I was able to use my Android phone to get on the NYC subway a few days ago. That's a lot better than it was with MetroCard. Sometimes things do get better.

2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again."

We used to have great multi-cross-blog debates. That's the kind of distance that makes discourse civilized. I post in my space, you post in yours, and link the two when appropriate.

Turns out we can influence the RSS feed we emit from a WordPress site by editing its theme, so it appears we should be able to get WordLand to work for linkblogs without resorting to a special feed.

We've forgotten how important links are. Let's find some linguists to write about the role linking plays in language. It's a language element that didn't exist before the web. And thanks to social media apps it's been mostly removed from our language. I aim to get it growing again.

I'm not an inventor, I'm a gardener, of media types. I had to learn to be a developer for this to work, but soon it won't be necessary. We've been stuck in a rut of online sameness for a couple of decades now. One benefit of AI is the exclusivity that programmers have had, for all of history, is being broken. Thank goodness. It's way past time. (I hope.) It's also possible we're in the process of inventing The Matrix. Ooops. That's what makes life so interesting, you don't know if the future is boring or exciting. But in my experience it's always largely unforeseen.

Good morning and welcome to December. The November archive has been safely stored on GitHub along with the rest of 2025. And now we will resume our normal schedule of winter weather in the Catskills, so please dress warmly and have a good song to sing.

What Frontier is about -- from 2021.

Someday everyone will have a blogroll like this, and a blog.

Podcast: Boastful story of Frontier and how it relates to today.

Hypothetically, if someone were building a headless version of Frontier with help from ChatGPT, they might be thinking about how to build a web app that was a really good shell to start with. If such a person asked what I thought, I would say without a doubt that would be Dru...

I love getting comments like this. The issue I posted about yesterday turns out to be a bug, and apparently it's going to be fixed. So I can go ahead without worrying about a workaround. This is the best outcome. Usually with most vendors if there's a bug, they don't acknowledge, and then they might get around to looking at it someday. This is what I call working together. Scott Hanson found the thread where they were discussing the feature in question, starting in 2011. I added an update from 2025. This stuff feels like time travel, and it's also incredibly reassuring to find that solutions to issues that were relevant 14 years ago are still relevant today. That's the stability that platforms require in order for developers to build with confidence. This is something that many big tech companies (cough Apple cough) either don't understand or don't care about.

I've assumed that all WordPress sites hosted on wordpress.com or running JetPack would have data about the site id, and for each item, the post id. It turns out it's not that simple?

A couple of examples:

• daveverse.org/feed/ -- has these elements
• scripting5.wordpress.com/feed/ -- doesn't have them

I have of course asked ChatGPT, and got a lot of wrong answers.

It's important because this data is used to connect blog posts to the editor, for posts you can edit. It's really important that editing is accomplished by at most a single click, when you're viewing it in a reader app.

I should be able to click on an edit icon from the viewer to open it in the editor, assuming it's my post.

It also figures heavily in the discourse feature.

I've created a place on GitHub for comments.

This week's New Yorker Politics podcast is an interview with Jeopardy champion and host Ken Jennings. Great stuff if you, like me, are a longtime Jeopardy fan. We used to watch it in our Flushing kitchen in the 1960s when Art Fleming was host.

ChatGPT aggregates people the same way polls aggregate voters. Ignore individuality, unable to hear new ideas, allowing journalists to write the same horse race stories every year. It would be better if they found a way to report originality, they can set an example for AIs.

There are a bunch of useful demo apps in the reallysimple package, which also is itself fairly useful. I used all these tools in implementing FeedLand and WordLand, so I'm pretty sure they'd be useful to other users and developers. The feeder app, one of the demos, is used to generate the Links page on scripting.com, and provides utilities to the scripting language in Drummer.

Happy belated Thanksgiving. I was so busy yesterday, didn't have the time to do my usual Thanksgiving gratitude post. And I do have a few things to be thankful for this year. First I want to thank all the non-technical peoople who read this blog every day. This has been one...

This is a really good blog post, in response to a post I wrote here that said among other things that a WordPress instance is easier to set up on your own server than Mastodon. At the start of the piece he said it was like comparing apples and oranges, but by the end, he wa...

I love shows like Succession and Pluribus, but I hate their official podcasts because they’re mostly outlets for the actors to praise each other. I don’t know who the actors are! I know the characters they play. I want a podcast where Carol and Zosia speak about the crazy shit they did in the last episode. I don’t mind if the showrunner plays herself. She really is God, in this context. She could explain why she had this character do this crazy shit or done other crazy shit. i don’t know or care about the actors. If they’re any good they disappear. Whodat?

I saw a post from my friend Matt Mullenweg where he said they're working on WordPress for the next generation. I like that idea. I'm doing the same, myself -- only I'm one generation ahead of Matt. So the improvements I'm working on will likely end up benefiting people his a...

RSS 2.0, the antidote to enshitification.

I'm starting to work on my new discourse system. I've been waiting to do this for a while, until all the pieces I needed were there, and they have been for a couple of months. I'll tell you about it as it starts to come into view. The first thing to know is that all comment...

The web is open the same way water is wet.

One of my recent posts is getting a lot of traffic. Basic idea is that the new AI-enhanced Alexa spooked me so much I went back to the old one. It's in every room of the house. The more it acts like a human the more offended I am.

Hello this is just a test. I'm creating a new post which will then be cross-posted to Daveverse site. Both Scripting News and daveverse should show up in the blogroll on scripting.com.

Yesterday I put up a form asking for the addresses of people who have WordPress sites that have the ActivityPub feature turned on. Only got four responses so far. But it's good to see what people are doing. For example Evan Prodroumou is using it, and his Mastodon posts are blog posts. I smiled when I saw this. Nicely done. Loop closed.

I've been using the term of the web, starting in a piece I wrote last Monday. Now it's time to explain more about what it means because I used the term in the context of Pocket Casts in an earlier post. For a piece of software, being of the web means that it is built to sh...

The feed validator operated by the W3C is kind of frozen in time, and imho has a very odd perspective on things. So I tried using ChatGPT as a feed validator, and it was totally up to the job.

Pocket Casts has come up with a new feature called Playlists. I was able to figure out how to use it in a few minutes using their web app. Is there an open format behind this feature? Can I create a playlist outside of Pocket Casts? Can I use a PC playlist in another app? Pocket Casts comes from Automattic so I would expect the answers to be yes and yes, given how committed they are to the web, and how podcasting is of the web. The most logical open format to use here would be imho RSS 2.0.