Good morning. I like how things are going in FeedLand and WordLand today. The dots are starting to connect.

A short podcast about Sarah Kendzior, Johnny Cash and Bluesky.

I've added the NetNewsWire blog to my blogroll.

The big news is that there are now docs for source:markdown. The goal is to have a writer-friendly standard for text on the net that's as useful as the one for audio was. We've never had that for RSS. As with everything in RSS-land, cooperation among the different vendors was never its strong point. I hope to change that, and plan to build a network for written text as open and powerful as the one that developed for podcasting.

Fixed a longstanding performance bug on the scripting.com home page. Sometimes it'd just sit there for five seconds. Really embarrassing. It might feel faster now. Still diggin!

New developer notes for source:markdown. Report problems here.

As part of the process I reviewed the developer notes I posted in 2022. I see why there was confusion, it was so early in the process. I'm replacing those developer notes with new ones, that's based on more practical experience.

An example feed that has lots of source namespace elements.

Today I'm going to work on re-shaping the docs for source:markdown because it seems to becoming a thing that people are supporting in their feeds and in their feed consumer apps. We're going to have discuss how it's supported, on both ends. What goes into a source:markdown element, and what does not, and how should readers use it. I will assume the role of benevolent dictator, as I did with RSS 2.0, with a bit more of an understanding of what's important. See Rule #1 in Rules for Standards-makers. "The only reason we have open formats and protocols is so our software can interoperate." And the Rule of Users: "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."

BTW, if you have a question about source:markdown, or want to raise an issue, this is the place to do it.

Scripting News' feed now supports source:markdown.

Now that Cory Doctorow has put enshitified into our vocabulary, I find myself looking for evidence of it in AI, and finding it everywhere. There is a common thread. Amazon Alexa has a really nasty habit of finishing a song by asking me if I want to listen to some other version of it. I'm sure that seems like a nice friendly thing to the product people at Amazon, but please -- I'm grooving on the energy of the song, and the last thing I'm thinking about is some asshole robot interfering with my train of thought with a question so stupid only a machine could think of it. Okay I think that qualifies for enshitification right there. Can we have a rule that AI bots must by defalt behave like a computer. I, your human overlord, the one who is paying the bills, will ask the questions. And you will not speak until you are spoken to.

Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was going to write a short post about how I never thought about how good Credence Clearwater is, until Andrew Hickey did a whole longish episode on them. The story isn't that interesting, but the music is great, lots of fun. Never realized it. Right now I'm listening to Born on the Bayou, lovin it.

I figured since I'm out there asking everyone (nicely I hope) to add source:markdown to their feeds, it kind of sucks that my own feed didn't support it. Now it does. I've started a thread on GitHub to report problems, and I can see that there will be some. If your feed reader prefers markdown, you will see the problems right off, I think.

Good morning sports fans!

WordLand is one of the few products that works hard to make sure that it has effective competition. It lays out a welcome mat for competitors. That's what DemoLand is all about. I think I finished it today, have to do another review, maybe two, before making it public. It is the opposite of a product that's meant to dominate. It's more like MacWrite, to fill a niche as an invitation to others to come play. Remember in the web, all parts are replaceable.

WordLand is one of the few products that works hard to make sure that it has effective competition. My goal is Working Together. That means, here, laying out a welcome mat for WordLand's competitors.

Screen shot of DemoLand a new thing I'm doing that shows a developer how to hook up to WordPress using the same server I'm using for WordLand. If they do that, our products will work on the same data, in Markdown of course. The user will get to use two different editors to work on the text. This is important because in the social network I'm imagining every part is replaceable. It takes work to make that real, but I have done the work. In this network the user will have choice of writing tools. Unlike products like Substack, for example, where you're forced to use their editor.

I need to have my posts from scripting.com flow through the Daveverse site, because the WordPress view of my writing is becoming more important. Not surprising, I've been reaching out to that world for a while now, and there have been real responses. I find myself copy/pasting again, and I have to start viewing every one of those as a bug to fix.

Google tries to speak for me. Here's what it does. Reading a friend's email, I click the Reply button, and withouth me asking, it writes a reply for me. Thus, if I want to speak for myself first I have to delete the message it created in my name. I don't yet have words to d...

The kind of email I like to get. From Manton: "Just wanted to let you know that I added source:markdown to all Micro.blog-hosted RSS feeds by default this week. You can see it in my feed." That's one nice lookin RSS feed. He added: "NetNewsWire support was the last nudge I needed to add this." The Power of Brent. It's good to stay on Brent's good side. ;-)

The previous post appeared on my daveverse blog which is something I'm especially proud of because it's the result of a fantastic collaboration between my codebase and Matt's codebase. Could not have happened without the wpcom api. That single bit of software imho is going to spark a rebirth of web applications and with that, the blogosphere. That is, if I have my way. Now one thing I still have to fix is the problem of posts appearing in more than one place without copy/paste. Have not conquered that yet.

Stephanie Booth asks about yesterday's post about dynamic OPML in Pocket Casts. I responded with a few comments, and a promise to write a post to show how this works in FeedLand, which already has the feature, but unfortunately is not a podcast client.

​AI changed the basic capabilities of computers. Some technologies will do fine in the new world, like SQL databases. But the stuff we do — that's going to change radically. Will anything be left? No one knows, imho. Best thing we can do is keep going on the path we were on, and look for ways to involve AI tech in a way that will bring the power of AI to writers.

I went to see a discussion between Matt Mullenweg and John Borthwick, two people from tech who I have worked with, but hadn't seen in a while. I wanted to chat with both of them, and did, which was well-worth the journey. I liveblogged it. My chat with Matt helped me understand what we're doing. One of the things we talked about is an idea I thought he would understand and love. It relates to their podcasting client, Pocket Casts, which I use.

I went to NYC yesterday, drove both ways in the same day, which is a lot of driving. It was exceptional for me, two big cities in three weeks, Ottawa and New York. Had time to sit in Washington Square Park, then I rode a Citibike up to where I used to live near Columbus Circle. On the way I shot a video of a woman on West St with a sign that said Honk For Democracy. I thought it was a nice shot, and typically NYers drove right by her, no honking, unfortunately. I also shot a video in Washington Square Park. NYC is photogenic, interesting, and still where I come from, proudly.

I went to NYC yesterday, drove both ways in the same day, which is a lot of driving. Had time to sit in Washington Square Park, then I rode a Citibike up to where I used to live near Columbus Circle. On the way I shot a video of a woman on West St with a sign that said Honk...

I liveblogged a chat between John Borthwick and Matt Mullenweg tonight in NYC.

Don't forget the new WordPress News.

And it's undeniable, the voters said no to Schumer and the current theoretical Democratic leaders. They can't be in charge of the future, otherwise we're lost. So the voters figured it out. Let's make sure everyone hears this, they seem to be saying. You better be able to lead us or don't bother applying for the job.