If we really want tech to get back to basics we need pubs that function as product reviewers, like we have entertainment reviewers. There's so much software and so many isolated bubbles of developers, when there's a development that shakes the world less than ChatGPT, I might...

Funny thing about yesterday's Supreme Court decision, if Texas goes ahead with their gerrymandering plan, it probably will backfire on them, cause them to lose a few seats instead of gain them. The news reports generally leave that out, probably figuring the sports fans who can understand the gambling on football and baseball couldn't understand that gerrymandering is a bet that you know which voters will turn out and who they'll vote for a year in the future. In fact NPR reports it as a victory for Repubs. Right now it looks very much like it is not a win for them.

When they say AI is just autocomplete on steroids, that's like saying a human is just a product of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur on steroids. It may be true, but it doesn't say anything useful. It's also like saying that a computer is just a collection of on and off switches.

I've come to think of WordPress as an API with a widely deployed and stable implementation behind it, where the user is in control and developers can build apps without having to get into the storage-selling business. It's an incredible bundle of web functionality that is largely unexplored. I've written two pieces this year, Think Different, and my input into Matt's State of the Word that explain what I'm doing, the best I can, for now.

In software I design, I like to have multiple ways to view the same data. In one context it's an outline, then flip a switch and now it's a graphic. MORE was a product we shipped at Living Videotext for the Mac in 1986. You start with an outline and flip a switch to turn ...

They should make a version of bash on Linux that also accepts ChatGPT commands. As always they is someone other than me.

The nightly emails didn't go out last night. It was easy to fix, a server needed to be rebooted. The problems cascaded from there, long story, but in the end I had to move one of my virtual-virtual servers (two levels of virtuality) to another virtual server. Upgrading versions of Node is a tricky process that I have never mastered or understood, and every time it takes almost a full day to do it. Something I hope to someday be able to find the time to sort out. Not today, though -- I have a fun project planned out. Really looking forward to doing the work and seeing the result.

Today's song: Old Folks Boogie. Sooooo you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill.

There's a question going around in WordPressLand as to whether there are any RSS apps. Yes, of course there are. Have a look at daveverse, in the right margin. That's a feed reader. All the feeds I follow personally. When one of them updates they go to the top of the list. You can see the five most recent posts by clicking on the wedge next to the title, and from there, you can go to the website by clicking a link. That's available as a WordPress plug-in. It works.

I asked ChatGPT to write an email to Sam Altman for me. It's about a possible way to compete with Google.

On Saturday I reported a problem with WordPress feeds that created a problem for the software I was working on. It's Tuesday now, and it's fixed. This really feels good. Thanks Jeremy! The WordPress community is special. Never seen a big product like WordPress respond so quickly.

Theories on what's actually going on. It's a love story between Carol and Zosia. You can fall in love with a person with no sense of self. They plotted to have Helen killed, and waited until Carol's "f*ckable" judgement turns into real love. They fall in love and and get m...

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...