FeedCity

I find that writing about something publicly helps me focus on the idea in a way I can't get by only talking about it privately. That's because I am a Natural Born Blogger. I was born that way.

I am using Bluesky the way I used to use Twitter, to talk openly about product development ideas before they are fully hatched.

After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen.

George Orwell on the coming of spring during the darkest of times:

It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

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I was interviewed by Inc magazine for almost two hours where we covered a lot of great topics for entrepreneurs but almost none of it made it into the weird hit piece they published, however since both the journalist and I had recording of the interview I’ve decided to adapt some parts of it into … Continue reading Automattic Operating System →

Within the typewriter space there are three broad categories of typewriters primarily based on size: Standard (or office or desktop) typewriters were designed and meant for use in a stationary location, most often an office where they would be used for 8 hours a day (or more), every day of the work week. These typewriters, … Continue reading Standard Typewriters versus Portable Typewriters and Ultraportable Typewriters

It's been exactly one month since WordLand opened to the public.

Carolina Jessamine… I think.

Thanks to Ben Werdmuller and Om Malik for their nice writeups of WordLand on their blogs. They're right. It is a small piece that can be hooked into lots of places, as is WordPress a big place that can host lots of apps many of which haven't been written yet. Products that l...

Mini-spoilers follow. I'm a Severance lover, it's definitely one of the best shows ever, and I feel even more so after the season 2 finale which I watched last night on AppleTV+. I think there are two types of Severance users. One whose focus is on the evil and the other whose focus is on the love. If you think nothing happened in the finale then you're the first type, if you are the second type, this episode was incredible rich. And we learned what the goats were about and that's not nothing.

Here's something that could be very useful. A link to ChatGPT with instructions on how to help a user overcome problems using WordLand. Try clicking the link and see what happens, esp if you're a regular WordLand user. I discovered the feature first by asking if the bot knew what WordLand was, and it said it did, and got it mostly right. I've been using ChatGPT to develop the product, so it's possible it has retained some of the info. And the docs are on the web. This is one of those times when you really want the AI bot to ingest everything they can find. What I'm worried most about are hallucinations. But with a product like WordLand, which could show up problems in the browser or a WordPress theme, a lot of the help requests we get are not problems with WordLand.

This is the 82nd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Ben Borgers and his blog, benborgers.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox...

More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:

LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.

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Make yourself a nice cup of tea and settle in with Julian Gough’s magnum opus:

How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields

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1. Support open source software
2. Support open web platform technology
3. Distribution on the web should never be throttled
4. External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized

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But know everything lost will be recovered When you drift into the arms of the undiscovered That’s from a Monkees song that’s so beautiful I cry every time I hear it. It’s called Me and Magdalena. Which I thought of because Tantek mentioned a song he remembered a song by Book of Love called Magdalena....

I often subscribe to blogs I like after reading one or two of their blog posts. When I see the blog in my web reader, it sometimes takes a second for me to remember what posts inspired me to subscribe to the website. Artemis has a bookmarklet that, when clicked, takes you to...

I think the term “RSS reader” needs revisiting. I much prefer “web reader.” The term “RSS reader” is protocol-first — RSS — rather than use case first. To understand what “RSS reader” means, you need to know what RSS is and why it matters. Designing tools for everyone, not j...

Notes

• Terminology: I don't thnk we should use the term social web until there actually is such a thing, so I invented a new term for these twitter-like services.
• Since Ghost is now supporting ActivityPub, I felt we needed to include Substack because the two products compete directly.
• I consider AT Proto a proprietary protocol for now, as proprietary as Mastodon's API.
• I included WordPress because it supports ActivityPub.
• If you want to comment or ask questions I posted this table on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Thursday session

Enjoyed meeting at the Digital Accessibility Centre today for our annual audit of GOV.UK. Learning how users with various disabilities use and test websites was truly insightful. Strongly reaffirms the importance of advocating for a culture of accessibility, not merely striving for compliance.