Another criticism of the Bluesky API. They make each developer do the support for Open Graph metadata, when it would be much more efficient for them to support it on their end. I would be happy to give them the code. It's not that complicated. But translating the OG format, which for crying out loud is a huge standard, into their arcane format which is only supported by Bluesky, is going in the wrong direction, and frankly is ridiculously arrogant. Show a little humility. Facebook is huge, and the format isn't just used by Facebook, everyone uses it.

Benjamin Wittes: "It’s remarkable how many non-New Yorkers seem to care who the mayor of New York City is." They do and they're right to, the same way we were concerned how the Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles would react to the invasion of the Marines and hi...

A case study in APIs. Creating a new post via Bluesky's API.

Developers, consider this example.

First, here's the packet of information I'm sending to Bluesky to get it to post something.

• {
• "title": "",
• "description": "Room for One More on Mount Rushmore?",
• "mailaddress": "",
• "password": "",
• "urlsite": "https://bsky.social/",
• "link": "https://politicalwire.com/2025/06/29/room-for-one-more-on-mount-rushmore/"
• }

And here's what comes back.

• {
• "uri": "at://did:plc:zxb2lwpxo4axkkkgjwqand24/app.bsky.feed.post/3lsqtoowg2h2h",
• "cid": "bafyreifhet2772xmic24qr4xbui4l5lllvgek2a7kmmchojwwkufvzalci",
• "commit": {
• "cid": "bafyreicjjsd4ixlezubezaxzfaqxxpwlvoxdqwyxblnme5uh6ehklxth3a",
• "rev": "3lsqtoowpsx2h"
• }
• }

Now that we know the outcome of the 2024 election, not just in numbers but in what it's doing to our beloved country and the rest of the world, it's interesting to revisit the campaign that journalism ran last year to force President Biden to step aside. That's one of the fu...

With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.

It's possible this is the last test post. (It worked, so it is the last.)

There are probably going to be a few more of these.

You hear the term Open Social Web used in places where things that are social are neither open or web. They aren't that far, and here today I'm going to give you a fast and easy recipe for linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness ope...

We live in interesting times. Never a dull moment! 😄

I'm communicating more with people in the WordPress community. There's so much to the story, we have to make up for 20 years or so since we turned in the direction of silos. There's a lot of catching up to do. I hope at some point people figure out that a lot of interop can be attained very inexpensively and quickly by hooking the input and output of each distinct network up to other networks that don't currently interop. Neither ActivityPub or AT Proto is suited for that. Too complicated and honestly too strange. RSS has has 20+ years to burn in. Lots of familiarity there, and lots of working code. When people get really serious about interop, and are willing to sacrifice a little personal glory, there's a very good compromise available. We've been here before. This isn't a new idea in tech at all.

I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House, are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited.

I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads just dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook.

Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho.

The latest David Frum podcast is about tech billionaires. Once again he talks about who he's willing to listen to. He's really smart, thinks about things, and speaks brilliantly, but cultivates his ignorance and speaks openly about it. In contrast, I listened to Jon Stewart's...

Fixed the broken images on morningcoffeenotes.com caused when it transitioned to https.

I have a Google Alerts query for my own name, just to see if any journalism outlets mention me. When it happens, it's often to give me credit for co-creating an app called iPodder, which they say was where podcasting started. None of that is true. But that's what journalism ...

BTW, I think the right way to read Scripting News is getting the nightly email. That's the pulse. I jot stuff down during the day, mostly in the morning, and later add links and finish stuff up. The scripting.com feed is updated in realtime. So you may get many versions of an...

I'm working my way through The Bear, and it's great because you remember that you love all these characters and you can immediately start living the ongoing drama of their lives. The scene they paint is intriguing. I feel like a cat perched on a window watching everyone doing their daily stuff. Looking forward to going back to the beginning and starting over.

Glossary: Tiny Little Textbox.

The longest continuously updated RSS feed in the known universe.

Krugman doesn’t understand what’s coming for NYC. And doesn’t understand the leadership Cuomo uniquely provided at the height of Covid. It’s pretty likely what’s starting in NYC will be worse than Covid or 9-11. Funny thing is Krugman did get it, a few weeks ago when the crisis in Los Angeles was peaking. He wrote a piece that was terrified, and realistic. The National Guard had been nationalized. Marines were invading California. But now that Calif hasn't been in the news, it's easy to swing back. I bet if the election had happened during the worst of it, Cuomo would've won.

I, like a lot of other people, assumed that Americans would be terrible at authoritarianism. Shows we have a lot to learn. Americans are pretty good at it it turns out.

Masked secret police is pure terrorism. We should ask NYPD what we have to do to protect ourselves from them, and then do it.

WordLand v0.5.15 is out.

Bernie Sanders asks what the Democrats should learn from Mr. Z's victory in the NYC primary this week. Here's what I say. Forget about ever rising from the ashes of what remains of the party. Right now, the issue is how to defend the city from the coming war with the US government. They're already holding the current mayor hostage. This will be worse than 9-11 and Covid. We have no leadership. We're totally fucked, what the Democratic Party does or doesn't do, at this point, simply doesn't matter.

A NYT article from last year about 34th Ave in Jackson Heights where "a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020." Before we moved to Flushing when I was in 5th grade, we lived on 92nd St and 34th Ave. What a difference that must make. I love it when cities take chances like this, and the people in the neighborhood seem to love it.

I tried an experiment, go back as far as I can in archive.org on scripting.com and see where it gets me.

There are lots of paths to try out.

The one I went for is the December 3, 1996 scripting.com home page.

This was where my blog home page was then.

Then to DaveNet, and in the left margin Nerd's guide to this website.

I love the screen shots that show what a good match the Frontier object database was to the way a website is organized.

Podcast: Holding your nose, the aftermath.

A preview of a WordLand linkblog works, which is of course a WordPress site, viewed in my blogroll. When I clicked on the link, I was surprised that it goes to Poynter, and not to the linkblog. But then I remembered that's the point of a linkblog. And it flows through to the feed, and the blogroll software understands. So now I have an end-to-end linkblog. Now we also have to do some work to make the theme make sense of it when you view the site in WordPress.