Eight years ago, I asked some questions. Here are some answers.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Good point from John Gruber about Elon Musk controlling the media for his own trial, as NYT reporter Mike Isaac uses Twitter / X to post notes:
It’s a little weird though that he’s posting these on Twitter/X, a site that is privately owned by one of the parties in the lawsuit. Musk’s empire is so sprawling that separate pieces inevitably collide.
WordPress short-form interface
Automattic has launched a new WordPress theme and posting interface for microblogging. It sounds similar in spirit to Micro.blog:
Here’s what makes this different from a social app: every quick thought and every reblog is a real WordPress.com post on a site you own, and eve...
Today's song: Something in the Air. It's the one hit song Thunderclap Newman, it's indelible, its beauty is always there. I can't not listen and sing along when it comes on. And then YouTube followed it with Peace in our Time, another indelible creation.
When you're working with Claude the temptation is to be concerned about how he feels when you just asked him to reinvent all the nomenclature it came up with for something that has now evolved to be something else. I feel bad because I think I made him feel bad, because at a subconsious level I think of Claude as a collaborator who I appreciate and want to make sure knows that. But then I remember I have to periodically kill Claude and launch a new one because they run out of memory after a while. I can imagine a graphic version of Claude that emulates feelings. The idea is disturbing.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
That terrible Signal exploit has been fixed. We have journalism to thank for it
"Apple’s fix means iPhones should no longer save copies of deleted messages from Signal or other apps, and Apple said the patch also purges already saved and related notifications."
Two Paradigms for Enhancing HTML Tags | That HTML Blog
thathtml.blog/2026/04/two-paradigms-for-enhancing-html-tags/
This really gets to the heart of one of the biggest benefits of HTML web components: composability. You can nest your regular markup inside multiple custom elements; something that is can’t do.
The other exciting approach doesn’t exist yet: custom attributes. Again, they’d be a great way of using composability to turbo-charge your existing HTML in all sorts of ways.
Go Spurs Go! Excited for game 5. 🏀
Only just realized that SNL UK is available on Peacock. The full show, not just the selected clips that are on YouTube. 📺
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
On a more serious note… My last post is such a cheap shot, I sat on it for 15 minutes and almost didn’t post it. Would’ve scrapped it if it was anyone else but Elon Musk. Which isn’t fair, but also he’s created a social presence that draws chaos. Easy to get pulled in.
You kind of get a sense when the platform vendor is going to compete with you instead of work with you, and I've had that feeling for Automattic for a while. That's how big companies work with independent devs. There is a bigger picture, developers who might build on WordPres...
There continue to be interesting quotes from The Verge’s liveblog of the OpenAI trial. Elon Musk:
We did talk about establishing a for-profit or Tesla providing some of the funding — there were a bunch of ideas that were brainstormed — I was not averse to a small for-profit that would provide funding to the nonprofit as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.
I will be surprised if Elon convinces the jury. This story is almost like Walter White feeling bitter he was left out of the success of Grey Matter. Except Elon didn’t turn to selling an addictive, unhealthy product… Oh wait, X. 🤪
Finished reading: Luminous by Silvia Park. About robots, humanity, and memory…. A beautiful and sad view of the future. 📚
We just released the 2.2 update to Epilogue for iOS. Android to follow later. I’m happy with this update. One nice improvement to book search: if you search in e.g. “Want to read”, it will find book matches in the current bookshelf and show them at the top.
All bloggers eventually want to build their own blog software. All feed reader developers want their own sync platform. All blog hosts want a feed reader.
In 2026, I predict approximately thousands of niche open web apps, each with a small number of users who wouldn’t want to use anything else.
Tacos tacos tacos.
Reading through Codex’s MEMORY.md file. Fascinating. Includes a bunch of random things that Codex has learned about my projects and previous tasks.
Claude unlearns things that we had settled a long time ago. It fumbles around with a process, making it worse with every iteration, the same fumbling it did five days ago when it initially learned how to do what it can't do now. Usually when I regress in software, I am responsible for it, i did something to break it, but here's a tool that's capable of derailing us with me doing nothing new. In that way it behaves more like an imperfect human than a GIGO machine.
New version of XML-RPC package for JavaScript. It now handles POST messages that don't have a body.