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.

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.