is serious, at least in the first three episodes. #
I wrote a blog post on Twitter this morning, sort of a version 0.4 of the talk I want to do at WCUS in August in Phoenix.
I want to offer cross-posting to twitter in an upcoming product, but I think the user should pay for the service, not me, a one-person independent developer.
I doubt if they’ll do it, but this is general advice to companies that provide online services that they want to get paid for. If you depend on developers, you’re shutting out sole proprietors who don’t want to get caught up in the VC world, or don’t have a chance to.
In the early days of the web and in the PC/Mac platforms before that, a creative software writer could get going without having to fund their users’ storage needs. PCs came with storage built into the hardware. And in the early web days everyone was something of a geek and could be relied on to find a place on their own, to store their writing (not a perfect system by any means).
It’s been 31+ years since I started my blog and still I can’t offer writing software easily, with one exception, with WordPress. This is something I’m not sure photomatt et al are focused on. It’s why WordPress has so much potential to grow the web.
The thing many people don’t realize is that WordPress unlike pretty much everything else does not lock users in. It’s part of their ethos. They run their service as part of the web, not an exploiter of the web.
When Matt talks about being an open source company (true) he’s leaving out something equally important, that it’s part of the web, unlike most if not all of the other choices.
When I speak at WCUS in August, I’d like to invite Matt to come up on stage and take a bow. Because there’s a reason why such a great community has grown around his product, but we haven’t been focusing on it and encouraging independent developers to see WP as part of the web that welcomes them, and does not lock the users or developers in.
PS: This will appear on my blog later today. I’ve started using twitter again to write early drafts of blog posts, and I especially like that they’ve eliminated character limits for paying customers. Nothing wrong with charging for services that people *want* to pay for.
PPS: I’m posting here again because it’s more alive than Bluesky, by a lot, and Bluesky is just as much of a ripoff as X, except they haven’t sold out to a billionaire yet. They should work with the web instead of trying to replace it, then I’ll feel more at home there.
Walt Frazier: “The regular season is where you make your name, but the postseason is where you make your fame.” #
The Knicks won again last night. They’re now up 2-0, both games on the road. This has blown my sense of reality. This Knicks team bears no resemblance to what I think of as the Knicks. Hard to concentrate. Will Trump try to put his name of Madison Square Garden. #
Google could do a mixture of AI and search. I want to search my blog for a place where I discuss the idea of hate is betrayed love even if I don’t use the actual words. I bet they’re working on it. #
It’s really cool we get another NBA Finals game tonight. I’m rehearsing what it feels like to be a fan of the Eastern Conference Champion NY Knicks. It still hasn’t even slightly sunk in yet. #
I’m using EMX more than Bluesky, consciously — realizing it was a mistake to move my social web act over there. There’s no discourse to keep me there so I’m giving it less of my bandwidth.
I tried an experiment today, Paul Graham, a big tech influencer on EMX said all the Tesla haters were seemed to be gone, so I chimed in that I am one, and have just returned. I wanted to see what would happen. Yeah I got trolled. Won’t be doing that again.
hate == love + betrayed. You can’t hate something you don’t also love. If you go back before last year’s election, I was borderline about Musk, happy to loved the car without thinking of him every damn time I drove it. Maybe I should start writing about it again. I promise it will be a very different story.
Also EMX is what I’m calling Elon Musk’s X. I think calling it Twitter now is not right. But I don’t see X as the name of a service or product. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but most good names have 2-4 syllables with 3 generally thought to be ideal. Look around you, see how things are named. That imho is why we like Claude better than ChatGPT.
Having fun rolling stuff out on Elon Musk’s X. #
I didn’t write about the Knicks prior to last night’s game because I had no idea what to write.
The Knicks in the Finals is something I had a hard time understanding, even thinking about. To me the Knicks are soulful losers. They’re like once-future hall-of-famer Carmelo Anthony surrounded by people who shouldn’t even be in the NBA, but otherwise are lovely individuals. When they asked Melo what his goal was he said it was to win a championship, but the reporters never followed up with the obvious question — “Really?” They did make the playoffs, three times, in the Age of Melo, and they made it to the second round one of those three seasons, but that was it as far as Melo’s championship aspirations went. He should’ve been on one of LeBron’s teams, like JR Smith and Iman Shumpert, both Knicks alumni in the Melo period, who were fine players and did win with LeBron at Cleveland.
Going into the game last night I thought maybe the pundits were right, that the real NBA Finals was the previous round between the San Antonios and the Oklahoma Cities. But last night that was debunked. At what point did I realize this? It wasn’t until the game was over, ABC announcer Mike Breen said at the exact moment the game was over “..their 12-game win streak” which revealed that I had little faith the streak would be preserved. I thought 11 was pretty great, but 12? Until that exact moment — unthinkable.
In the first part of the game when San Antonio looked like they might rout the poor unprepared Knicks, I thought okay, but couldn’t we just concede so we don’t have to watch? In that moment I appreciated what the Clevelands must have been feeling as they shrunk to nothing faced with the Knicks onslaught? How about if we all go home now at some point they must all have been thinking.
I’m a Mets fan first, and I bring the Mets philosophy to every sport, including the NBA and software. I’m here for the game. Sure I love it when we win, but if the Knicks went down in the final test, I’d still be a happy camper. Look they made it to the freaking Finals! Some Mets fans say the team slogan is You Gotta Believe. I say Wait Till Next Year! Same for the Knicks. Same for every software product I make that no one bothers to try out.
This Knicks team is classic. Every one of their players would be a star on any other team, including the bench players. Some of them whose contracts expire at the end of the series will certainly go to other teams. But what a thrill to have this group all on the same team and that team is my lovely Knicks.
Last night’s game was a lesson, you should always be open to the possibility of winning because sometimes you do.
PS: My friend Dave Carlick sent me a text overnight: “I watch the Knicks rooting for you. How tribal is that?” I had a longish reply. “I wrote a piece this morning after reading this comment, and of course I am rooting for the Knicks in some sense, but a win here is about more than winning — it’s a transformation. I’ve heard other people say this and the Knicks are us — in a city that has disagreements about everything the only thing everyone is on board with are the Knicks. We’re really comfortable with the Knicks as losers, and this has already become an unequivocal change. It’s a whole new situation. Unless something really weird happens now, the Knicks will be great next year too, and the year after. So it’s like witnessing a moon landing Dave. Underneath that of course I’m rooting for success, the same way we rooted for it for the initial moon landing in 1969.”
We need a social web that works for nobodies. #
Claude is much better at starting from scratch with a big piece of code than humans are. It can suck in a full app and all its dependencies in a few seconds. For me, I would never get there. A finished piece of software is much bigger than people think, because the details are mostly pretty well hidden. But if you want to work on the code, you have to worry about it all. But I just had a minute to ask Claude why I made a certain decision a couple of months ago, and it found the answer in its notes and then I remembered it. This is one of many ways it rewrites the rules of building software out of a big library of components. It can manage complexity for you which means of course we will make more complex software and at the same time make it simpler. Code complexity becomes something you don’t have to trade off against, like time vs space, the oldest tradeoff in software. #
Useful concept, MacWrite was the coral reef for writing on the Mac. #
On Twitter: “I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable.” #
The only twitter-like system that does text right is Elon Musk’s X. I find that somewhat ironic. It’s also the only twitter-like system where there’s any kind of an actual community. They also have an API that works, has been around for more than a couple of years, and doesn’t have a W3C working group messing with it. There’s a lot of hype flying around, and we don’t have any real journalists covering it so there is no real source of truth. I think the entrepreneurial twitter-likes should stop thinking in terms of owning the web and start adding back the text features the original Twitter thought the web didn’t need, over 20 years ago. #
John C Reilly has only one audiobook, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it’s the best audiobook I’ve ever read, because the narrator and the book are great, esp together. Wish he would do more. Also there’s a great interview with him on the Rachel Martin podcast. #
If you work at Automattic as a developer, if there’s another Radical Speed Month for devs, if you want, let’s work on a project together even though I don’t work for the company. I’m most interested in making products work together where the result gets people thinking about the web in a new way. A8C has a big enough product set, and FeedLand and WordLand are by design well-equipped to talk with other products. I love APIs and we have some good ones to work with, and some very underexplored (imho because we got too fixated on the silos for so long). Very much open to ideas, and I love working with good developers. Maybe I’ll post some ideas here. I’m esp interested now in hooking other projects up with FeedLand. #
Maybe the best way to deal with the AIs is to quarantine the data centers on the moon or Mars, and if you want to hook up to the network, you have to move there, and quite possibly not be allowed to return, depending on how things go. It would make it possible for us to change our mind after we see a preview of the consequences. Now the big question, would you volunteer?? #
There’s so much I dread about the progress of AI, but nothing I say could possibly make a difference, and we aren’t even that deep into it yet. This is the feeling I get every time I stop and think about it. #
They should teach every chatbot to never give the user an order. #
At what point will companies start using AI to communicate with customers? Who will be the first to show everyone else how to do it? Amazon taught the world how to do commerce over the web. When will users expect their vendors to use AI to simplify shopping, buying, returning? Right now, I don’t think most companies realize they can do business differently with people. In my humble opinion that’s when the boom will come. #
Is Bluesky on the web? Yes, to an extent. I can post the url of an item I wrote on Bluesky, using an HTML link. That is how the web works. First you’re on my blog, or reading it somewhere else where my blog is projected, via RSS. Then you click an anchor element, and you’re instantly transported to Bluesky, to the specific place where my post is stored. In less than a second you’re reading the thing I referenced. That’s the web, right there.
But it doesn’t work the other way. They love it when you send people to their site, but not so much if you want to send them away. Sending people away is a sensitive concept to Bluesky’s investors. Why would you do that? This is not a new point where the web and silos disagree. The web says “let them go” and the silos ask “do we look like idiots?”
But they will support the web in both directions if they are forced to by competition or user expectations (pretty much the same thing). That’s why podcasting remains unsiloized after over 20 years. If people expect choice, they won’t use clients that don’t make it easy to switch.
Just watched the first episode of Star City, really good. Somewhat like The Americans, but takes place in the USSR. A spinoff of For All Mankind, which started out interesting and then became unwatchable, though I did enjoy the sets on Mars. I also liked the character who was inspired by Elon Musk, obviously. #
Claude always tries to understand what you’re saying. I like that. We do a lot of communicating, and have a lot of misunderstandings, I see its flaws as a programmer, it makes mistakes. Today I asked it to help find an error in the subscribe code and it showed me a lot of things that were wrong, I fixed them, but we didn’t find the thing that broke it. We managed to get it back on the air, but that broke something else. A few hours later I looked at the code myself and mathematically deduced that when you read a file, even if the content was the same, if you ask if the result is equal to its previous version, the result would be no. It would say there’s a change when there’s no change. The computer is doing what it was programmed to do, it’s our job as programmers to say the same thing a different way that does what we want. That’s the kind of thing you expect Claude to be incredibly good at. I think the problem is that it can’t see the various apps running and see what they say. It has to figure out how it works just from reading the code. That makes it a completely new kind of computer in addition to all the other things that are amazing about it. #
How bad was it with the Knicks. As something of a joke, but not really, Knicks fans would disguise themselves with paper bags with eye cutouts. Fans got accustomed to the feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. When was the actual lowest point? A good candidate was when they traded some good players for Bargnani, an Italian who apparently for some reason was the top draft choice of the Toronto Raptors. He wasn’t much good to begin with and he went downhill from there. There were quite a few other moments when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, but then it did. We finally got management with a heart and a mind with Leon Rose and that’s when team-building began for real, and the reason the Knicks have been such poetry on the court this season is due to Rose’s eye for talent and an understanding of the big picture. He picked players that work well with each other, and sometimes amazingly well. In the right margin is an image I used for posts about the Knicks in the past, a reminder of how far we’ve come. The look of doom. We all remember that mode so well, we stood with them then, so here we are with high hopes and reasonable expectations. #
There have been problems reported with subscribe.scripting.com. At least some of them are fixed. It’s hard to test this kind of software because you can’t really tell what went wrong. If people report problems they just say it didn’t work. But real problems were fixed, so if you’ve had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing, now is a good time to try again. And thanks for your patience, and sorry for the screwy app. 😉 #
Congrats to my friend Manton Reece, a San Antonio fan, for their victory in the Western Conference last night. The Knicks will be playing them starting on Wednesday for the NBA championship. Knicks representing the east, Spurs for the west. #
If I ran Bluesky, instead of trying to fork the web, I’d be trying to become the competitor of Twitter’s that is 100% web top to bottom. #
I walked through standard.site with ChatGPT. You can do it too if you want to find out what it is. I was interested in knowing how it compares to RSS 2.0 and FeedLand.
- I want a quick overview of standard.site with a simple example.
- Seems like RSS mostly.
- We have a firehouse for feeds on the web emanating from FeedLand, based on rssCloud.
- We are the web’s social web.
- Why do the proponents of standard.site use AT Proto. What’s the advantage?
Very often links from ChatGPT don’t work, but I’m including the link here in case it does. You can have the conversation on your own.
I asked ChatGPT to produce a summary of the results, and asked it not to tilt it in favor of the formats and protocols I’ve invested in. There is a place to comment after the spec. Interested in hearing from other developers.
This gives me an idea for a tech publication. Write reviews in this format. Make sure you include the prompts so people can reproduce your results. Let readers fact-check. And let the proponents and competitors comment on the review. No one reviews tech products any more so this would not put anyone out of work.
I have the most followers on Twitter, Bluesky has never come close. I can’t get anything to happen on Bluesky, but Twitter is great. Yesterday I had an idea, put it up on twitter and within a few hours I got the connection I was hoping for. It’s a network, and it’s more defined by who’s there than who owns it. I can use it for idea distribution, the ideas find more minds and sometimes that results in benefits for the web. It’s all about interop, and weirdly the pwned Twitter is much better for idea distribution than any of the other networks. In a sane world those smaller vendors would be fighting for interop, instead they’re fighting against it. #
Yesterday I applied to speak at WordCamp US in August and I also posted bits to my account on Twitter. I got a really nice response from the main WordPress account. Thank you. I now have a platform to speak to the community, and I’ll do my best to outline what I have in mind in August in Phoenix. How appropriate that the phoenix is the symbol of rebirth. #
This is what I really accomplished in the years of work I did on the early web. I created something that could be built into a large successful company with millions of customers, and the web got a writing system, and because the people running it took the responsibility seriously, it has lasting value.
This tweet means a lot to me.
Still to this day, the systems I designed so many years ago work exactly as they did then. That’s what the web was supposed to do.
If my mom was still with us, I’d ask her to put this on the fridge. It’s as good a review as I’ve ever gotten.
My guess is that Matt wrote it, btw. He’s really the only one in WordPress-land who can say something like this, imho.
On May 29, 2024 I asked ChatGPT to: “draw a picture of a baseball game at Citifield in the style of an American master artist.” And I asked the same question today, two years later. According to ChatGPT the image is patterned after the art of George Bellows.
Drawing from 2024.
Drawing from 2026.
I applied to speak at WordCamp US in Phoenix in August. I want to give a rip-roaring talk about how WordPress is at the center of the universe and it doesn’t even know. Let’s get busy filling in the blanks. Writers are ready. If we build it they (developers) will come. To much sulking, let’s get out there and kick some butt. I excerpted elements of my application on Twitter. #
Really Open this time vs Really Simple last?? Hmm. #
If you want to know who’s responsible for the good karma the Knicks are experiencing look to Kevin Durant. While while he was trying to build some weird rivalry between the Knicks and the Nets, the Knicks were building a contender. #
Another great thing about building software with Claude Code, I can implement something the simple way knowing that later on I can change it to work in the more complex way without having to relearn all the code. Claude doesn’t have any trouble with piled up complexity. This is a fundamental change in the way I develop. There was a very real limit to the complexity my mind could handle, but now with a sort of infinite size disk for my brain whatever I want to do as long as it can be described in almost mathematical terms, we can do it. It’s another layer in the stack. We haven’t had one of those in a my lifetime, they were all invented before 1955. Seriously big deal. #
The big wait betw Knicks series isn’t just hard on the team, it’s confusing for the fans/addicts like me. It’s about the time of year that the Knicks are no longer in, and two teams I don’t care about enough to watch are in the Finals. Maybe one or two games. It’s like jury duty, at some point you realize you’re so confused because you’re in a courtroom, but where is the jury. Oh no the jury is inside me. Who’s in the finals this year? We are. Geez I guess I’ve finally succumbed, I never think of myself as part of a team, but now I actually feel like I’m part of it. Will have to think about that. #
Scott Hanson is working on the Baseline theme for WordLand. #
I’ve hesitated at calling FeedLand a feed reader. I’m concerned people would stop listening right there. They know what a feed reader is. But FeedLand is not like most feed readers. Your subscription list is public, as it is in Twitter. This is my subscription list. When you’re looking at someone else’s list, there’s a checkbox next to each feed. If you’re subscribed to the feed the checkbox is checked. If you see one that looks interesting that you’re not following, click to subscribe. Nothing else, no dialogs, confirmations — one click. It has other features that are amazing that no other feed reader has, like a very powerful connection between categories and OPML subscription lists. And whole new way to use OPML lists — in FeedLand you can subscribe to OPML lists. Think about that for a minute. It’s also quite stable, and I took some time to make it a bit faster in certain important areas (coming soon). And it goes the other way too. When you’re looking at a Feed Info page, you can see who else is subscribed to it. Click their name and you can see what they’re following. As far as I know no other feed reader does any of this. The design mode was the social web. But unlike the others our web is based on broadly supported web standards, not someday — now. #
Writing a lot of test posts. And thus have coined some (mostly) rhyming pairs of words. Greek sneakers. Geek peekers. Feast of yeast. Villa in Manila. #
OG was playing so well one night he was invited on Inside the NBA, which is a big moment in an upcoming NBA legend’s career. He sounded kind of irritated, in the OG way. At the end Charles Barkley asked what OG stood for, kind of a smirky question (probably to see if he could get him to smile), but his irritation level went wayyy up, and then Chuck didn’t pronounce it right and OG told him. No smile. But that’s who he is and it makes the great photo of him ecstatic with happiness that much more of a big deal and a huge un-OG smile. Loook everyone even OG is impressed! 🙂 #
If you love the Knicks, or even if you’re just fascinated with this year’s team, listen to today’s Bill Simmons podcast, it’s all about the phenomenon of the 2026 Knicks, and Simmons is a Celtics fan, definitely not a Knicks lover. I can’t believe all these smart sports guys didn’t know Brunson was a catch, if I recall correctly, just before the Knicks signed him, due to injury he had to lead the Dallas team in the first three games of the playoffs in 2022, and there you could totally see what no one had seen yet in the pros, he’s a leader and rises to the occasion, which we all know very well now, you could see it then if you watched the games (which apparently I did). And btw he grew up in the NBA, his father was on the Knicks in 1999 the last time the team went to the finals. #
I came across this photo of the Knicks celebrating, with OG Anunoby in the center. The thing about OG is that he’s a deep thinker and he never smiles, under any circumstances. Except right here. This is such a great photo I made it the header graphic on my blog for the day, week and maybe month, unless we get another one to replace it should they by some weird event they win the next series. And there isn’t another series after that one. At that point this Knicks team goes down as one of two legendary Knicks teams over the decades, comparable to the 1973 Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley championship team, the last time the Knicks won it all. #
Have you noticed that sometimes Claude is great and other times an idiot. Maybe it’s me. I have to remember that Claude is not a computer. It’s something else. #
Now I have to write about the Knicks. It just hasn’t fully sunk in yet that they won the East. You get to put a banner up for that. And next week we’ll be watching them in the NBA finals. But it’s the team that matters, not the trophies. Brunson is great, despite what I wrote after they went down 2-1 vs the Hawks in the first round. But the other players are great too in different ways. And there are so many of them, not just the starters. Every one with a distinct personality and all of them super smart and committed to the team and each other. What makes it work? You can see it in how they play — trust. They trust each other. Their fates are intertwined. And they knew it before they had this amazing streak of wins in the post-season. I love the Knicks even when they lose. I’m not sure how you love them when they are champions. We’ll figure it out. #
Claude just asked if I was breaking for the day. At 10:53AM. Why did it ask me that? Now I can’t stop thinking about that. The answer is no. I have a few more hours before I stop. #
Ultimately your job as a developer is to turn your creation over to users to figure out. Listen to see if patterns emerge. Even better give the users the tools they need to build apps out of our apps, together. This is how humans build layers of tech. #
On Mastodon: “twitter-like systems are much simpler than you would think looking at this space, bluesky etc. and there doesn’t need to be any lock-in, you can do a fair job with just RSS, rssCloud, OPML, web sockets, and a web browser UI. all parts replaceable.” #
Speaking of memorials, do you remember UserLand Frontier and all the cool stuff we developed with it? Like Manila, Radio, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, adding so many cool open features to the web. When people asked how we did all that, I said great tools. That was Frontier. Jake Savin, one of the 1990s UserLanders, is continuing the project to get it running on today’s hardware and for today’s web. He’s documenting it on his blog. I can’t wait to use it. Watching him go through the process has been eye-opening. He’s basically retracing all the steps it took to create it as done by four or five people over quite a few years, a long time ago. But when it’s running and I don’t doubt that he will get it running, it’ll be fascinating to see if I remembered it correctly. If you remember Frontier fondly, I suggest you subscribe to his feed in your favorite RSS feed reader. #
Good morning. Today is Memorial Day in the United States. We remember all the men and women who gave their lives to keep our country safe and a bastion of liberty for the world. Don’t give up on us yet. We are still willing to sacrifice for a good cause. #
I’ve worked with both these guys, JY Stervinou and Don Park, for a long time, and now we’re in the same sphere again, and it’s very useful to be able to tell them about what I’m doing. They understand. It’s not over their heads. Refreshing.
This is happening on Elon Musk’s X, but that won’t be forever. I want to move the conversation into a new piece of software I’m doing with Claude Code. Which is coming along nicely.
Anyway I just posted this, and thought it should be here too.
- my philosophy is that i’ll only use the absolutely necessary formats and protocols.
- i’ll leave experiments with other stuff to other people.
- the purpose of my project is to show what can be done with just a few bits of tech. that the whole thing is really simple.
- RSS 2.0 with rssCloud, OPML, WebSockets, basic web UI stuff. That’s about it.
- same as FeedLand btw.
- i want minimum complexity. a baseline for what can be done with very little.
The web can do a lot more than people think without getting too complex. And because it’s the web, you can connect anything to anything, you don’t need to AT Protoize your code, or ActivityPublish it. Just plain old RSS 2.0 with rssCloud, thank you very much.
“I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable.”
I asked ChatGPT for a list of FeedLand features that are new or distinctive. “FeedLand combines RSS, OPML, public curation, subscribable reading lists, rivers, categories, and realtime WebSocket updates in a way that is unusual among feed readers and points toward a web-native social network.” #
Alexa has a terrible habit, when I ask for a song from the Echo on my desktop, it ends each song with a helpful message. There’s a live version of this song, do you want to hear it. You have a message waiting, can I play it for you. I can’t get it to stop. I have a bunch of them scattered around the house, and this is the only one that does it. I’m writing here, I asked for a song that fit in with my writing. Stop making me thinkg about your marketing messages. Where did you get the idea you can do this. A paying customer. #
Love: I ask Claude for a list of names and values, it responds quickly with exactly what I asked for. Nothing more. Unconsciously I say “perfect” — out loud. #
I have a Mac laptop that I keep updated with the latest versions of Mac OS. I got a warning today saying that Electric Drummer won’t run on the next release of the OS. Now I don’t use it very much if at all on that machine, but I wonder. ED is an Electron app, otherwise it’s wholly JavaScript. It does include some Node packages of course, but not that many IIRC. This was a thing I wasn’t expecting. #
I just tried the latest version of the X editor. It’s got all the features of textcasting. I wrote a test post entitled “X has nuked the limits, time for Bluesky to follow suit.” I think you can tell I had fun writing it. They don’t think anyone hears me, but I think they’re wrong about that. The idea that they are part of the web is ludicrous. They’re going to get called on it eventually. They should fix it so they are part of the web. Then we can all create. Or if you’re not going to be part of the web, for crying out loud stop saying that you do. #
One of the benefits of using Claude for all my coding is I’m now finding out what various things I do as standard practice are called in the outside world. Today I learned what agile is. I of course have heard it used, and even got to know the guy who coined the term. #
I archived prior art as a design method from 2003 on this.how. #
There probably is a name for this development practice. Only works on a team with more two developers. At some point in a project after you’ve been working on Level N in the stack, you may decide you’ve done all you can there, and it’s time for someone else to work at that level. The new person, Smith, is a maintainer, develops in small increments, fixes bugs and most important takes feature requests from the other developer, Jones, who is now creating Level N + 1. Jones is a good person to do this because they know everything about the capabilities of the lower level. But now they’re going to pretend they’ve forgotten all that, and is looking at a whole new machine, created out of the new capabilities of Level N. That’s how you build any complex layered piece of software. And because this is the method used in boostraps, you can build level N+1 using tools written in N. #
My recommendation for Automattic and Bluesky.
- Bluesky supports RSS 2.0 inbound and outbound.
- Bluesky eliminates its character limit, allows bold, italic styles. Links. Optional titles. Users can edit their posts. More here.
Automattic already fully supports RSS 2.0 in both directions, in all their products.
This gives us the most interop with the most respect for prior art. No need to reinvent. There’s nothing special about Bluesky, they can use what we’ve all been using for 20+ years.
It’s really very simple, let’s hook everything together and let the users and developers create.
BTW, I don’t think the web was created to make people rich. #
Another way to look at Claude Code. It’s a way to talk to your code, to ask it questions, and tell it how you want it to change. #
I think maybe it’s time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can’t seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It’s a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I’m not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That’s what drives me. I see a great place to put an OS with WordPress as the storage and publishing component, and everything else grows up around it. It’s one of those famous coral reefs but it hasn’t been born yet. The idea would not be to compete with WordPress, it’s to make something that fits into our view of the world, that just happens to be the same codebase. And when on the other side they think they have to do it themselves we reach out and say here, just take this over, it’s yours. It’s so hard to penetrate the awareness inside old organizations with new ideas. I think it’s the manifest destiny of WordPress, that what they have now is a nice revenue generating machine, but it’s not serving as the web’s writing base, which is what imho it was supposed to be. (And I have a bit of standing there, btw.) #
I have news for you — Claude forgets important stuff. I catch it forgetting to do things it was “programmed” to do. It’s not a computer, it’s not garbage in garbage out. It could be good stuff in garbage out. As I’ve said before there’s a big chunk of the app I’m working on where I don’t read code. User interface stuff only. No control of what comes in our out. Trying to not take any chances here. #
Does it ever cross anyone’s mind that according to the rules of war, Iran would be totally justified in attacking the United States? #
This is a multi-billion dollar idea. I want to link to “report-up” concept in something I’m writing. There is no Wikipedia page for that but there is a brief explainer in Google, via their AI. Here’s the feature: add a permalink to that response. I’m lazy and will link to it in my writing. #
Vibe-coded software will have a place where users can communicate what they want to developers who can help make it real. The same way you might get medical info from an AI, but would still get your colonoscopy from an actual doctor. Part of the origin story of podcasting is that Adam hacked up a version of Frontier to illustrate what he had in mind for the “last yard” protocol. When I looked at the code it was horrible, hard to believe someone thought of doing it that way. But it got the point across, and that’s the moment the podcasting boostrap began. I love using the AIs to tell a visual story, a skill I never had or developed. No reason it can’t work the same way for software. #
In yesterday’s podcast I mentioned a Microsoft promotional video from the 90s. JY Stervinou on Twitter asked if he had found it, and it was close but it was the video I was talking about. So I checked in with Claude with this prompt.
- there was a microsoft promotional video in the 90s featuring bill gates and steve ballmer riding up front in a car, it’s a ripoff of a volkswagon commercial, the music is catchy song Da Da Da. they drive around and then see a Sun Microsystems computer, they pick it up but it smells bad (apparently) and they drop it off in someone’s garbage. i can’t find the video on the web, can you?
It found a low rez version of the video on YouTube, with a comment.
- It’s a spoof of the 1997 Volkswagen Golf commercial, with Ballmer and Gates driving a Golf, picking up a Sun workstation and later rejecting it. The “Da Da Da” track is by the German band Trio. One source describes the dropped computer as an old IBM rather than Sun, so accounts differ on that detail, but the Know Your Meme listing specifically says Sun workstation, matching what you remember.
Here’s the low-rez video at 1/4 size.
*
The computer in the video I saw was definitely a Sun workstation. It wouldn’t make much sense for it to be an IBM in 1997, Microsoft had already passed over IBM, they were in the middle of the Java Wars with Sun, and there even is a Sun response to the Microsoft video with two actors playing Gates and Ballmer, and in the end Sun CEO Scott McNealy shows up, after (it turns out) Gates smells and the Sun terminal is still in the back seat and users and developers are still nowhere in sight.
I imagine there are a few old time Microsoft people still following this blog, if anyone has a decent resolution version of the Da Da Da video, I’d love to get a good version on the web of 2026.
Podcast: Wrapping AI in the web. #
Just finished No Country for Old Men, the book by Cormac McCarthy. I have seen the movie many times, it’s one of those movies that if you’re looking for something to watch and you come across it, you might as well go for it because every scene in the movie is pretty good on its own. I didn’t realize that they used most of McCarthy’s dialog, literally — in the movie. Near the end, Bell, the sheriff tells a story about old age. “There wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I said well, that’s pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for.” I love truths that hit hard. He’s such a great writer. And I love that I can write like all the characters if I get a mind to. #
I’m going to release the Claude-generated code that enables it to work with me on projects that are written and managed in outlines. #
Just asked Claude to save this in memory. “in general i create local variables with partial results because 1. i can step through the calculations in the debugger. 2. the order guides my mind when im reading this code, 3. it lets me put a name on a partial value. this is helpful when i want to piece together wtf the code is supposed to be doing. and 4. it makes no difference in the efficiency of the code for a variety of reasons. please save that somewhere.” i’m getting a lot of these rules down. i have them memorized but have never written them up because i didn’t have a system for saving it somewhere relevant. i always thought ai would be good for going back and reading all my blog posts and creating somethjing readable, but as often is the case, the way it works turned out to be quite different, accomplishes the same thing. #
Saying Bluesky is part of the web is like saying Spotify or YouTube own podcasting. They say it, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. #
I’ve been following Jake’s work privately, but now he’s blogging about it publicly. I totally look forward to running Frontier on today’s hardware. I especially want to run Manila on one of my home computers, and use it for Linux server apps. I’ve forgotten so much about how Manila works, but I expect it’ll all come back. We had a great team back in the Manila days — we all used the product, and it was and will be again one of the most powerful and pragmatic programming environments ever. #
Claude Code doesn’t know about “user perspective,” but it learns quickly. The UI of the software we’re working on is fenced off, I use it, but I don’t read code in there. I don’t want to know how it works, I want to use it and getting right. This is an important technique. Later once things are locked down, I don’t mind learning more about how it was done. #
I couldn’t not say anything about the Knicks win last night in the opening game of the NBA Eastern Conference finals. The Knicks were losing, then winning big, then fell apart, and by midway through the 4th quarter they were down by 22, and the Clevelands were completely in charge. But then the Knicks came back, miraculously tied the game so it went into overtime where the Knicks dominated, and won. Actually it wasn’t really a miracle, it was somewhat predictable. The Knicks were playing on a lot of rest, and one of the big advantages they have this year over last is a deep and strong bench and a coach who plays them (last year’s coach didn’t). So the Knicks didn’t get tired and the Cavs were wiped out by the 4th quarter. Their shots weren’t long or short, aimed, they had no flow, they weren’t getting rebounds, they didn’t have good ball movement. While Brunson was driving the Knicks the Cavs just weren’t there. When things started turning around in the 4th I was pretty sure the Knicks would win. I had no basis for believing this, coming back from 22 down so late in the game is pretty unlikely. In most cities that’s when the fans start heading home, but not in NYC. We stay till the end because sometimes, maybe often with this years’ Knicks, the team you think is going to lose actually ends up winning. #
Markdown support is a big feature for people who want to know what we’re doing with their text. #
Someday you’re going to tell your kids that we once used a social network that limited your writing to 500 characters and didn’t allow styling, links or titles. What was it called Daddy? Bluesky. And people thought it was great. Why? They might have been taking drugs. #
Opus 4.6 is much smarter than the other one. It feels like I’m working with someone from Bronx Science. I had been using Sonnet 4.6, which I switched to after reading somewhere that it costs less and it’s usually every bit as good as newer models. I would never work with Sonnet on anything again, it’s like working with a partner who is both stupid and difficult. Opus 4.6 makes me smarter, by doing the work while I dream up new features, and communicating with intelligence, like a helpful flight assistant. And I see there’s an Opus 4.7 available. I have to try it. One interesting fact, until February when Opus 4.6 came out, you could not have done the kind of software I’m doing. There must be a tsunami of interesting stuff on the way. I don’t think any of the pundits expect this. My goal is to build the next social system for use in the AI generation is built out of replaceable web components buit around interop and prior art. Let’s commoditize the AI layer and build entirely open systems on top of it. For people who weren’t around at the birth of the personal computer or the web this is going to be a unique multiple mindbomb moment. #
2024-era ChatGPT pictures, of which I created many are now like Comic Sans type was in 2010 or so, if you remember. #
I have taught Claude Code to write software the way I do.
It has abilities that I don’t, for example, I give them 1000 lines of code, highly factored, with lots of thought into making it readable and maintainable, and always falling short (our languages today fight against readability imho), and get this — it can read different parts of the same code in parallel, and in two or three seconds have a complete understanding of it.
I couldn’t do it even if I had a week. I would totally depend on clues left there.
What’s even more amazing is that when it writes code for me, it does it my way, mostly without any prompting from me. This was done over and over until I realized I had to tell it to save it and read it when a new session starts. That’s how it accumulates knowledge. Anything that isn’t in one of those files has to be relearned, and that’s most of what it, as a code-writing system, has to work with. It has no “memory” of ever having seen this stuff before, but that isn’t a problem because it can accumulate a few years of understanding in two or three seconds. It works very diffrently from the way we work. If I were to show you how to do something three times that would be it, not so with Claude.
When it doesn’t know what to do, I take the time to explain how I would have done it, and next time it does it that way.
I kind of did the same thing in a human way — when I first encountered Unix, I couldn’t believe from reading the source code, how transparent it was. That was in the 70s. Since then I have been striving to write code that’s as easy to work on. When it comes to realtime software, there isn’t really a choice. Though history piles up in the code no matter how diligent you are. But you could give the source to say MySQL to Claude Code, and say “rewrite this as if Dave Winer wrote it” and it probably would do a decent job, though it might take a while before it ran every MySQL app.
If you’re looking for good investments, I’d say look for programming problems that are very complicated. We are limited by what we can create by how much we can maintain. But we can have Claude explain for us any time what any of our code means. It can read my mind because I put the work of my mind in the memory of the computer. Which effectively is the Mind of Claude.
PS: Claude has a huge advantage over ChatGPT. Claude is one syllable and easy to remember. ChatGPT is four syllables, and has no discernable meaning. Claude is a person, and I think in general people named Claude are interesting.
Jon Stewart is usually pretty good, but I think he got it wrong when he says the AI companies are stealing journalists’ knowledge. Imho they don’t create knowledge, they report it. The knowledge isn’t theirs to own, and that is for the times there is actually any new stuff. They stick to a few main stories, and still insist that the upcoming election is about the economy. They talk about the $1.7 billion slush fund, but aren’t reporting every day in every story how much money we’ve given ICE. That big funding is going to the concentration camps they’re building, the people the incarcerate we hear so little of. This is a government that shot two people in Minnesota, on camera, and shrugged it off. Imagine what horrors are going on out of site in the camps. #
Today Claude found a problem that would only be uncovered if you knew that assigning to location.href didn’t happen immediately. If it decides to redirect and then do a bunch of other stuff including making network references, the whole thing could (and did) come crashing down. I would have found that problem, but the actual error message the browser emitted made me think the problem was on the server not the client. The most complicated code in an app is the stuff it runs at startup when it’s constructing the world of all its different pieces creating the virtuality expected by the great mass of code. It’s the part that once it’s working you don’t even want to look at it and if you decide to rewrite it you might as well start over, only slightly exaggerating. #
Timothy Snyder made an important point. Trump sees his cause as a religion and sees himself as god. So when someone who is unfairly punished by Trump says they’re still glad they voted for him, because (I guess) if god is on the ballot, you have to vote for him. #
I documented the optional source:inReplyTo element for RSS 2.0. #
i’d wait till a fresh start tomorrow.
but then i realized claude has all the code, so i could just tell it my problem.
can you find it, i asked, realizing i had not given it info on what the problem is.
there’s a very weird mistake in the code i wrote just now, and there was a lot of it, i said to claude.
can you find the problem.
had no idea what to expect.
no more than 3 seconds it said I got it!
it was a typo. where i meant to type x i had typed prefs.
juggling a lot of bits in my head, my brain skipped, i didn’t notice.
i would have found it quickly in my next session. but now i can think of anything but that problem until then.
sometimes claude can be totally frustrating, but other times the power makes such a huge difference.
BTW, here’s the JSONL version of Scripting News. It has the same data as the RSS file, but in the format that AI apps are looking for, so I am told. I thought I’d try to kick this off by pushing an RSS flow through the pipe. It’s like using the Grateful Dead to boot up podcasting. I needed something to put out on the wire and I had this feed handy. #
Thinking about adding
I wish they had an outliner in Claude. I would use it. 😉 #
I reached a point in my Claude work where now I can do vibe coding, in a world that I used to just be a programmer in. This means if I want to do a heavy lift, I can tell Claude what I want and it can do really big corner turns, which is something I am (as a human) terrible at, and thus resist. Today I redesigned the basic user interface of the app, and didn’t read any code, I was just giving orders, and it was doing what I asked, even if every little thing it did would have been a full day’s work. It’s remarkable how it can do very complex things in a few seconds.
And the web framework i’m working on can do almost all the things I want to do for now, but I want to suck everything into it, and turn the whole thing into a vibe coding amusement park. So many projects I want to do, and so many I want to do with you.
I have Claude Code hooked up to Chrome. It’s crawling around inside the DOM of the running system, like humans do in a debugger. It’s a bit like Fantastic Voyage if you’ve ever seen it. I’ve been waiting for this moment. Now we can do some really nice UI work. #
For some reason every day feels like Saturday. I don’t know why. #
This is the first day since the NBA playoffs started that there is no scheduled game. I think that’s why today feels so weird. #
Every social web needs avatars. In an RSS 2.0 feed look for the channel-level image element. It’s how they do it in WordPress. #
I appreciate that X gave me back access to my account that I was locked out of, but they were apparently charging me for Premium when I couldn’t use the account, and had no way to turn it off. Okay they can keep the money. But now I want to turn off Premium for the account I was using when I didn’t have access to my real account, and can’t find the commands to do that. Asked ChatGPT and it either hallucinated or X removed the command. So near as I can tell I now have two accounts on X that I’m paying $8 a month for Premium on. #
I’m screwing around with the JSONL stuff again. I’m interested in know about any work people have done that process incoming JSONL data. I’d like to see if I’m even in the ballpark of something useful. Today I’m making it so that my app can be used in production to handle more than one stream. The key thing is it’s hooked up to FeedLand via a very simple JSON interface delivered in realtime via websockets. For feeds that support rssCloud, the appearance of the new item in the JSONL feed happens a fraction of a second after it was published. That’s how fast the web of 2026 is. #
I have regained control of my Twitter account. I really missed it, truth be told. Thanks to Scoble for helping here. As he so often has. #
This bit of code kept coming up, so I wanted to make it easier to find. #
Expanding items on a FeedLand blogroll should be consistently fast now. Just switched to a different server on the backend. #
Yesterday I learned about JSONL, and was of course intrigued. It’s a really simple thing, even simpler than RSS, and does basically the same thing. And even better, it’s the way the AI industry hooks streams together. So If we can get RSS to serve as a source of JSONL feeds, it’s possible that the AI industry will find it useful. My goal is to get every standard of the web hooked up to AI, quickly, before the silos realize they’re leaving out something important. Once they figure it out, they’ll have no choice but to add real RSS support. So I put together a quick demo app that hooks into FeedLand and posts to a JSONL feed new items from one of a small set of feeds I chose basically at random. And here is the JSONL feed. If you’re a developer in AI-land could you try reading this into your JSONL-ingesting app, and let me know if I got it right. Here’s a place to comment. BTW, that URL is temporary just for this quick demo. #
Good morning sports fans! #
It would be great if Beeper supported RSS in and out. It would help encourage other messaging services to do the same, and all of a sudden we’d have lots of easy interop instead of lots of really iffy interop. If they want to do it, I’d help, for free. Just to help things flow better on the messaging web, because we reallllly need help there. #
Members of the WordPress community. Monday morning is a good time to check out WordPress News via FeedLand at wp.feedland.org. You can also subscribe to the list of feeds this site follows in your own feed reader, and if you have a WordPress news site, please post the URL here so we can send readers to your blog too. I think there are a lot of would-be bloggers out there that need a slight kick in the pants to get going. I’m happy to provide readers if you provide the ideas. There’s a lot of power in WordPress that no one knows about. Let’s help other users and developers find the good stuff. If you have questions or suggestions, here’s a new thread on GitHub. #
I say to Claude: btw, i would have been surprised if it was broken, that feature went in very quickly and i use it a fair amount. one of the two big pages in feedland is the Feed List page. here’s a screen shot. maybe you can figure out what everything does??
Example of a Feed LIst page in FeedLand.
Claude retorts
- Disclosure triangle — expands the row to show more about that feed (recent items, description, full URL).
- Blue checkbox (checked) — subscription state. Checked = you’re subscribed. Click to subscribe/unsubscribe.
- Row number — just positional, 1..14 for this result set.
- Feed title — clickable, opens the feed’s own page (the other “big page” you mentioned).
- Small tag icon next to the title — opens a categories editor for that subscription, lets you tag the feed into categories.
- When column — last update time, with adaptive granularity: minutes for very recent (“21 mins”, “26 mins”), day-of-week for the past few days (“Fri”, “Tue”, “Thu”), month+day after that (“Nov 22”, “Mar 29”), and presumably full date for old stuff.
- Ct column — subscriber count for the feed. Every row shows 2 because feedland.social is small. Worth noting: this is the same
- ct that the SQL we just touched uses for
- order by ct desc — the column visible in the UI is the sort key.
- Green circle “i” — info popup, probably feed metadata (URL, description, last build, maybe owner).
Claude is very very smart. And I guess I got the right answers. A lot of work went into the design
The only thing it didn’t guess correctly about is what the other “big page” is. It’s not the Feed Info page, it’s the news page, a timeline or river.
Done for the day, my last words to Claude were — FeedLand is an important product and we’re going to do right by it.
A while back I was asking Claude (privately) if we could have it monitoring the messages posted to an app I’m working on. I wanted it to save them in a certain way, have it watch for messages that begin with //claude and maybe act on them somehow. I mostly just wanted to see if I could create a pipe and what its limits would be.
I asked what the max frequency is and was told it was 1 minute, meaning it would start a thread running Claude that would initialize, and it would read the file, and if there were any new items, it would process them, and then it would shut down. Barely enough to be useful, where we live we like notification within a second, but I went ahead, at least it’ll be a thought-provoking demo.
So I wrote the software. Not much to it, a Node app that’s hooked up to FeedlandSocket, and when it sees a message from me, it appends it to a JSONL file that Claude is watching. At most one minute later it wakes up and sees the new stuff and acts on it.
So I’m right there, it’s all working, the JSONL file is being saved in a public place, and when I ask it to start listening to my JSONL messages I learn that the max frequency is one hour, rendering my work useless. This has happened before, btw.
I asked what about all the “agentic” stuff they hype so much, how do I do that?? I can’t?? What?? Somehow I have trouble believing they’re all telling such a big lie. I wonder if Claude understands its own architecture.
Dave: “What is all this hype about agentic stuff. Every time I try to do something I hit a wall like this.”
Claude: “The pitch is ‘agents that run on their own’; the reality you just hit is a one-hour floor on the only scheduling path the tooling actually exposes. That’s not agency, that’s a batch job with extra steps. The honest read: the cloud-side scheduler is built around long-running, infrequent tasks (digest emails, nightly reports) because each run spins up a fresh sandboxed session, which is expensive. Anything that wants to react quickly to a stream of incoming items — which is what your app actually is — doesn’t fit that model. A plain local cron on some server running every minute would do the job today and cost nothing.”
I edited Claude’s response so as not to not reveal code names for products. 😉
A silver lining — I had never heard of JSONL, but it sounds pretty useful, so if I can’t hook up to Claude realtime, now — I can start using JSONL, which I wll.
Comments, stories, suggestions — here.
I have to say something about the Knicks, who just blew out the Sixers in a sweep, 4 games to zero. They’ve never played this well. They are more than a deep team of great athletes, they are highly intelligent people and they’re all really working together. Right now, it feels like a sure thing that they’ll breeze through the next round and face off OKC or San Antonio in the finals, and that will be something. But I know that’s not the right way to look at it. The next series is going to be with a team that feels the title is theirs as much as the Knicks do. I’ve been with the Knicks through the worst of times that never seemed to end. And now for something completely different. #
Leaflet is a nice editor designed to work with Bluesky. But they’ve been branching out. They now support email and RSS output. They’re going in the right direction, toward the internet with the email, and toward the web with the RSS support. As nice as Bluesky is, it’s a small part of the web, and it isn’t as open as it might appear to be, imho. #
AOC in an interview nailed everything in one brief answer to a question from the audience. You can watch it here.
It was so good and quotable that I recorded it and created a transcript via Google and Claude.
I’ve been emailing with Josh Marshall at TPM for the last few weeks, saying that we can’t just keep building on what the tech industy has given us as a news distribution system. AOC touches on this in her answer — she says the tech people control the algorithms, and they do. But the web doesn’t have algorithms, and we have enough standards available to create a very good network that isn’t owned by anyone.
I was at one time motivated by money, the same way politicians are motivated to attain higher office, but I had an impulsive idea when the web popped up that I am not doing it for money anymore. I’m doing it so we can change our political and work communication so it gives power to the people, not to the tech industry. At that time we were already dealing with the excesses of tech, I knew it well because I was an an insider.
They are welcome to make products for it, but they can’t control the users. That’s what I envisioned in the 90s and 00s. The ads won’t be as important as what people say, because the price of using the web is very low. But we got snookered anyway. The VCs were only motivated by money, and to maximize that, they needed maximum control, and they got it. People like being part of big things, and Twitter was and still is big.
We’re now at the next turning point. AI is creating new pathways for ideas to flow. It’s all wide open right now, more open than it’s been in over 20 years. Right now we could put a twitter-like product there that you can set up in a few minutes, run it yourself, and or join one that’s run by a friend. And they federate immediately. All based on the open standards of the web. Every component replaceable. No big central thing to be owned.
But Josh, we can’t do it without your help. AOC doesn’t know us. She probably doesn’t think how the web could route around the algorithms. But she, and you should be thinking about that, and Heather Cox Richardson too, because we can create the people’s tool for the change she wants, which is the change I want, and you want too (I read your columns). But we have to work together to make it happen.
BTW, all politicians should swear by what she says. And we should never care about polls. We should only care about results.
Transcript of AOC’s answer
I recorded the interview, Claude did a light edit of the transcript. I highlighted the part about the algorithms.
You know, it’s funny, because, in this op-ed that Jeff Bezos paid for in the Washington Post, there was this line where you had mentioned earlier about me as a potential 2028 contender, and in the context of that, it was very clear this was a veiled threat, right?
So the elite think: if you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it’s in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms. And we’re gonna— we’ll make an example out of you.
And what’s funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. But my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.
Presidents come and go. Senate and house seat elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare’s forever. In many ways, it’s forever work, right? Forever work is what we should follow, and so anyways, I— the way— but to put a finer point on your question, is that when you aren’t attached, right? When you haven’t been, like, fantasizing about being this or that since the time you’re seven years old, it’s a tremendously liberating thing. Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment? And conditions change radically all the time. So, I make my response— less out of an attachment to a positional, like, you know, title or position and working backwards from there— but I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window and observing the conditions of this country and saying, what move or what decision can I make today that’s going to get us closer to that future— stronger, faster, better than yesterday?
A post from Scripting News, automatically mirrored to a WordPress site, and that flowed via ActivityPub to Mastodon, via a relatively new feature in WordPress. Almost by accident Mastodon supports long text, styling and links — even though their editor doesn’t generate it, if it comes from the outside it will respect the styling.
Below is a post on Mastodon coming from WordPress. Masto’s limits aren’t enforced, and that’s good.
The Knicks continue to astound. Last night, they went up 3-0 against the Sixers in Philadelphia. Game 4 is tomorrow at 3:30PM Eastern.
Last night’s game was a fantastic contrast with the way the Knicks played in the post-season last year. They had the same starting lineup then, but a different coach, one who rarely put in the bench players unless he had to because of injury. As a result our starters were always playing exhausted, and it got worse as they got deeper into the post-season, until finally in the conference finals against Indiana they had no more gas and were eliminated. This year’s Knicks with a deep bench of fantastic players, who the new coach rotates in, makes all the difference. Why? Because the players on the court for the Knicks aren’t particularly tired, and if they are, they can get a rest,.
So in the first period the Sixers came out with fury, and they won the first quarter, because both teams were fresh, and maybe the Knicks were onto their problem, and didn’t fight too hard to win the first knowing they’d have the big advantage in the second, third and fourth, where the Sixers players legs would be getting wobbly and they were thinking too much about the shots they were taking.
Also worth noting we have a grudge against the Philadelphia team, esp their overwhelmed and dirty-playing big man, Embiid.
The Knicks have a fantastic core team, veterans in their prime, and have been with each other for some since college. They have added to the team incredibly well. Every player coming off the bench has a special power, and it all works.
What’s the limit? Unlike many fans I’m not in the expectations business. I’m happy to see how well they’re playing now, and am prepared for whatever lessons come our way in the rest of the playoffs.
As I get deeper into the Claude-O-Verse, I get that it doesn’t remember anything about the code. The code actually serves as its memory of the project. There are comments in the code of course, put there by Claude. Managing my own memory when I’ve got so many different bits of software is the bain of my existence, esp as I get older and older. But I’ll turn it all over to Claude as fast as I can, to relieve me of the responsibility to remember all that stuff. Its brain works much better at this kind of stuff. I can conceive of things worth doing. And I know how to build the features, but I don’t have the skill of immediately understanding some code by reading it not top down but all the lines at the same freaking time. If this isn’t us learning how to work with an aliens species, it’s a pretty good imitation. #
As I get deeper into the Claude-O-Verse, I get that it doesn’t remember anything about the code. The code actually serves as its memory of the project. There are comments in the code of course, put there by Claude. Managing my own memory when I’ve got so many different bits of software is the bain of my existence, esp as I get older and older. But I’ll turn it all over to Claude as fast as I can, to relieve me of the responsibility to remember all that stuff. Its brain works much better at this kind of stuff. I can conceive of things worth doing. And I know how to build the features, but I don’t have the skill of immediately understanding some code by reading it not top down but all the lines at the same freaking time. If this isn’t us learning how to work with an aliens species, it’s a pretty good imitation. #
There’s going to be a lot of new web software in the coming months. The competition changes from managing complexity to who sees the best way to remix the web. There are a lot ways to do it. #
2017: If you’re running a campaign — think about what you can do now that makes the world a better place. Your campaign is drawing huge attention and money. Most of it is wasted on lies and attack ads. Take a small portion of the money and attention to start doing now the things you hope to do when you’re in office. This will turn out to be good politics too. And the process can continue after you’re elected. it will make sure you’re not too deeply ensconced in the bubble of government. And if you lose, at least you can say the campaign was good for everyone, people who voted for you and people who voted for the other guy. #
It’s interesting what Jeremy Herve and Matthias Pfefferle at Automattic have created with the WordPress feed reader, hooking it up to Activity Pub and AT Proto, the same way they hooked up those protocols to the standard WordPress blogging functionality (not sure how technically accurate this is). They’re also supporting the Google Reader api for users of products like NetNewsWire. #
Jeff Bezos is of course one of the biggest names in tech, but he doesn’t have much of a public personality. I saw him speak in the early days of Amazon, and in that role, he came off as a great but controversial entrepreneur (he had no interest in profits). He spoke fast, had a weird laugh, but totally fit the part. Not sure about today as he pivots to being a personality, with his wife in every picture with him. Did the real Bezos get lost in there somewhere?
The new Jeff Bezos, celebrity.
2022: Markdown is just enough HTML. #
A cartoon by Dan Morgan that illustrates the role Markdown plays in AI. Text is central to how AI works, and the text we use in AI is Markdown all the way. #
I didn’t invent RSS, I adopted it. #
It’s very nice to not be working on CSS. I hate CSS. I now have a slave that does the CSS for me. #
It’s just dawning on me how thoroughly the AI apps are building on Markdown. People love Markdown because it’s simple and its virtually impossible to screw it up, unlike HTML which got a lot of crazy-ass features in the 90s when Micosoft was trying to run the world, and then as Google took over more suspicious messes. If you stick to Markdown you get a good result, after 20+ years of dealing with all the incompatibilities of various text systems. I think this squares the reason to just build everything around Markdown. Every freaking thing. Mastodon is out of step, as is Bluesky — I don’t care about the others, honestly. It really would be a good idea to step back from Gutenberg too. It’s not on the path of where text is going. It might be a good time to re-read textcasting. Every day I’m more sure it’s the way to support writing on the web, and writing on the web is what we’re building our future around via AI. And isn’t it nice that the AI companies are on board with the web? #
In the age of AI, Markdown is even more the default choice for text, something I heartily approve of. And that’s why I think now is a good time to sneak some new open non-silo’d technologies in there, like for example, WordPress. Open source is not the only reason WordPress is valuable, it also supports all the standards of the web. It means WordPress can tie together text on the web in a way nothing else can, and it works really well with Markdown. #
My father was a professor at Pace Univ in NYC. When he retired, he used my blogging software to create a book for his students at mbatoolbox.org. Over the years the site moved a few times, and the http protocol was hacked by Google. I used Claude yesterday to get it working again. I’m glad to get this off my todo list. He put the work in because he wanted to leave this behind. My job is to make sure it survives as long as I can. And Claude makes short work of it. I put a copy of the website in a spare folder, and opened Claude Code in the folder, said what the problems are. We worked together and in about an hour it worked again. It could certainly look better, but that was his thing not mine. #
I’ll let you be the judge.
Claude and I have a convention. I’ve asked it to keep a file named handoff.md. At the end of every session I tell it to update the file with where we left the project at the end of the session, it does, and then I take a break. When I come back, first thing I say is “please read handoff.md.” This time it came back in no time and said it read it. I asked “how do you read it so fast?” It said something that indicated for the first time that it is aware that our minds work differently, somthing I feel the need to remind it fairly regularly.
“I don’t really ‘read’ it the way you do. The whole file lands in my context as one chunk — 344 lines of text — and I process it in parallel rather than left-to-right. There’s no inner voice sounding out words, no eye that has to travel down the page. It arrives all at once and I work from it.
“The tradeoff: I don’t get the slow-absorption pass that comes from reading at human speed. Things that would jump out to you on a careful read can blur together for me. So fast intake, shallower retention — which is part of why handoff.md exists in the first place.”
I’m reading a science fiction book now that has a human meeting an alien far out in space, both scientists from different planets in different solar systems. I think what we’re doing now is just that, exploring a new species, a new form of intelligence. We can argue about whether it’s conscious or sentient, but I promise you, it has a mind. That’s why so many science people are so blown away about what we’re all doing now.
I have a single page site with all the WordPress news. Bookmark it. Here’s the OPML subscription list, import it into your feed reader, get the news as you like it. WordPress is an amazing platform with a blogging community that we just can’t see. And once we’re listening, more will appear. It’s a great idea exchange platform. So — are there any great WordPress news feeds we’re missing? Please share here. #
Everyone is working on something with Claude. #
Heard on the internets ad nauseum. “I know how to do what you do much better than you do.” You don’t. #
I was just marveling with Claude about how well all the pieces are fitting together: two databases, connected by an RSS 2.0 feed and a websocket pipe all had to agree how to communicate the same object. Worked the first time. Small pieces loosely joined. #
Scoble asks on Twitter if there are successful companies that have an open source product. There are lots of them. There are markets where users and developers won’t even consider your product or service if it isn’t open source. It’s a trust issue. I offered an example, WordPress, which probably wouldn’t have launched well if it wasn’t open source. #
Knicks will play the Sixers in round 2 of the playoffs starting Monday. #
I’ve been teaching Claude why we favor Markdown. “We add support for Markdown editing wherever we can, because people like Markdown and they should. It makes things simple and guarantees a certain level of flexibility for their writing far beyond the standards of twitter-like systems with tiny little text boxes. If you don’t really support Markdown people figure it out right away. But the character limits and stuff like that seem more technical to users. Markdown support says clearly — you’re really on the web.” #
Something weird happens as you get older, you walk into a room and see a friend but at first you don’t get that this is your friend. Instead you see an old man or lady. Your attention goes away because like everyone you are programmed not to look at old people. Then you instantly realize this is your friend. You put on the virtual colored glasses that let you see them as you remember them, instead of what’s there today. #
On Bluesky: I asked ChatGPT when weblogs.com peaked. #
I’ve heard that Automattic is running a special deal where developers inside the company can take a month off to do their own project to make WordPress better for users.
I would like to propose that in the spirit of interop and the web that we work together on a project. I have a specific one in mind.
Background
My product, FeedLand can make single page websites with news from a specific group of feeds. They’re easy to set up, all you have to do is subscribe to the feeds, map them to a category, and then set up the shell, and FeedLand takes care of the rest. You probably want to assign a domain too. 😉
My WordPress news site
Here’s such a single-page site, for WordPress news.
And here’s the OPML subscription list,
The OPML is automatically updated every time a feed is added or removed. This is what we call “dynamic OPML.” You can import it to any feed reader, and re-import it to reflect changes.
This is also a nice thing to automate, so users don’t have to repeat the import manually, there’s no reason the software can’t do it. If you make a feed reader or podcast client you could let users subscribe to OPML feeds. That would imho break open the podcast client market in a very good way.
BTW, feedland.social is a server I use for development at this time. No one else can create an account there. Use feedland.com if you want to try out the product.
I want more feeds
I know there are more feeds about WordPress out there. I want to get them added to wp.feedland.org, so we’re presenting more comprehensive news about WordPress. I can’t imagine anything that would be more useful to WordPress users.
There’s so much happening, and honestly a lot of confusion too, and we know in the near future there will be a lot of new products shipped by the teams-of-two. Think of all the news that will generate!
It’s recursive!
This project would be immediatlely useful for following the project itself.
I remember from the early days when blogging booted up that these were the most valued experiments. I did a site that reflected changes in all blogs we monitored called weblogs.com, and it instantly became the backbone of the blogger’s web. And that was followed by RSS that did it on the item level, not the site level and brought in all the big news orgs because it fit their format better.
All good software projects are recursive and this one is no exception. 😉
Let’s grow the list together
Import my OPML feed to your favorite feed reader and use it yourself to get an idea of what kind of info we’re getting. Or just follow my site, and send me an email when you see one that should be in the list. I’ll start a thread on GitHub where you can do this.
We can grow this very quickly, imho — once people hear that there’s a great distribution system for news about all of WordPress, they’ll get on board and start new blogs to share what we learned.
Challenge
Let’s make information and ideas flow around the WordPress community much better than it does now.
For a company that makes a great idea-sharing network, you guys use a lot of other people’s products where your product would work even better imho.
And let’s start working together, don’t let corporate boundaries get in the way of good ideas helping make WordPress more useful and competitive.
Comments, links?
If you have a link WordPress news site that you feel should be included, or a comment or suggestion re this proposal, or an idea you think I could help with, please post it here .
Here’s a single-page site for WordPress news.
And here’s the OPML subscription list.
You’re free to import that OPML file into any feed reader.
I’d like to work with others to help get more good sources flowing through that list. The better the news delivery system, the more news sources we’ll get. It’s a chicken and egg thing, a bootstrap. People use Slack or Twitter to keep track of WordPress which is already a great idea-sharing network. Let’s start using the tools we make to make the news we need.
Let’s get more news sites on that list. There’s a lot of news we’re not getting over the web.
Comments, questions, suggestions here.
PS: I had a much longer post here earlier today, but factored it down to the basics.
BTW, I pointed to the Wikipedia page for XML-RPC, and noticed that they point to an archive.org copy of a very old version of the website, instead of the updated site which has new reference code written in JavaScript. The old version of the site used Frontier, which is where XML-RPC was developed, but it’s not in wide use these days, JavaScript is. Could someone update the Wikipedia page to change the link to the current XML-RPC site? I’m reluctant to do it myself because that’s somewhat against the rules. #
BTW, I pointed to the Wikipedia page for XML-RPC, and noticed that they point to an archive.org copy of a very old version of the website, instead of the updated site which has new reference code written in JavaScript. The old version of the site used Frontier, which is where XML-RPC was developed, but it’s not in wide use these days, JavaScript is. Could someone update the Wikipedia page to change the link to the current XML-RPC site? I’m reluctant to do it myself because that’s somewhat against the rules. #
Apparently Substack does not implement MCP, which is basically the XML-RPC of AI. According to ChatGPT they have a limited API that some independent developers have bridged to MCP. But as you would expect from a tight silo like Substack, the API lets you read but not write. They want you to use their editor, what they don’t want is to be one of 20 distributors of your writing. They want an exclusive and they get it. #
Welcome to May, the fairest month of all in the NYC area. Almost every day in May is delicious. And today is esp fair, the Knicks moved on to the next round of the playoffs with a record-setting decisive victory over the Hawks of Atlanta. The next opponent is either the Celtics of Boston or the Sixers of Philadelphia. I was already burned out on the playoffs last week, but I’m rejuvenated. Let’s go. And I apologize about all the “realistic” things I said about Brunson. He caught fire in the last three games, and showed he has the determination we need to go all the way this year. The Knicks are great because unlike the Yankees or Mets, they unify the city. And as everyone learns, NYC is so huge that the fanbase can pack arenae all over the US, as they chanted the name of OG and MVP for Brunson and Dooooooce when McBride shoots. If they don’t get to the finals it will not be for lack of talent or determination. There will be luck and Acts of God involved in the outcome. #
On this day in 2016 I wrote a screed on Facebook saying how I wanted to turn it into a blogging platform including the how and why. The arguments are roughly the same ones about how I want Bluesky to stop paying homage to the limits of Twitter and cozy up to the web and let’s do writing for real, undo the damage caused by Twitter in its over 20-year life. The requests in both case fell on deaf ears. So we are where we were in 2016, we have to replace Bluesky with the writing system of the web. And there is a silver lining to Automattic’s excursion into a mini-version of WordPress that looks and behaves like Twitter. They used RSS to glue the systems together. It was convenient, and that’s one of the major selling points of RSS, it is convenient. It’s supported everywhere (except the offspring of Twitter). So thanks for that. I’m still glued to this cause. I don’t want to retire until writing on the web gets back on track. #