FeedCity

WordLand and Scripting News and a bunch of other sites/apps were off the air starting about 1AM Eastern, but mostly things seem to be working now, shortly after 6AM. It was a big scramble, I had to provision a new server on Digital Ocean.

WordLand and a bunch of other apps are down. The server that was hosting the apps went down, that happens sometimes, but it isn't coming back up when restarted. I am provisioning a new server, and hopefully when that's up I will be able to restore each of the apps. This is not an April Fools joke. :-)

I changed the domain for Radio Free America and the Bluesky channel. It's not a Canadian site. Maybe at some time we can have a version of the news flow from Canada. We may need it!

When Apple bought NeXT, it wasn't long before we understood that it was the other way around.

Bluesky is today brimming with irreverance.

Great artists, before they die, should share their secrets, so the next generation can be even greater.

Yesterday I uploaded an image of a pizza pie, in a New York pizzeria, with a couple dressed in evening clothes with a NYC cop and off-duty sanitation worker lurking in the background. Paolo Valdemarin writes from London, "Have you tried adding more images to a prompt? From my experiments it can easily keep 'in mind' five different images and mix them. You can get a bunch of people sitting in the same room, with a very detailed version of the room." He sent two examples which are somewhat embarrassing, but you'll probably enjoy them. :-) First, he uploaded my profile picture from Facebook. And asked ChatGPT to add me to the picture and then to "sit him next to the couple, with both of them kissing him on the cheek, and as you can see ChatGPT complied! Facebook profile picture. Original pizzeria. Dave inserted. Kissing Dave.

There's now a home page for Radio Free America. Once we have more feeds, the home page will be a timeline of news that can be acessed outside of Bluesky. Please subscribe now, and help spread the word. Via the dynamic OPML file that's publicly available there can be many such pages on the open web.

A new Bluesky news feed, Radio Free America. It will also be on a web page as a river of news, and of course in dynamic OPML so it can be reproduced in lots of places. It will be hard to shut down, if it catches on. The idea: deliver news stories, blog posts and podcasts fro...

The US is being run like a TV show, with predictable results.

This is very important. If you're on Bluesky, follow this account. "This is the official rapid response page of the Democratic Party, holding Trump and MAGA extremists accountable." I've been begging the Dems to do this since 2009, a permanent heartbeat for the Dems on social media. The team that ran the Harris campaign social media center during the campaign. They were snarky, fun, irreverent, and never apologized for representing the people, and they did it well. This is a moment. I no longer have to beg for this. It exists. So the first step has already been taken, thank goodness!!! Now it's up to us to spread the news that there is a place to find the heartbeat of the Dems. I'm going to study it, RT it, and keep the flame lit the best I can.

When your AI bot gave you code that worked do you go back and thank it and say it worked? I do. I don't feel complete until I do.

When you put a hack into a piece of software you have to say out loud "It's a hack." That makes it okay.

When we flatten out the differences between the different social networks, we'll start with their RSS feeds, if it works, ultimately there will be no need for different social networks. And again, if it works, we'll bring back the features of the open web that Twitter left out.

This is a much better approach to federation, delivers the benefits long before hashing out the diffs betw ATP and ActivityPub will take. And we really have the choice that Bluesky says they will deliver, and yes, it will also be billionaire-proof.

I gave ChatGPT a picture of a man and woman, reading the screen of a computer to start, then asked for various renditions. In the style of Leonardo da Vinci. In the style of the cover of a John Steinbeck novel. As if it were an illustration inside Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. As if it were Mr Caputo and Chapman from Orange is the New Black. From Succession with Logan and Sioban Roy. From Severance, with Mark S and Helly R. If you step through the pictures after giving each a bit of your time, by the time you get here, if you were asked if it's art, I hope you'd say Who cares. If it's really art and it helps you see something new about anything (probably yourself) whether or not it's art is not really the most interesting question..

I believe it is. When people say my software thinks like they do, what's really happening is the software has gotten out of their way, they've incorporated the way it works into the base of their spine, so they can remain in the world they're writing about, and forget that they're using a piece of software. They perceive that as the software thinking like they do, which is fine -- it's the goal. But it's quite possible they have a totally different experience that takes them out of their suspension of disbelief by not working the way they expect, the same way it did the last 100 times, or it failes to open a file, or whatever might cause them to leave their own world and have to deal with the one I, and generations of software developers, have created, which can (as I know) be excruciating, humiliating, and whatever else you may feel.

Yesterday I posted four new ChatGPT-created drawings, created with the latest upgrade of ChatGPT's drawing functions which are better than previous versions. The usual controversy is rekindled on the networks. The concern as always is that it learned how from human artists, ...

ChatGPT's drawing function has gotten a huge upgrade. I've been doing tests for the last 24 hours. First I gave it a screen shot of WordLand and asked for a nice colorful poster for the product. Then I had it make a movie poster for Mutiny on the Bounty with different actors, and As Good as it Gets, and then a stunning rendering of an El Salvador news photo in the style of Edward Hopper. It refused to do an R Crumb rendering or Doonesbury, but it was OK with Hopper. WordLand poster by ChatGPT. Mutiny on the Bounty starring John Belushi and Jeff Bridges. As Good as it Gets starring Jackie Gleason and Melissa McCarthy. An Edward Hopper rendering of Secretary Noem at the El Salvador prison.

This morning‘s early morning missive from WordLand.. Talking with friends about What To Do. I actually have an idea. We all try to lead a parade, with a big viral idea, if only everyone would follow me, it might just work. A lot of us have that feeling. My advice — it doesn’...

Watching Doc Searls use WordLand to post to his WordPress blog. He's using it the way Manila worked for blogging in the late 90s early 00s. Every day is a new page, which contained as many items as you liked. When you add a blank line that starts a new post. It's Markdown k...

This may seem controversial, but the Repubs do have a point re DEI. We really do have a problem honoring the achievements of white men. I know because I get the bullshit when people have tried to honor me for my achievements. When I was offered a keynote spot a the ISOJ confe...

You know how they have walkability scores for different places? I live in a place now with a score of zero, you can't do anything without a car. I moved from a place with a score of 99. I'd like to have social networks get a score like that, for how much they feed energy int...

A thought for everyone struggling to see a good future in all the michegas. My advice -- please -- do your protesting, resisting, DEIing, organizing, learning, look for silver linings (they are there) and most important keep doing things that feed your soul. Treat yourself with love even if the world isn't. So in that spirit for those of us who have cats they love -- a story.

What a world we live in.

I was just thinking about themes for WordPress, and thought to look up Manila themes, and found we have a whole website that's still running (thanks Jake!) where you can see the catalog of themes we had for Manila and Radio (thanks Bryan Bell!). I want something like this for WordPress themes that work beautifully with WordLand-authored blogs.

The ruling class in America is more out in the open now. Pretty much the same people who brought us the Lehman Brothers too-big-to-fail meltdown in 2008 and the Brooks Brothers Riot in Y2K. Not sure if oligarch is the right word. Peter O'Toole starred in The Ruling Class, a favorite when I was younger. The last song in the movie is pretty freaking great.

What would be great -- the ability to define text macros in ChatGPT. I would write a macro that turned random text I wrote online into a properly formatted blog post. for example when i write fast i almost never stop to capitalize things that should be capitalized. or i might abbreviate the name of a product so i expect it to fill it in, as a professional copy editor would. I hope we're heading there. And if they have this, put it behind a simple api so i can wire it into my favorite writing tool. We could even work on a set of standards, a higher level Markdown if you will, that goes deeper than formatting. That would be something for an experienced copy editor to do imho.

We're getting into WordPress in a new way, the need for a featured image came from users. I didn't know they had this feature in WordPress. If you asked me if it did, I would have said yes, I'm sure it does, but where and what is it called? i could've gotten that too via chatgpt, but i would have had to think of it. that's where having sharp users makes a world of difference. When people thank me for my generosity, they don't get it. I want something out of it, your experience and your mind. It's one of my main raw materials.

With all the good stuff happening with WordLand I haven't found time to wind down feedland.com and feedland.org. The servers are still working, though not performing as I'd like them to, but it doesn't seem I'm going to get the time to do a graceful transition before my self-imposed March 31 deadline. So I'll come up for a new plan, and if you're using either of these services, enjoy! And keep backing up your subscription list.

WordLand 0.51 is out, with support for featured images and excerpts, and a better designed home page for the app, before you sign in.