BTW, suggestion to web-based companies that send out notices via email. It's good to do that, but make sure somewhere there's a link to exactly the same material on the web. It can only build traffic for your ideas, earned media.

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 Word...

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

Archived Scripting News OPML source for March 2026.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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. 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!

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 differe...

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 some...

Did some work on my RSS feed this morning. 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 ...

Doing a little tuneup work on my blog's RSS feeds.

rss.network sounds nice. What would it be?

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 one open independent format from nowhere that no objects to you using and will not do anything ever to turn you off. Maybe it's that RSS isn't playing hard to get? :-)

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Sometimes buy a name just because I just like it. ;-)

When I heard about Matt's product Beeper I thought wow if only that were on the RSS network. Think different, RSS isn't just for news, it's for everything. For a chat program that's trying to support all protocols, why not take a shortcut, immediately connect to all kinds of insanely great things that blow peoples' minds. RSS is going places, help us help.

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.

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

My linkblog is down. Still diggin!

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.

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.

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.