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.

I like it when people send me thoughtful responsive notes about things I've written. I think it's possible to set up a social network so that most of what you get follows that pattern. It has to do with incentives.

I'm looking for WordPress sites that are set up to cross-post to ActivityPub.

Say someone is working on an open source project, no matter what role they play, they don't own the project. They can't sell it, or profit from ownership. That goes for whatever role a person is playing, if they're the project leader, or just helping out, or even not helping out. Now that's not to say the founder or show runner couldn't start a business based on the open source software, but so could you. We all own all open source projects and open formats and protocols equally, and that means we don't own it.

Next FeedLand release, has the option of keeping items around for a certain number of days. Running on two servers for burn-in. I don't recommend turning this on now unless you're helping test.

This week I had lunch with a developer who had been at WordCamp Canada last month. He apologized for not being at my session, but I waved it off. I didn't go to many sessions myself, too many great discussions in the hallway, out on the patio or in the coffee room. I rememb...

ChatGPT makes a pretty fantastic feed validator.

The new FeedLand release is ready. It's installed on feedland.org, not on feedland.com yet.

Loving a series I just heard about -- it's on Netflix, entitled This Is Going To Hurt. I discovered it the usual tedious way, scrolling through newly available shows on one of the streaming services with my iPad handy and when I see one that looks interesting, I look it up ...

I've got a new version of FeedLand, going to release it in a few minutes. It has all the new stuff I've done to make recognizing updated posts more reliable. Thanks to Brent Simmons for his help from his experience with NetNewsWire. I love it when we work together to make our software work better together. That's the way we help to support the web. That's what the web is about. Making software connections that work, and last.

I'm continuing to work on the way FeedLand detects changes in feed items. This morning I did a careful study of the function that gets a guid for an item in conjunction with ChatGPT. It would be so much easier if RSS 2.0 required an item-level <guid> element, but it doesn't. That was the philosophy, all item-level values are optional except for a couple. My notes are here.

Good morning sports fans!

I'm working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, a...

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a human there spying on you is bad -- Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I really think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human.

One of the reasons Mastodon doesn't get credit for being "on the web" is that there's been no buzz about the ActivityPub support in WordPress. Ghost has been beating the drum about their ActivityPub support for (many) months. I don't know if they're actually there yet, I've ...

If Bluesky and Mastodon were "on the web" they would already interop because friends that's what the freaking web does. They behave like closed off silos, and until that changes, they can't claim to be on the web. Don't sell out the web so cheap. It really means something to be on the web.

I love the domain for MSNOW. Just before it came out, Jeff Jarvis wondered on all the social networks why it wasn't msnow.com. Well, because they found an even better domain.

The news gets everything wrong about the nouns of our political system. They talk about Repubs and Dems, but the real power is with the people. Something that Heather Cox Richardson said so eloquently in this week's podcast with Nicolle Wallace. I know I recommended it yesterday, but please do listen to this and don't forget it. When you're watching MSNOW you're getting the wrong nouns. I think this problem could be solved by moving every show on MSNOW to a different American city. The people on the panels should come to work in Detroit, St Louis, Phonenix, Denver, Charleston, Cleveland, Seattle, places like that. Get out of NY and DC. Really connect yourself to the whole country. That would rock a lot of boats.

Highly recommend this week's conversation between Nicolle Wallace and Heather Cox Richardson. The contrast of their points of view is dramatic, the election wasn't a win for the Dems, it was a victory for the people.

A feed that Aaron Swartz put up early in RSS times was a feed of Paul Graham essays. The feed items have no guid or pubDate. The way FeedLand is coded right now for detecting changes, it sees all these items as updating every time we read the feed. Okay we have to make it a little bit smarter.

What I'm doing now is preparing FeedLand to reliably do things we haven't had it do yet, at least not at scale. It has one important feature most other feed management systems don't have, dynamic OPML lists that I keep touting here. I have a product that can both generate them and use them on behalf of users. But it's a lot more fun if there are other products that can do the same. It means we can build networks of feed sharing apps, no kidding -- it's going to do new things for us the same way RSS did new things for us 22 years ago. Now it can be fun when there are more FeedLand instances out there. It'd be more fun if they were products like Overcast or Pocket Casts. Sometimes companies like Apple or Microsoft show up in these little projects, it has happened (Apple supported XML-RPC, for example. Microsoft supported Frontier in MSIE on the Mac.).

BTW, one of the areas of breakage is in our handling of source:markdown. What changed? There are now feeds I didn't create (ie "in the wild") that have source:markdown elements. This bug is 100% my doing. The feeds are fine. These are the kinds of bugs you like to find, and fix.

I'm looking into the problem in feedlanddatabase I mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about, screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI.

I'm chasing down what appears to be a bug in feedlanddatabase. Items that haven't updated are being reported as having updated. Fairly sure there is a problem here. Next up, will add debugging code so I can see if my theory is correct.

The Lever podcast does have an RSS feed. A good way to find the feed when the usual hacks don't work is to post it here, where it's a matter of pride for the braintrust to dig it up. Thanks as always. 😄

An old quote falsely attributed to Gandhi. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Over the weekend I flipped the switch on a new app that makes my blog available on WordPress. It seems to work really well. The WordPress site is Daveverse. And because it's on WordPress it is also available on ActivityPub, at @scripting@daveverse.org, which means you can re...

I wrote this as a comment on Doc's blog. Doc, I’m working on a discourse system that works better than comments, imho. One thing it does is lets me use the full fidelity of the web instead of forcing me to type in yet another Inadequate Text Box (ITB) with none of the featu...

Here's a screen shot of what the Daveverse home page looks like. It's got all the stuff from scripting.com. It's not a perfect rendering of my Old School blog, I have more features, but it's pretty good. I'll be testing this out and thinking about it now, as we go forward. But here's the milestone: I have a WordPress place to hook into now that has pretty much everything I write outside the tiny little text boxes. What I write in WordLand or Drummer, the two places I write for real. The rest of it is throw away nonsense, a waste of time. No one reads anything, everyone fighting for attention.