FeedCity

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.

Another reason to love WordPress. Every freaking WordPress site had great RSS support. They did more to keep feeds alive than anyone else. Google tried to kill RSS in a particularly humiliating way. WordPress kept it going.

Jeremy Herve is a developer at Automattic. Here's what he said about yesterday's podcast. He liked the idea of WordPress as the OS of the open social web. Glad that resonated. It has so much more than the other possible platforms. The others couldn't even realistically claim...

A great scene from The West Wing. Use your imagination, something similar is probably happening right now.

Podcast: WordPress and me.

Dan Knauss, one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada, wrote a post on their blog using WordLand. This is wonderful! Look at the screen shot at the top of the page. That's the whole point of WordLand. It gets out of your way and let's you write for your WordPress site.

One more thing about the linkblog, it no longer cross-posts to social media sites. I want to see if I miss having the links there. It also won't have the limits. Maybe it'll be better if my accounts are a bit more quiet. Also the RSS feed is in a new location, I want to wait a bit to make sure it works before distributing the URL.

Note to linkblog readers: I just flipped a switch and am now using WordLand to do the linkblog. Today's links are good, but the ones from prior days were mainly test posts. They will scroll off in a few days, and it'll be as it always has been. Still diggin.

People talk about "regime change" as if the only regime that could change is the one in Iran.

Trump may not want regime change in Iran, but he definitely wants regime change in California.

He's going to war with Iran to hide his war with the United States.

We need a war-ready Democratic Party.

Governor or mayor is not a job for peaceniks.

Today's song: Peace in our time.

More on the vision for WordLand and RSS. Imagine that WordLand is the editor of a twitter-like system built around RSS. It saves your writing to WordPress, where it is published on a website and via RSS. You don't have to use WordLand or WordPress, because RSS is an open fo...

I'm keynoting the WordCamp Canada conference in October in Ottawa. It's the first conference I've attended since before the pandemic. The timing is ideal, and the location is significant. As an American, I don't want to try to attract people from around the world to a meeti...

Speak plainly. Don't say sui generis, say unique. And as Brent says, lessons not learnings. Keep it simple. This is one of the foundations of blogging, btw. "Try to write correctly."

Just a guess, but the people doing the "ice" raids are not real police any more than the "doge" people are/were actually part of the US government. In this New Yorker podcast, they dug into what "doge" actually was/is. Some weren't actually Trump supporters, they just thought it would be interesting to be empowered to fix the government. They learned the government doesn't work the way they thought it did. Spending is way up over the years, but number of government employees has stayed flat. It has already been largely privatized. Tangentially they appear to have found some things actually worth fixing. Tech culture isn't just the billionaires, far from it. There's a lot of hippie ethics in there too, you just have to look past the money, which seems too much work for some/most journalists. But The New Yorker tends to do this well, btw, sometimes. 😄

As you get older and see your friends of 30, 40, even 50 years -- you realize how silly this all is. I see them and I see an old person, but I know who they are inside. The old "don't judge a book by its cover" adage probably wasn't coined by a younger person. 😄

I had an experience like the one Paul Simon described on Colbert last night. I was at the Apple Store on 14th St in NYC to pick up a new phone I had pre-ordered, lined up with some much younger folks who asked if I knew what was new on the phone. I said I wasn’t sure, so I asked if they knew. They all agreed the coolest thing was called “pod casting.” They said it slowly to be sure I could understand. They said it was great, it was like radio, but you could get it from the web, and there was always lots of new stuff. "What will they think of next," said the old man, impressed, nodding with respect.

I read through the QuickDraw API summary from 1985. For me it was like someone who built applications of electricity, going back to see Edison's workbench before there was an industry. It was so seminal. It would never work in today's architectures, almost everything was glo...

Until further notice dissent is an act of patriotism, support of and belief in our country.

Bill Atkinson died last two weeks ago. I was explaining to a friend why he was so important. Most people who know of him know about MacPaint and Hypercard, both were fantastic contributions to the evolution of personal computers. But underneath all that he created a layer o...

If there were a Joe Rogan of the left, he would tell you to stfu and vote for Cuomo for mayor of NYC.

NYC is a special place, like the Knicks are a special NBA team.

And btw, Cuomo, like Trump, is from Queens.

PS: If there were a Joe Rogan of the left he would be from Queens too. :-)

PPS: Queens doesn't have an Empire State Building, and they tore down Shea Stadium. So the Unisphere from the last World's Fair will have to do. But Queens is probably the most ethnically diverse place in the world. Think about that for a minute and how the fight for the soul of the US will be fought in Queens.

PPPS: I come from Flushing.

I had a conversation on Bluesky with a writer at the New Yorker saying she didn't have much use for ChatGPT, though she had tried using it. I wanted to see if I could open a door, suggesting that next time there was an issue with a computer, that she bring the question to C...

Highly recommend reading this review of Trump's parade. We had the wrong idea about what the Army would do. Basically if you order us to do a parade, we will give you a parade.