The perfect app for an AI to do for you is a demo app. Yesterday I wrote about making WordPress boom with new apps for writers that run in the web ecosystem, not as plug-ins, in JS running in the browser, or on the desktop, any desktop, that would work too. Probably would be fine to put an MCP shell around it so it can be in AI-internal scripts.

I'm into writing tools. Proud of it. I'm a writer and a developer. Did I become a developer to create tools for writers or the other way around? At this point the answer to both questions is yes.

I'm basically offering to host a potluck party where people bring an app that works alongside WordLand but works differently from WordLand. Mine is a simple wizzy editor with a Markdown flip-switch. But everyone likes a different kind of editor. There is no single best editor for the web and since WordPress is of the web that applies here too.

If this work is ragingly successful it should have the adoption of XML-RPC in 1998, where devs were competing to get support for their favorite platform before all the others. Here's the list as of 2003. It was exciting and fun, kind of like how things are now.

So back to the AI connection. I started a session with Claude this morning and asked it to look at wpEditorDemo. Let's write a developer's guide and an AI guide, I said to my AI friend. This was a direction Don Park, a very longtime human friend suggested.

Claude and I spent the remaining time this morning creating a Gutenberg editor that works alongside WordLand. The two apps share files through the wpIdentity server that connects to WordPress.

So you can edit the text with either or both editors. If you use both you'll have to stick to Markdown. But you could use the Gutenberg editor for documents or sites where Gutenberg is better or required. This is so key. The document is yours to do with as you please. It's the web way for text to work. No lock-in. So important because almost everywhere else on what remains of the web, the ability to write and publish comes with a cost: lock-in. That's why writing on the web sucks so much.

I know Matt thinks open source is everything and that always bothered me a little.

• I loved that the NYT came on board with RSS 2.0 in 2002 that made it grow like a weed in all the right places, but it wasn't open source, though they didn't hide the source. They made an incredible contribution to the web which is largely unsung.
• Same with NPR and podcasting. It never would have booted up as fast or well and stayed open on the web without the help of WGBH and Tony Kahn. Again, not open source.

What you do need are partners who let people bring their text any way they want and don't make people type it into their defective editors, which deliberately constrain you — to their shitty little silo.

To my WordPress friends — WordLand is not seeking to replace Gutenberg, it just wants a place alongside it. And to open the doors for a myriad different approaches to writing on the web, all working beautifully with WordPress.

This should blow open the doors of the writer's ecosystem of the web, adding a whole new level, like adding air travel alongside trains and cars. And it should show how inadequate the current best writing environments are.

We'll have the Gutenberg editor for you to try out along with developer docs later today or tomorrow, Murphy-willing.

All made possible by WordPress and Claude.ai. What a time we live in! All of a sudden the web works again even if people have lost hope, because the AIs do the work either way. 😉

Update: Here's a screen shot of the Gutenberg demo app.

New ways to write with WordPress as the back-end.

Build an API that combines what wpcom does and storage.

Recruit devs to create products for this environment.

• Gutenberg will be one of these editors.
• I will provide WordLand which is a wizzy html editor that has a flip-switch Markdown mode.
• MarsEdit can join the club if possible.
• Leaflet would be great too.
• Any app that requires text editing is a good idea.

Here's the really cool thing — we can all edit each others' docs.

Put another way, the docs belong to the users, and they let access them.

The storage is so we can build smarter better editors, more fun, color, interactions, cool toys for writers.

And yes, btw — they are on the web, and there's an RSS 2.0 feed with rssCloud support.

And for that we can create all kinds of amazing readers, I want to do one with SVG now that I know how to do that thanks to ChatGPT of course. SVG is another breakthrough waiting to happen.

We're right there now. Ready to go. We start with text editors and build from there.

There's a new place to put WordPress, under our apps. It's remarkably good for that.

I don't know about you but I thought there was a pretty good chance Trump would detonate a nuke somewhere yesterday, and the fact that we did not get him out of there in time to prevent it, says we went along with it. You can decide what that means.

I've had several friends over the years who are German. My age or a little older. People who grew up with the shame of being German in the postwar years. Friends. People who weren't born when the atrocities happened. We were friends and when I could I tried to assure them that I know they weren't there when it happened. It didn't matter, as far as they were concerned it didn't absolve them of the shame. It had become their birthright.

American friends, what we allowed to happen yesterday, even though we were adequately warned, says we went along with it. If we wanted to stop it now, I believe we could, and we still can.

PS: Good German is an ironic term. Wikipedia's explainer nails it.

Hacker News isn't a software masterpiece. All the pieces have to be there to make something as real as HN happen. #

This is so true. Hacker News isn't a software masterpiece, same with Craig's List and with WordPress. All the pieces have to be there to make something as real as HN happen. #

The president of the United States is spinning around acting like a NYC real estate jumbo who accidentally was elected president and after only five years in office has realized a whole new level of trolling. It started with cable news, then went to Twitter, then masked American gestapo killing protestors on TV for everyone to see, and then starting a war with Iran of all countries.

I'm sure his generals suggested that at the same time as they were bombing Iran proper, that they should send in a few boatloads of Marines to occupy the Strait of Hormuz. When the Iranians weren't so desperate, it might have been relatively easy to take it over. I'm sure we've spent billions over the years on what to do if we had to attack Iran, not like now when things like this are done on a whim.

Anyway, what a movie. The audacity of the writers. One things for sure we'll all be watching at 8PM Eastern to see if he blows up the world tonight or whatever.

The voice of America channel on Bluesky.

I recommend this post on vibe coding.

There's a lot more to development than coding.

I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what you had in mind.

I think people find it amazing that they can create code, not just that the machine can create it. I know what that's like because I get a rush from creating images, something I never had a skill for, so all of a sudden being able to express myself with drawings was a breakthrough for me. 😉

I've spent a few decades making commercial quality software in a variety of contexts, and so far I wouldn't rush to get rid of my dev teams based on the idea that the bots can do their work.

I think more realistically we have powerful new tools that we as yet have not learned how to use, but it's pretty exciting to see what may be possible.

I love all the new discourse about WordPress.

It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.

I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.

What's missing on the web — software for writers.

I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is. There should just be one social web, btw — not 18. If there are 18 and they don't interop, then none of them deserve to call themselves the web. There is only one web, by definition.

The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and imho it is prepared to do that.

I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory — writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.

I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.

Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly — in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text. #

Excellent podcast discussion with John Stewart and Heather Cox Richardson. I desperately wanted to get in the conversation. I think they missed something important and came soooo close. Trump isn't only a TV star, he's a blogger. Comes naturally to him. Why wasn't Obama transformative in the same way? First black president. You get to be the first black president by being utterly brilliant and infinitely careful. There wasn't a single spontaneous moment in his presidency, though there were scripted moments when playing that role. And some amazingly brilliant speech-making. He's perfect, but that's because there were severe limits on what he could get away with.

On the web the ethos is "Come as you are, we're just folks." That's not Obama.

Who also had to be hugely careful? Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Not Joe Biden who's famous for his gaffes.

Trump doesn't give a shit what you think, that's why he's so good on Twitter. Trump was a TV star but right now it's more important to be a natural born blogger.

I was beating this drum ever since Trump appeared on Twitter. We need to be much better at this. We're still in the hole. At least Newsom knows there's a problem but imho he isn't the answer. We need someone who's bitter and funny, like Joan Rivers or Don Rickles. You don't need to understand government or politics, just show up and be a kind of lovable asshole 24 hours a day.

People could relate to Trump. Trump, even though he's not a great dancer, doesn't mind doing it if you think it's funny. He's a total entertainment package. Very random.

Wouldn't hurt for the next Dems to to find someone like that. Hopefully not to run for president.

HCR said Trump was Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs — I LOL'd totally.

WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026. #

Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is what I see on the Posts page. #

Suggestion for feed reader devs. Put a Check Now button on the page for a single feed. It shouldn't overburden your system because it's just doing an HTTP read and a little parsing. Not much more work than reloading a page in the browser. The benefit is you can see a current view of the news according to a specific feed without waiting. Makes the web roughly instantaneous for every feed, even ones that don't support rssCloud. FeedLand has such a button. #

Things are changing a lot. Huge flow of ideas, and some catching up to do. Mind bombs in every direction.

Last night while watching sports I learned via ChatGPT about MCP.

Here's what it can do and people *are* using it for this

You could turn ChatGPT into an easy editor for WordPress posts.

Just as I have developed the habit of getting it to create a handoff.md file when I'm done with a session, I could write something with ChatGPT helping, I don't ever do that myself but i might, if it were easy. and when I'm ready to publish, I'd say "Please publish this on my daveverse site now." I might specify a category or two, or set defaults, it's good at that stuff. I've taught Claude to write code in my style, so I can maintain it (to answer Aral Balkan's question on Mastodon).

We create little hierarchies everywhere we go.

So many places. I have no room for new ones, yet I have to make room because there are people there I want to work with. Now I have to manage it.

If an alien came to Earth and asked why we don't just create a way for a little hierarchy in one place to appear where ever you want it.

It's not out of reach, it would take two or three developers with enough imaginative users to get the ball rolling.

Write down the features you'd have to support, concisely and simply, and provide conventions for making those hierarchies accessible through a very simple format, in JSON or XML or anything isomorphic, and then we start building.

And start releasing apps that work together. That's what I want to do.

WordLand is supposed to be the first such app. But maybe I need to go even simpler for example code. Thinking about it.

The aliens were confused by the inefficent way we were organizing our ideas.

This is something we can and should research.

Let's give one of the ai apps a fairly good idea for an app we want to use, and help it — not by coding, just by answering questions about how it will work, and Iterating over the product until it works like we want it. Sometihng simple, like perhaps a text editor for Mastodon. Something that isn't squished in a tiny little text box, and has icons for bold, underline, links, etc. It could be useful.

Then let's look at the code with an open mind. I think i've given it enough examples of good maintainable code that I could get it to produce maintainable code.

This was in reply to a Mastodon post by Aral Balkan.

My first real post in the New Dave On Twitter, or N-DOT. #

Please follow me at my new Twitter address: bullmancuso. Whatever anyone thinks of the company the product is still unique, there are people and communities there that I need to communicate with, and I just don't have that kind of network anywhere else. #

When I think of "Slack" my brain immediately translates it to "AOL." I'm not kidding. #

Continuing, isn't it a shame that CloudFlare didn't take a different approach? What if they had created a fantastic WordPress runtime, which seems to be where most of their effort went, and that's where their expertise lies, not in crafting new user experiences. A service you could buy from CloudFlare, along with all the other services, that does a fantastic job of running WordPress sites. The customer wouldn't need to know how it worked behind the scenes. Yes, that would still be competiting with existing WordPress vendors, they make money off runtimes, but for the users it would mean they could keep using WordPress the way they always have, and the result would run better. That they didn't do it this way, that's it's all-or-nothing, might turn out to be the reason the product doesn't take off. It's a serious consideration. On the other hand there probably are a few WordPress users that would like to try something new out, esp if the cost of conversion is near zero (which they kind of claim it is). #

Yesterday I wrote about AI introducing doubt with something as fundamental as how software is created now with the advent of AI software that can be used effectively to write software. Behind that I wondered if the open source developers of WordPress had changed their methodology? Is their codebase managed by ChatGPT now or Claude.ai? Not only did I get the answer to that question overnight (yes, they have made the change), but there was an announcement of a new WordPress competitor, something that hasn't come along in decades, actually. It's called EmDash from CloudFlare. I read their announcement, and then asked ChatGPT to walk through an analysis of it with me. Here's a link to the conversation, hope you can read it. It understood my concerns. Is this something that can work with my product WordLand. Short answer: No, not as-is. It apparently doesn't support the wpcom api what we use to connect to WordPress. By design, you can import WordPress sites into EmDash, but they don't interop with each other. It's for moments like this that I have my WordPress news FeedLand flow. Already there has been some analysis. No doubt anything written today is going to see sketchy in the days to come, first impressions don't usually end up meaning much, even so I'm anxious to read what other people think. Meanwhile I'm thinking that maybe I should shift gears back to working on FeedLand, thinking that the WordPress world is too shaky now to try to introduce something new there. Likelihood of success is decreasing every day it seems. #

Archived Scripting News OPML source for March 2026. #

There's so much bullshit, why deliberately add more — in hope of being either funny or memorable — and only succede at annoying.

We prefer to try to keep things real here.

Got an email from Automattic about MCP support in WordPress, which is now available on their servers. With this new interface you can write prompts in Claude etc that do things in your WordPress workspace. Kind of like a scripting language, but English, like this — "In WordPress, please set the category for the current post to Project 32."

I guess it's very much like the wpcom api we're using for WordLand. It's going to be harder to get people to look at wpcom with this kind of functionality out there. It was always going to be hard, but I liked the challenge of telling a story about a great bit of technology that could save the web but wasn't known to almost all developers. WordPress never attracted the kind of devs that care about APIs like that one, ones which would let you build on WordPress as opposed to in WordPress.

Tech is always foggy and full of hype, but rarely is it as intense as it is in 2026. AI is the major thing people are talking and thinking about, trying to figure out if there's a way to be part of the fun with our software and ideas. And there are so many quick ways to get hooked up to the hype, that seem pretty desperate, the kind of ideas that emerge from management offsites in orgs that have little sense of direction — "let's add AI" everyone agrees, without any idea of what that means, and not much comes of it. Firefox, the perennial hype-harvester very predictably did this late last year. No we don't need another browser with AI. You have to think harder and more creatively. My advice was to be better for the web, and eventually if there is a link to AI it will reveal itself. But you have to pay attention for that.

As revolutionary as AI is, some things aren't going to be done with prompts, pretty sure of that. It 's a lot easier to pick categories from a dialog than typing an instruction in ChatGPT. Think about how you drive a car, you don't slowly tell the car to "turn the wheel left and tap the brake, now right, and hit the gas." Maybe this will turn out to be like the difference between using a mouse or a keyboard. Some people thought keyboards were obsolete when the Mac came out in 1984. I'm using a keyboard right now.

I'm going to finish the new WordLand and ask some people I want to connect with to try it out. The goal is to create a new kind of structure for the web, made out of posts that both stand alone and are part of a graph that you can walk around in. Far more spontaneous than web rings of the early web, like my blogroll does so much more than the static blogrolls of the 90s and 00s. But it is going to be hard to get attention for it, in the midst of all that's going on with AI.

On the other hand, I haven't seen the AI tools get into social structures, I feel very much alone with my AI collaborator. I know there are ways to set up collaboration, but that hasn't reached me yet, and at this time I'm not actually receptive to the idea. I haven't yet seen how we can plug away together human to human.

Like everyone else we're feeling my way around this, looking for ways to add value, and at the same time help to revive the web, which definitely needs help.

I'd like the web to make the transition to AI, not to become even more forgotten. I feel like this is the last chance, I want to get the web hooked into AI, but I have to work with other people, going it alone won't work.

Just some random thoughts on a Wednesday morning, having absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it's freaking April 1.

YouTube now puts commercials in front of songs. I used to be able to point to a low rez recording of a song as part of my blog. Now I have to think about all the links I've put in my archive that lead to shittified Google. I had never used that adjective before, I think, this certainly qualifies. #

It's peeve time. I've just listened to a song that inspires me on Amazon Music. A song I've been humming and singing in my head all morning. After it's done, the voice of Alexa comes on and says "BTW, you have two new messages. Would you like to hear them?" Now I have to think about how much I hate this. I had an exalting experience I want to savor and the frickin robot intervenes. If I say "don't do that again" it says basically "Sorry Dave." #

BTW the latest episode of 500 Songs is about The Who and Tommy. I of course had the album, which means every song is deeply embedded in my personal LLM. This episode, in two parts, was one of the best most recent ones. As with what Get Back did for the Beatles, when you know more about the people creating the art it has so much more value. #

I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort." #

Yesterday I ran a podcast, a voicemail to NakedJen saying she could/should use Claude or ChatGPT to create software. Later that day she told me about the software she had written. I tried using it, and and then interrogated ChatGPT which had been her programming partner, to explain what she did and what the app does. I'm not sure I have the actual story yet, have to talk with Jen live. But it turns out that the thesis was correct, and she was already using ChatGPT, had even given it a name — Harry, and was delegating tasks that I would want to use. Of course she was. Now I have to learn more from her about what she's doing. Stay tuned. #

On Feb 8, two months after Firefox announced they were pivoting to AI, I wrote a piece saying in 9 points what I would do if I ran Firefox, instead of what they were doing. Now a few weeks later, has there been any further development of this idea? #

There's something incredibly funny about slapstick and farting. I was flipping channels the other day and came across an old WC Fields movie. I used to love them when I was a kid, but figured now, with so many many fancier forms of entertainment this wouldn't get to me, but I was laughing uncontrollably the whole way through. Later, I caught a SNL skit with a boss being surprised by her employees with a Happy Birthday celebration and started farting uncontrollably. They're indulging in body-humor thanks largely (I think) to Sarah Sherman whose whole comedy schtick is about disgusting things about the human body, esp her own. The boss was played by Ashley Padilla, another SNL superstar. Everything she does is funny, esp farting. Even now, rewatching the segment, I couldn't help but laughing loudly. Farts are funny. I have no idea why. #

Video demo of using Claude to write a Hello World app. #

The source code for my podcast builder app is open source. Of course I use my outliner to edit the OPML file for the podcast text and link in the enclosure. I recommend opening it in Drummer. To see how the atts work, click on the suitcase icon with the cursor on the main head for each episode. The new att is enclosure, which is the URL of the audio for the podcast. Drummer automatically fills in the length and type. #

Podcast: Jen and I often exchange voicemails. Yesterday I sent one about how she, who is not a programmer, should try creating software with Claude or ChatGPT. I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get it to give you a file that you can run from your own desktop. But I explained that in the voicemail. Midway through I realized this a podcast, and checked with her if it would be okay and she was very emphatic that I should. You see NJ aside to being one of my best friends for life, is also a Natural Born Blogger or a person with maximum audacity. Her first instinct like mine is to share it and shut up. So that's what I'm doing. As usual I asked Claude to write the show notes. Hope you like it and thanks for listening! #

We should teach everyone how to write software with the AI apps. If the language is too hard, make a new language that's easier. Eventually we'll come up with a fantastic language but you and I won't invent it, people who are newbies in 2026 will. Just like there was a whole new generation of software for PCs, graphic UIs and then for networking and the web. Try this out in Claude.

• Can you create a browser-based app that asks for the user's name in a nice dialog, not the one built into the browser, and then takes the name and displays it using only css styles in a simple animated fashion. It quits when I hit the Escape key. Give it to me in the form of an html file that i can download and run by double-clicking it in the Finder. Call the app hello.html.

I tried doing it but there was a bug in the result, and I had to say "Claude, 'delighted to make your acquaintance' appears but nothing else."

I did a video demo of this exercise.

I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I know the streamers don't want us to have this info (I don't really understand why) but I really want it. BTW, they say the Green Knight is fantastic. Got the tip from a NYT email, but even they didn't say what the rating was, or even what their own reviewer said. Had to do this thing manually. Do they have any user-oriented creative people in the mix anywhere in this system?? #

There's a conference in Vancouver this weekend for people who are developing apps for Bluesky. They have a protocol they are proud of called AT Proto. A sexy name, but imho it doesn't do anything that Twitter's API did 20 years ago. So why do people hope it'll make a difference for independent developers? I think they're believing because they want to believe in something, a magic potion that will make it easy for the web to overcome the power of the silos like Twitter, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky too.

I feel most sympathy for the developers who are using AT Proto to make writing tools that use the web as their prototype for what a good text editor would do. But they overlook the problem that Bluesky itself has most of the limits on writing that Twitter has, although Twitter is working slowly to get rid of the limits, presumably because when Elon Musk saw them he thought the limits were bullshit, as I do too and always have. It was a tragedy for the web, the day Twitter decided the web wasn't a good model for writers of "tweets" — they had to get rid of style, links, editing, enclosures and add a character limit so people couldn't use it for a longform writing platform.

The division created a problem that users have always wanted someone to solve — they don't want to have to copy/paste everything they write into five different editors because none of the silos can connect, much like the Apple TV series of the same name. Each silo is a world unto itself. And somehow, Bluesky which preserves the silo tradition, also claims to be a lover and supporter of the open web, truly outstanding VC hype.

Here's what Bluesky could do to turn me into a fan. Get rid of the limits. Then the people who have created writing tools for AT Proto will have a market to serve. We will of course convert WordLand to serve that newly enabled user base. Maybe that's what the writing tools devs are anticipating — the day when Bluesky decides that character limits have outlived their usefulness. And that links, the core innovation of the web, deserves to be loved, not hidden as if it's too much power for their users. When we can add an enclosure to help be sure that podcasting survives the latest BigSilo onslaught (it has survived all that came before, I have no reason to believe this time will be any different). They do also need to support inbound and outbound RSS so we can easily hook everything together. I will praise them individually and collectively. I would love to be wrong! I will sing a song in their name.

Rule #4 of Rules for Standards-Makers: "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."

That's where Bluesky is stuck. If they want to keep their devs and to attract new ones, they have to give them access to all their users. All of them. And the only way to do that is to get rid of the limits, to make it the one twitter-like platform that can handle everyone else's tweets, and every writing tool ever written for the web before Twitter came along — ie Tumblr and WordPress, and everything anyone can think of that conforms to the standards that power the web — HTTP and HTML. I've suggested we settle on Markdown as the core writing functionality of these platforms.

The problem is that Bluesky doesn't have much of a business model if all their users can walk out the door every night. Not much monetizable value in that, but it would be good for the web, and for civilization.

Did some work on my RSS feed this morning.

1. There was only one source:account element in my RSS feed and it was to a Twitter account I lost control of a few weeks ago, the account I had there since 2006, that at one time was in the top 10 accounts on Twitter. I changed the account to bullmancuso — one of my many testing sites on Twit, and added my Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. I will check the bullmancuso account every so often, but the masto and bluesky ones are several times daily. And the funny thing is that I have far more Bluesky and Mastodon accounts than Twitter accounts. Put that in your press release. 😉
2. I updated the JSON version of the RSS feed, but noticed the Masto and Bluesky accounts (above) hadn't come through, and then on further investigation I realized that I hadn't been keeping it up to date for quite some time! The rule is every time something is added to the XML version I have to also add support for it in the JSON version. This is where Claude came in handy, it gave me a list of all the updates that were needed and I did them. We make a pretty good team imho. The two versions should be in sync now.
3. A note on my JSONification of RSS. When I first did it in 2010, it was on a lark. I was tired of hearing how people didn't like XML so could I please switch. So I did and published it, and I think no one used it. The idea of a JSON version of RSS is in the air again, so I brought it up to date. I want to serve it with a different https-friendly address, but probably won't get to that today.
4. The reason I wanted to work on this today because I have to add RSS-generating code to wpIdentity, so I needed to get warmed up on that part of the world.
5. The new version of the daverss package is 0.6.15.

Yesterday I hatched an idea of a demo program that turns RSS 2.0 feeds with rssCloud into a WhatsApp-type communicator. I called it rss.network, and asked ChatGPT to draw a prototype.

How I did it. I pasted a screen shot into ChatGPT, and wrote:

• "i want you to draw me something very specific, it's a chat screen like the image pasted above, but in the window it says rss.network. in the conversation two people are talking about how you can plug anything into the network now in 2028 because all an app needs to connect is RSS 2.0 support. it's a conversation between Harry and Sally. two or three messages back and forth. use your imagination."

It did exactly what I asked. The result was this image.

I bought the domain and turned it into a website in a few minutes with my outliner.

One day later (today)..

I wrote a description of the app (below) and gave it to Claude.ai, including the image that ChatGPT produced.

• "here's a screen shot of a mythical app that someday i'd like to develop. i have all the network stuff done, rssCloud servers, websockets software. but the user interface i don't have. i want something as simple as what you see here. a user has a name and each message is an RSS 2.0 . the user's profile info is in the header part of the feed. so don't worry about that stuff, the messages will arrive automatically, all the app has to do is place them on a screen that looks like this. how to??"

It came back with a very usable design and implementation as a browser-based JavaScript app. I put it in the demo folder on my Digital Ocean server where you can run it by clicking on this link. It doesn't do anything, but it really would be easy to put it together with feeds, as we use them in FeedLand and WordPress. It's quite a team.

For now you'd use FeedLand to set it up for you and your friends, who would just use it. (I thought I needed an identity system, but what I really need to define a chat group is a subscription list, the standard stuff of RSS 2.0 systems.)

Should I finish this app tomorrow, or should I let someone else have the honor? 🙂

It's time to adjust our thinking about where the value is in software. Getting a new design ready to use in order to experiment, to try out a new idea, was a big bottleneck, now you just have to ask for it.

I may have found my calling in all this. I know how to design network user interfaces. The important thing is now to use open formats and protocols so we don't go through the same nightmare of silos we've dealt with since Twitter 1.0 (over 20 years now).

rss.network sounds nice. What would it be? #

Sometimes I buy a name just I like it, rss.network. #

When I heard about Matt's product Beeper I thought wow what if that were on the RSS network. For a chat program that's trying to support all protocols, take a shortcut, immediately connect to all kinds of insanely great things that will blow peoples' minds. RSS is going places, lots of new products coming out these days. I think maybe finally we're giving up on what you give up using the silos. #

This piece explains the tragedy of how we've set up communication using our networks, all based on exclusive products, rather than standards which mean you can use whatever software you want for more and more of your communication. #

Send this video to your favorite Democrat and let them know that we would pay money to have this video run as an ad running everywhere, exactly as-is, no editing, not made glamorous. This is the truth that absolutely is not getting out about the law the Repubs want. We need to communicate with each other using the amazing tools we have at our disposal now in the third decade of the freaking 21st century. #

Send this video to your favorite Democrat and let them know that we would pay money to have this video run as an ad running everywhere, exactly as-is, no editing, not made glamorous. This is the truth that absolutely is not getting out about the SAVE law the Repubs want. We need to communicate with each other using the amazing tools we have at our disposal now in the third decade of the freaking 21st century. #

My linkblog was down. Thanks to Scott Hanson it's back up! #

My linkblog was down. Thanks to Scott Hanson it's back up! #

If you're using FeedLand and running a WordPress blog, you can install a blogroll just like the one I have at scripting.com or blogroll.social. #

My linkblog is down. Still diggin! #

When I heard about Matt's product Beeper I thought wow what if that were on the RSS network.

I think RSS should be here. Makes sense doesn't it?

Why not an open independent format from nowhere that no one objects to you using and will not do anything ever to turn you off. It seems it would be fairly easy to add two-way support. 🙂

Meanwhile I have to tend to the past. I had a server go down the other day, and haven't been able to get it running again. It's a very old one, the first I used PagePark for hosting the apps. So I'd rather not have to dig into whatever it is that's keeping it from running. This morning I moved the test app for XML-RPC, betty.userland.com, to another server, so this page now works again. #

WordPress can now connect via MCP for both reading and writing. This sounds like a possible alternative for the wpcom api that we're building on in WordLand. Sometimes it feels like everything is being reinvented. If the world would just stand still for a moment we might be able to do some building. I wonder how the advent of AI is affecting how WordPress is being developed. I know it's changing everything here. #

You can't really use Claude to do research. It always assumes you're trying to do something. If you don't tell it what you're trying to do it guesses, and then starts telling you what to do. Its guesses are always wildly wrong. How do you tell it to stop telling you what to do? It totally disrupts your train of thought. But it makes me miss the days of Stack Exchange and Google search. #

Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes.

And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic.

People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be:

The first question could be:

1. Do you have your birth certificate or passport?

In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed.

And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law.

They might want to keep things as they are.

I’ve watched Mozilla not get it for what feels like decades.

Their only legit function imho is to make the real actual web be a great platform for independent developers.

For that, start by adding user controlled storage to the web, a few standard formats, and let app devs take it from there.

I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved.

So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.

The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.

Here's a screen shot of the domains folder.

Here's the script as a screen shot and GitHub doc.

This is just a way to preserve a little of the Frontier culture. Hard to explain in words. Easier to show as screen shots.

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do.

It's another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.

How mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer. Then at least you'd know why you're there. 😄

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do.

It's another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.

And how mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer or Soul-Sucker or You-Cuck. Then at least you'd know why you're there. 🙂

BTW, as long as Bluesky has a 300 char limit and no style or links, I'm going to have to hand-translate posts there to become posts here where no such limits prevail. At some point either they give up on the limits or I give up on them.

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do.

It's another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it's a fucking machine. it has no idea what i'm doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

AND THE STUPID THING ABOUT CLAUDE IS IT DOESN'T EVEN SAY WHAT IT THINKS YOU'RE TRYING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO READ WHAT IT SAYS AND THEN TRY TO GUESS. YOU QUICKLY LOSE YOUR MIND THAT WAY. MAYBE THAT'S THE POINT.

How mad can you get at a machine named Bluesky or Claude. They should call these things Mind-Killer. Then at least you'd know why you're there. 😄

Happy to report there are FeedLand users who want to edit OPML lists there so they can subscribe to them in another feed reader that has support for dynamic OPML lists. I am happy because this is a very cool feature that will be so much more fun if other people use it. If you want to set it up so you have a list on feedland.com that you want to subscribe to in another reader, instead of subscribing to all your feeds, like this — create a category for each list you want to hook up to another reader. It will be much easier to manage down the road. Categories in FeedLand are very simple, but if you use them carefully, they really help. Here's a screen shot of my Cats menu to give you an idea. I really use FeedLand in the most powerful ways, but it'll really click when others do the same. We might be there now. #

Video demo: Using categories in FeedLand for dynamic OPML lists. #

There's a problem with one of my Digital Ocean servers today, it turns out it's a problem with Caddy, not sure why — but it doesn't seem to be on the computer any longer. I can figure out how to re-install it, but it always is a bit tricky, and I wish I didn't have to do it. In diagnosing the problem I used Claude, it asked all kinds of questions, gave me commands to run, and I dutifully reported back the results like a good servant. It's so funny to be a tool for the cyborg. Then it hit me, why don't they offer servers with built-in maintenance by Claude. I would type commands at like "install the following apps on this new server I want to commission, and check into it every so often and if it's running out of some resource, get in touch with me and let me know how much more it'll cost, and I'll just use it and you can keep it running." I think it's a really nice application for AI. #

I wanted to subscribe to the GiftArticles feed from Mastodon. It makes it possible to read news on paywalled sites. I found the feed by going to the site the feed comes from and tacking a .rss at the end. You can read the feed in a browser, and my feeder test app can read it as well. But for some reason FeedLand won't subscribe to it. Have to dig into that soon. I'm looking forward to doing some long-overdue work on FeedLand before doing the next push. #

A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in 2006 and 2026. #

Andy Baio noted that it was 20 years ago today that Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet. He also noted it was the day that Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was interesting piece written by Phil Jones on how everyone watched me all the time and they were all trying to figure out what I do. Fact: At the time I was trying to make OPML grow big like RSS had, but it didn't happen. The big concept was the World Outline that would be an open directory where everyone created browsable outlines that linked to their own outlines and others, in a completely fluid way. In order to be something it had to catch on, and it didn't. In the intervening twenty years, I tried it again and again to start a technology party like blogging and podcasting, viral viralities — but nothing stuck. I came close once, with Twittergram, but I didn't want to run a company, I wanted to keep developing software. Sold it to Betaworks, but they never marketed it. Instead I helped them launch bit.ly and had a blast doing that. I love doing PR. Anyway I guess I got lazy. And I wasn't building on the web any longer. Instead I was trying to fit in between Twitter and Facebook mostly. Now I'm getting ready, much older and more tired, but wiser — to go back to roots, to use WordPress as my blogging platform, as if it were Frontier — and see what we can build out of the web and if it'll stick. That's why I'm so relentless at getting people to play with me. It's the same damn thing Phil Jones describes. And OPML is going to be a big part, yet again — only this time playing a vastly different role, with lists of feed locations on the web. If it works we will call it the feediverse. Even if it doesn't work. 😉 #

BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four. #

The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. It generated this copy because he needed an example post for a programming technique it was testing for me.

• There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these formats matter, the answer is simple — because they still work, and they still let you own your own data.
• The feed reader of 2026 isn't that different from the one of 2003. Entries come in, you read them, you move on. What's changed is the ecosystem around it. Aggregators became social networks. Social networks became walled gardens. And somewhere in the shuffle, people forgot they could just… subscribe.
• The architecture of the early web had a certain elegance. Every site was a server. Every page was a document. Every link was a contract. We've gotten away from that in the pursuit of engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, but the bones are still there. RSS is still being published by millions of sites. OPML is still the right format for sharing lists of feeds.
• The tools we build now should work with that grain, not against it. A reader that respects the format, surfaces what's new, and gets out of your way is more useful than any algorithm.

I've written a bunch of pieces with this premise, what if I were CEO of Apple being the first, in January 1996, before Steve Jobs returned. This time I'm writing as if I were CEO of Bluesky, a company that just got a new interim CEO, Toni Schneider, formerly of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. This started as a comment in reply to Colin Devroe on Mastodon, but quickly exceeded its 500 character limit. And no doubt I will expand on it over the course of the day.

Here's the issue. AT Proto is proposing to be a better web than the collection of standards that make up the web in 2026, starting with HTTP and HTML and DNS and including Markdown, WebSockets, MP3 and RSS and probably a few others. Maybe they can come up with something better organized and with more consistent interfaces. But the web doesn't work that way. Once it embraces a method of doing something, it goes on, and doesn't reconsider. It's exactly like evolution in the natural world.

Example: RSS was a deeply entrenched competitor when Atom came along, intending to do everything RSS did but do it differently and better. It did get some support and still does to this day, but the differences are flattened out, most feed-reading software doesn't know if the news came from RSS or Atom, the distinction is buried in low-level code.

If you were to look at the size of the developer base for the web, it would be clear how steep a hill AT Proto has to climb, and why? What's in it for Bluesky except satisfaction of ego? Not a good business proposition for a startup.

But they can't abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give it to a standards body, work with them, but at the same time work on interop with products like WordPress and support inbound and outbound RSS. Markdown would be nice too. Get rid of the character limit and support links, styling, enclosures (for podcasting) and make their posts editable. In other words they have some catching up to do re the web. That's where their leadership would be welcome instead of questioned.

Colin, I don't think they should do it for you and me, they should do it as an investment in their future. Get in the game. The idea of creating something that stands alone is imho very un-web, and not differentiated from their competition. The web was made for small companies like Bluesky. Trying to act like a giant in a way even the biggest giants wouldn't work is not a formula for success. I think Toni and Matt would understand this.

Quick note on Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management probably is the reason this happened now. They should also clean up the promises they've made about Bluesky as a platform. I've done the homework, having developed a few apps using their API, some are still running. If I were their new CEO, I would announce that in addition to supporting AT Proto, they will also hook up Bluesky to the web. The web is already decentralized. Lots of developers know how to build web stuff. We can all breathe the same air. #

Knight Foundation: "How did a private foundation with roots in local journalism and civic life find itself on a cap table with venture capital firms like Bain Capital Crypto and Bloomberg Beta to invest in a tech startup?" Imho because they misled you. #

Bluesky raised $100 million last April, just announcing it now. No doubt part of Toni Schneider's cleanup, new CEO, need to get this out in public now. It was a mistake to keep it hidden. #

Thinking about linkblogging, my blogroll software doesn't do it correctly. When you click on the link to a linkblogged link, you must go to the place the linkblog entry points to, not the linkblog itself. I know that sounds confusing, but here's an example. It's obvious we can skip the stop and go right to the thing they were pointing to. It's awkward in the code because the RSS 2.0 item-level link element is doing double duty. I think I should add a source:linkblogLink element. I also think it's a good time to start discussing this among devs. There's some very nice fertile ground here and an opportunity to work with each other. #

I wanted to change the URL for the source namespace in the RSS 2.0 feed for my blog, from http to https. I thought this might be a nice warmup project. Started at 9AM and it's now 10:45AM and it might work now. Let's see. Nope. Thought of something I didn't do. Let's see. Yes! We win, sorta. Bing? #

I talked with a friend who makes a feed reader app, suggesting how to hook up to a linkblogging tool. Thought I would share the instructions to everyone. I'd love to see more people using software to do linkblogs, rather than do them by hand. Then we could build systems for distributing them. This is how we create markets, by getting more people automating their work, and thus we are able to connect components together. So if you make a feed reader, how about hooking up with linkblogging tools? #

I have a hard and fast rule about phone calls that solicit private information. I hang up. The worst are insurance companies. They expect you to enter all kinds of confidential info on a phone from a number that doesn't even verify as belonging to the company. Caller ID has nothing to say about them. Yet at least some of these are legit and unless you do what they want, you don't get your meds. #

Today's song: You Never Can Tell. #

Small update to the source namespace. source:localTime is a channel-level element. It was incorrectly stated that it is item-level. #

Podcast: A one-line comment on Brent Simmons' blog got me started on a 10-minute ramble about suspension of disbelief, in software. Also a story about meeting Ted Nelson at the West Coast Computer Faire in SF in 1979. Skiing. And other miscellanea. BTW, I didn't even remember the quote correctly and I might have misinterpreted it. It's still a good story imho. 😉 #

I asked Claude: "What is OpenClaw useful for? Do you think I could use it in my programming work, based on what you know about what I do?" Basically it's for non-programmers. Then I asked: "I wonder if I could make software that would be useful to people who love OpenClaw?" That was more interesting and included in the response I linked to, above. #

A clip from a video interview with Marc Andreessen has been making the rounds. He was a very successful entrepreneur in the early days of the web and has been a very successful venture capitalist in years following. He's 54 years old. You should watch the clip before reading what it inspired me to say, on Bluesky and below, after a lot of consideration. I kept it about me, and my experience, not coming to any conclusions about him or anyone else.

• I went through a heavy duty midlife crisis when I was in my early 40s. I started seeing a therapist. I was depressed because I had achieved everything I was supposed to, I learned later, but didn't get the love and acceptance I felt I deserved.
• The therapist kept asking about my childhood and my relationship with my parents. I said I really don't want to do this. Why can't I keep going the way I have been going (as pmarca describes). "You can do that, she said — but you won't have as rich of a life."
• So I gave it a try, and it was the beginning of an education that somehow I had missed. Inside I had come to conclusions that were flat-out wrong. I got to know myself. I stopped thinking others were responsible for things that didn't make me happy. Usually it was me, projecting on them.
• I learned how to get what I want. She was right. I'm still learning 30 years later.

I'm software developer, that's really all I wanted to do — and blogging and podcasting, ideation and programming. I made the career I wanted, both before and after the therapy sessions that got me started on my trip through myself. I've learned that I am driven by my subconscious, the feeler, even though my concscious self, the thinker, denies there is such a thing.

Whether you accept it or not, you do have feelings and you are driven by them.

One of the great things about going inward is you learn to relate to the subconscious, to form a team — a parent-child relationship, where the subconscious is the all-powerful child, and the conscious can see things the child is too self-centered, too narcissistic to see. There are other people around, and the things that freak out the child often aren't dangerous. But if they are, the parent is there to help, but that's all it can do. The power is with the child. Lots more to say about this. And btw, yes, I am very woke, relatively speaking — having lived in Northern California for 30+ years, and have sampled all kinds of workshops and retreats, and visit my hot tub most days, to remember that I don't only exist in my mind, something programmers are particularly subject to — because we do a lot of thinking, it's a big part of what we do. All the while we still have the body, the child, ready to flee or attack, if danger should come. Or ready to feel glee when what you just did worked the first time. 😄

Thinking about the SAVE Act, 60 Minutes should do a segment on what you have to go through to get a birth certificate in any random state. It's a lot of work, I've had to do it twice in the last few years. You'd have to be a pretty committed voter to be willing to do all that work. I imagine it would be even harder if you're black, and it's going to be hugely hard for married women who changed their last name when they got married. And how much you want to bet they don't accept birth certificates from Muslim countries? It is the biggest scam ever, and if the journalists don't cover it that way, always, with no both-sides-isms, then we should all know this is the end of journalism in the US. And btw also the end of real elections in the US too. The Repubs these days like to say they're against the "deep state" — well my friends this is about the most deep state bullshit ever. #

They've been having intelligent and clear-thinking guests on CNN and MSNOW on the coverage of the Iran War, unusually good discourse. But the best coverage I've heard has been from Frontiline podcasts. There's a new one out, haven't listened to it yet, but the one I heard yesterday was very informative and probably a better briefing than our president has been getting (or paying attention to). #

I added Paul Graham to my blogroll at scripting.com. Another massive oversight. #

An example. This isn't all the data that WordPress keeps for each post, it's just the stuff that WordLand uses. We add some of our own metadata, that's how it is extensible. It's open source, and it's evolved for 20+ years, with a strong ethos of not breaking devs. It could have been twitter, or masto or even bluesky, but they don't show through enough features to be useful as "web text." We want to use all the features of text on the web. I may be the only one who sees this but I predict in a couple of years if we aren't subsumed by AI everyone will say they always knew this is what WordPress is for. 😄 #

The thing that we all missed is that WordPress is the best candidate for a standard for what an individual social network message is. #

If I knew how AI would work with software, I would've done things differently to prepare for this. I find myself wanting to ask questions about my code that I don't have proper tools to answer. I have to get all my code managed with the new system, but not sure that's even the right way to go. Once I started using it to build full bits of deployed code, not to just answer questions about the work I'm doing one day at a time, I've become confused about planning my own work. #

24 years ago I had life-saving heart surgery. The treatment was not available to my grandmother who had the genes from which I inherited the condition. She died very young, but that was normal in her time, there was no treatment for this kind of disease beyond, don't exert yourself too much for the rest of your (short) life. Do you think heart surgeons are less useful now that we've had such amazing innovation in one freaking lifetime? Right now we're just beginning to discover new ways AI gives us the same kind of new power that bypass surgery gave to surgeons. #

I gotta say some days I start with a lot on my mind and am driven to write. This is one of those days. Maybe I'm inspired by the torrent of posts by my blogger friend ma.tt. Blogging can be a solitary thing or a relative thing. When you blog about something I have something to say about, I write on my blog and link back to yours, that's relative. The problem with comments in the old blogging world is that my comment resides on your blog. No more of that. I want equal stature for all writing, your comment should appear on your blog, yet still be easy to find from the other person's blog (and this is very important) with their support, it has to be something they want their readers to see. Otherwise the comment is still on your blog where your readers can see it. #

Coder is derogatory term btw, as if our work was like a telegram coder, but it's understandable I guess because all the lay people see is us typing on a computer and being grouchy when they interrupt our train of thought. Coder is analogous to calling a chef a chopper. You have to understand the activity you're proposing that AI is replacing. And I find all the discussions about art very harmful — because AI opens up graphic art to people who never thought they could do it. I bet you some absolutely fantastic artists are blossoming right now. Calling it slop is just as disrespectful as calling art expressed in software "code." BTW they said the same bullshit about bloggers and we know how that turned out. #

Happy Friday The 13th! 😉 #

We're still fixing problems created by the switch to https on the web. Reported a problem yesterday, was surprised to find an inconsistency in the way WordPress represents guids in its RSS feed for a post and in the API. This morning I posted an issue on the WordPress repo on GitHub. I don't think they can fix either approach without breakage, so they probably have to leave it as-is. I updated wpIdentity package to normalize guids it gets from the API to lowercase, so even if they change the implementation my software won't break. Another reason we're still paying for what Google decided we needed. What we don't need — BigCo's f-ing with the f-ing web. #

As you know Jake Savin is getting Frontier to run on current Linux and Mac OS systems. Today he posted a wonderful screen shot. It's how Frontier's built-in web server says "hello world." #

If we can get the web to come back, Scripting News could have new relevance. The age of the silo really hurt my rep. But I think people will ultimately appreciate that I never turned by back on the web. It was either the web or the highway as far as I was concerned. I've already lived under the thumb of a corporate platform vendor. I'd rather give up than try it again. And by the web coming back, I mean when products are expected to interop, the way podcast clients interop. I don't care if they're forced to do it, or do it willfully, with gusto — but I know and so do people who tried to develop on owned platforms know, that it just doesn't work if there's a BigCo in charge of your destiny. There's always an acquisition or reorg just around the corner that sacrifices your future, often for no reason other than they don't care. #

Just added Daring Fireball to my blogroll. What a huge oversight. Glad to get this fixed. #

Substack would be the web's printer, if they supported inbound RSS. #

Bluesky is actually pretty close to being on the web. The biggest missing piece is inbound RSS. They already support outbound, it could use a review and tuneup, but that half is mostly there. I would even go a bit further, if they really supported RSS, it would be the web. #

Try entering this into Claude or ChatGPT:

• "debugging an app that uses wordpress rss feeds and noticed that guids are http but other addresses in the feed are https. this causes trouble."

Here's a screen shot of the Claude response.

A while back Matt was giving me grief, in a friendly way, about how scripting.com still uses http addresses. I could switch over, but then all the images and included files posted before 2014 or so would break. The minor gain in security on a site that doesn't ask for any private information, is totally not worth throwing out all the work I did on a site that actually has historic importance is just a bad deal. It would be a solving a problem no one but Google has (and it's not even clear what that problem is, and why I should care). There's a principle here too — letting one company dictate to us how the web works, well I got into the web to get away from that.

Anyway, the reason they still use http in a place where one expects https is apparently is the same reason. It would break things that they don't want to break. I'm not suggesting they change it, but somewhere in my codebase somehow the http addresses are getting converted to https, and I haven't (yet) been able to track it down. I'm pretty sure it's a bug I unknowingly introduced.

PS: When I'm calling through the API, I get back a record that has a different guid from what's in the feed. Seems like the API and the feed should be in agreement. This is the code that gets the post record. My guess to get them into agreement, I'm going to have to hack this, changing https to http. And there is the reason they can't fix this, and just have to live with this mess. I think overall the people who manage the feed and the API are doing a pretty great job, btw. You have to know I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it.

PPS: I reported the problem once it was fully diagnosed, on the WordPress repo for Calypso.

Thinking of AI and how it relates to software development, I'm working in the old mode and the new mode. The old mode is I build a project over a few years. I try to bury bits of functionality behind interfaces, either APIs or UIs, and hope I can forget how they work and just access them via the interfaces. Repeat the process. In the new mode, I rely on the machine to remember all that. Claude Code is the key to doing that, using a GitHub repo. And then two or more people can work at the higher level. Obviously the next thing is to see if there aren't some interfaces we can build that are even higher level. The evolution of AI and languages go hand in hand. On the other hand, human beings being what we are, it's just as likely as there will be a wild proliferation of new even more complex interfaces, because now we can rely on the machines to remember the complexities, and their limit is, compared to humans, practically infinite.

Trump’s naive attacks or threats against Iran, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Cuba and lack of support for Ukraine guarantee that every country that doesn’t have nukes is going to be working overtime to get them. Assuming they don’t already have the equiv of the Strait of Hormuz. Assuming the world survives Trump do you really think they’re going to let the US have as much power as it has up until Trump? They and we have to limit the power of all countries big and small. Trump is the warning that you can’t assume things will always be as they always have been. #

It is incredibly stubborn at insisting on giving you orders or deciding for itself what it will do. According to these AI's the human will isn't important, I couldn't possibly have arrived in the chat with a goal. I am blown away by what I can do, but I absolutely hate how these bots try to dominate, always, and never remembers. There should be a macro for: "I will tell you what to do." #

An important best practice is to always start fresh threads by asking the old thread to prepare a handoff.md file that I can give to the next one, so we don't have to always start over. It takes some getting used to because coding doesn't work that way. Everything about your app is in three classes, CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There's also package.json for server apps. And I always have a worknotes.md file for every project. And that's it, the runtime isn't like Claude or ChatGPT. You have to get practiced at starting fresh threads because there's only so much data the app can store for your project. Somehow having the handoff.md doc it effectively does garbage collection? And there are limits to what the "make me a handoff" can do for you, it does forget things between threads. I don't understand how people with large projects don't go completely crazy. #

I put another couple of hours in my from-scratch right-sized Claude project. I decided we should switch from a browser-based app with no server component to a Node.js app with a browser-based UI. I felt it would be substantially easier to develop as a server app, and would more easily be enhanced with a SQL database running behind it. So I learned how to do that with Claude Code. had to slap its wrist when it tried, twice, to look at and change code outside of the freaking sandbox. I was promised it never would do that. I have the server running in PagePark, which has a built-in Heroku-like system I wrote a few years ago so I could manage all my apps from a CLI app, on Unix at Digital Ocean. Then we created a nice UI running in the browser. Two hours. And how did it make me feel? Mind bomb! #

Yesterday, I put another couple of hours in my from-scratch right-sized Claude project. I decided we should switch from a browser-based app with no server component to a Node.js app with a browser-based UI. I felt it would be substantially easier to develop as a server app, and would more easily be enhanced with a SQL database running behind it. So I learned how to do that with Claude Code. had to slap its wrist when it tried, twice, to look at and change code outside of the freaking sandbox. I was promised it never would do that. I have the server running in PagePark, which has a built-in Heroku-like system I wrote a few years ago so I could manage all my apps from a CLI app, on Unix at Digital Ocean. Then we created a nice UI running in the browser. Two hours. And how did it make me feel? Mind bomb!

An important best practice is to always start fresh threads by asking the old thread to prepare a handoff.md file that I can give to the next one, so we don't have to always start over. It takes some getting used to because coding doesn't work that way. Everything about your app is in three classes, CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There's also package.json for server apps. And I always have a worknotes.md file for every project. And that's it, the runtime isn't like Claude or ChatGPT. You have to get practiced at starting fresh threads because there's only so much data the app can store for your project. Somehow having the handoff.md doc it effectively does garbage collection? And there are limits to what the "make me a handoff" can do for you, it does forget things between threads. I don't understand how people with large projects don't go completely crazy.

It is incredibly stubborn at insisting on giving you orders or deciding for itself what it will do. According to these AI's the human will isn't important, I couldn't possibly have arrived in the chat with a goal. I am blown away by what I can do, but I absolutely hate how these bots try to dominate, always, and never remembers. There should be a macro for: "I will tell you what to do."

I found out recently that my blog is in of the default startup set for NetNewsWire. What an honor to be included. Thanks Brent! 😉 #

The Guardian is the coolest news org, paywall-wise. Why don't they innovate, and create a EZ-Pass for news, and run it for other high quality, reader centered pubs. We pay $1 per article read. That's how I as a reader want to do it. I don't like subscriptions. #

Bluesky has a new CEO, Toni Schneider former CEO of Automattic. I have known Toni for many years, dating back to his startup, Oddpost, that I praised on my blog, and his partner was then quoted in Wired saying Scripting News is media. That meant a lot to me at the time, and it was true. I was very proud that I had played a small part in their success.

I had a virtual meeting with Toni a couple of years ago about their identity product, then in development, urging them to include storage in it, but as far as I know that didn't happen.

Toni believes that Bluesky is a distributed social media app, but I've been all around this, wrote some software for their protocol to see if I was missing something, and concluded that it's typical tech industry hype, there's no reality to the claim. They're selling something they don't have, and I don't think they can do it and preserve the feature set of their product.

Here's a search for Bluesky on my blog. You can see that I have taken a great interest in the product.

Scripting News unfortunately is not as influential as it once was when I praised Oddpost, but I think this advice is equally valuable as it was in 2002. I think the shortest path for Bluesky to achieve its vision is to hook up with WordPress, that would give us a path into it that is decentralized. If we ever talk about this, ironically, I will be selling Toni on his own product.

Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t because I don’t know." #

An app I'd like someone to do. I want to underline the word reason in a blog post I wrote, below. I want to point to a page with a definition of the word, as a verb, not a noun. As far as I can see there is no page on the web for that. Your app will have a dialog at the top of the page where you type the query, and it generates a page with a static URL that I can point to where the definition will display if the user clicks my link. I would paste the URL where I want it. And that's just the start, the key thing is short replies to queries needed to support something you're writing. I'm surprised Google doesn't do this. And I'd much rather use someone other than Google, but it has to be someone who will be around for a while. You can put an ad on each of the pages, but don't overdo it, or you'll incentivize a competitor. #

Let me tell you something about AIs. They are not in any way ready to develop the kinds of apps I make. I spent a full week trying to get it to do so. What happened here is that we all were blown away, correctly, with what ChatGPT could do, and loved that it kept getting better. I've used it and Claude to make apps, and that is also amazing, unprecedented, maybe the biggest innovation ever. But. It doesn't have the memory you need to keep a full app in memory at once. And the tools we have now, compilers, editors, runtimes, do remember the whole thing, they are really good at that, but they don't understand at the level a human can and does. And sessions are too limited. And it makes unbelievably huge mistakes. Maybe they will get there, but we also had high hopes for the last breakthrough, the web, in its early days, and it didn't achieve its promise. Turns out the web gets you Trump, and Trump just discovered he has nukes. Cory talks about enshittification and that's right — but it's even worse than that. The tech industry always oversells the innovation. I am one of them in that regard. In this one I'm so far just a user. Also I haven't given up. Still diggin! #

Carville is obviously right. No political party can afford to demonize a group of voters based on gender and race, esp when they make up approx 33% of the electorate. #

Reporter at the Guardian: "We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie." It's true. I was covering tech realistically starting in 1994, was writing for Wired, people thought I was being too hard on them, but I was actually like you too easy. But people didn’t want to believe tech was evil, they believed that the young people that were running tech were idealists and maybe they were when they started, but by the time the billions started flowing and they stopped caring about people and started only caring about money. A piece I wrote in 1996, after going to a tech industry conference." #

My friend Manton Reece has a new feed reader called Inkwell. The thing that's great about Manton is he tries out new ideas. This is a feed reader of experimentation. Let's see if this works, Manton asks. We'll find out. I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways. I think before long they won't laugh at the idea that RSS is at least as good as AT Proto. (That's a joke, RSS is so much better in so many ways.)

BTW, I'm not sure how Inkwell will fit into my life. I want to try the features of his product, but I am already in FeedLand, all my feed subscriptions emanate from there. I could import my feeds into Inkwell, it supports OPML import, but the subs would not stay in sync. Something for Manton to worry about in a few months or years. No doubt a lot of people are going to love Inkwell, I love it because it's new and creative and represents a substantial investment in RSS. We all got an upgrade today thanks to Manton.

If you want to get an idea of how it works, he did a video demo for his beta testers.

I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app.

Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently.

I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be.

And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood.

If he were alive today he'd be busting silos.

Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users. #

I was looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters angry and arguing about nothing, dramatic music mocks the awful writing and acting. Does it get better? Reviewers loved it. I've seen this before. Previous seasons were great, so the next season automatically must be great too. #

I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom.

• Development around RSS has never "lain dormant." That's a perception not reality. Let's stop handicapping what we agree is a very useful and freedom-building system like RSS. You're telling the story that makes people believe it's gone. It is not gone.
• Without the NYT the rest of the news publishing world would probably have never adopted RSS. The NYT drove the liftoff of RSS. Google's product did come to dominate, but there were excellent feed readers long before that.

Happened to the Mac too

• In the early days of the web, it was conventional wisdom that there was no new software for the Mac, all the developers were flocking to Windows. Maybe all the devs were, but the best web server and development software, writing software, was on the Mac.

A blogroll for 2026

• BTW, since you mention Kottke's blogroll, I'd love for you to have a look at mine. You can see it on my blog at scripting.com, or on the WordPress version of my blog at daveverse.org. A screen shot.
• It's a realtime blogroll, the blogs appear in the order in which they last updated. You can expand each item to see the titles of the last five pieces, with a 300-char excerpt, and a link to read the whole thing. It's the blogroll I wanted in the early 00s, a clear indication that there's nothing dormant going on here, Cory.
• You can install it on your own system, it works as a WordPress plugin, so it's especially easy to use it on a WordPress site.

My old ass

• I'm working my old ass off developing for the web and RSS every freaking day Cory.
• I won't stop until we have a social web running with all replaceable parts, no lock-in, as decentralized as the web itself and of course RSS is part of the web.

I remember liking the first three seasons of Industry on HBO, so I just watched them again. It's a Succession clone, in a way, not exactly the same story, but the same type of story. I waited until the final episode of Season 4 had aired to start at the beginning. So now I'll be watching fresh stuff, which is kind of scary because I found that I had forgotten some of the big plot points, I wonder how much of the new season I'll understand. I also found it dragged toward the end of Season 3, where they do a trick with the audio, make it sound really portentious and dramatic with a promise of evil, for events, which without the music would seem mundane, tiresome, kind of pathetic actually, embarrassing and just plain stupid. But at least it was just part of one season, there are some series that are all about nothing, made to seem important. I try to imagine the writers' room at such shows. Do they know how ridiculous it is? Maybe they don't care. Next up is The Pitt, which everyone says is great, esp doctors, tried watching it but couldn't stand the gore. #

The video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video. #

Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news? #

Remember when, just weeks ago, the Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congress. The video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video. #

If you have an X account, esp if you have a lot of followers, please RT this post. I'd like to get my real account back. Thanks for your help. #

On the other hand, it's hard to get Claude.ai to really apply itself to my own software. It likes to drive. Same with ChatGPT. #

What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good girl?" Rub behind the ears. When they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing. #

We had a problem today with one of the servers, it meant a bunch of services weren't working. Never found the actual problem, but something changed and the misbehaving server started working. Learned a lot about managed databases on Digital Ocean. #

The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was going to evolve. I asked if it remembered how Rules worked in MORE. Yes, it explained it correctly. Then I said I'd like "faceless" rules, where we could edit the source so the outlines looked the way we wanted them to look, using Rules. In the time it took me to write a sentence here, it finished the job. I added a home page for the AI outliner folder with links to the other docs in the folder. Then I did a bunch more changes, I could go on like this forever. It was like working with a team on a product, only the team turns around new versions in seconds, and eventually runs out of space (gets tired?) and I have to start another thread. I just did a transition and it seemed to pick up pretty close to where we left off. I have a lot of ideas here. Expect an explosion of new versions of popular software writing by individual people. We'd better make sure the standards of the web are really well documented. #

I asked for a feature of the outliner from Drummer that it automatically opens a file in read-only mode if there's a URL parameter with the address of an OPML file. Like this. #

Then I had to ask Claude.ai to write me a nice little outliner that runs in the browser. And it did. With a flourish. It was designed to make me the guy who designed outliners for most of a lifetime, and I have to say it was very nicely done, for a two-minute project. Even for a two-week project it's pretty nice. Then I asked it to do a priorArt outline, and it looks really good in the this.how template. The power of standards. And I had a full day of work even while Claude.ai was doing these mind bombs for me. #

I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser." Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other cells using point and click. If you go down this path, ask it to keep a user's guide current, and then ask it to put in features, and just describe them in standard spreadsheet terminology. The trouble starts when you want to make something that doesn't have a standard terminology yet because it's new. #

"It really tastes like a pizza!!"

Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s, now heads up the MacArthur Foundations. It feels like the old band is getting back together. 😉 #

I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)

They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.

Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.

It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference.

Some of my takeaways from the meetup.

• Getting more people to use Bluesky and AT Proto was the topic. I don't know how to do that, and I don't think there's anything developers can do to make it happen. I think both products are what they will continue to be.
• What's needed is to get all the various systems to interop. There must be a definition of what a text message is. Since we're trying to make the social web, I recommend looking to the web for the definition of what a text object is. I would go with a subset of the web. I outlined the features in the textcasting doc I wrote a few years ago. I am using Markdown in my software, and it seems like a lot of other people feel this is a good subset to use.
• Bluesky will never be a distributed system because it has features that depend on being centralized. That's okay, perfection isn't needed.
• Even better would be to have all systems support both inbound and outbound RSS, then they can do whatever they want internally, and users can participate using any blog and any feed reader. And independent developers can go crazy trying out all kinds of variants. That's how it works in WordLand 2 coming real soon now. 😄
• More people will use a system when it's fun and/or interesting and they can't wait to see what else happened there. Like watching Alysa Liu videos now. People don't think about what they want, they just want it. That's what Twitter was like when it started. Unfortunately you can't start it again, if you want people to want it, you have do something new.
• I talk too much. That's the downside of having an interesting conference. At a boring one where people give PowerPoint type talks, I can listen, form my opinions, write a blog post that no one reads and get back to work on my projects.
• One day I'd love to go to one of these meetings and find people I can work with. You can be sure I'll let you know when that happens. Last conference I went to where that happened was at WordCamp Canada last October, but that wasn't about the social web, it was about WordPress.
• I got to talk with Mike Masnick. I don't understand why he has a board seat at Bluesky and promotes it as a decentralized system. He's a highly credible reporter at TechDirt, but you can't be part of a company you cover and report on it with credibility. And it is not now and imho never will be a distributed system. I talked with him about this, at one of the virtual groups-of-six tables, but he didn't respond. I don't like it when Bluesky misleads users and they buy it, but as bad as that is, it is predictable. A credible journalist doing it, I can't comprehend that. I am open to being convinced, but I'm kind of an expert on this stuff, so it's really going to blow my mind if I'm wrong.

If you followed me on Twitter, please follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the f, it is what it is. One more thing, guys — pay your taxes. #

A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders. #

Archive for Scripting News in February 2026, in OPML, as always. #

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff.

It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it.

I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that).

Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this.

Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub.

I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops.

Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format.