Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes.

And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic.

People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be:

The first question could be:

1. Do you have your birth certificate or passport?

In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed.

And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law.

They might want to keep things as they are.

I’ve watched Mozilla not get it for what feels like decades.

Their only legit function imho is to make the real actual web be a great platform for independent developers.

For that, start by adding user controlled storage to the web, a few standard formats, and let app devs take it from there.

I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved.

So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.

The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.

Here's a screen shot of the domains folder.

Here's the script as a screen shot and GitHub doc.

This is just a way to preserve a little of the Frontier culture. Hard to explain in words. Easier to show as screen shots.

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you're trying to do. It's another freaking algorithm. Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It's a fucking machine, how could it possibly know....

You can't really use Claude to do research. It always assumes you're trying to do something. If you don't tell it what you're trying to do it guesses, and then starts telling you what to do. Its guesses are always wildly wrong. How do you tell it to stop telling you what to do? It totally disrupts your train of thought. But it makes me miss the days of Stack Exchange and Google search.

Video demo: Using categories in FeedLand for dynamic OPML lists.

Happy to report there are FeedLand users who want to edit OPML lists there so they can subscribe to them in another feed reader that has support for dynamic OPML lists. I am happy because this is a very cool feature that will be so much more fun if other people use it. If you want to set it up so you have a list on feedland.com that you want to subscribe to in another reader, instead of subscribing to all your feeds, like this -- create a category for each list you want to hook up to another reader. It will be much easier to manage down the road. Categories in FeedLand are very simple, but if you use them carefully, they really help. Here's a screen shot of my Cats menu to give you an idea. I really use FeedLand in the most powerful ways, but it'll really click when others do the same. We might be there now.

There's a problem with one of my Digital Ocean servers today, it turns out it's a problem with Caddy, not sure why -- but it doesn't seem to be on the computer any longer. I can figure out how to re-install it, but it always is a bit tricky, and I wish I didn't have to do it...

I wanted to subscribe to the GiftArticles feed from Mastodon. It makes it possible to read news on paywalled sites. I found the feed by going to the site the feed comes from and tacking a .rss at the end. You can read the feed in a browser, and my feeder test app can read it as well. But for some reason FeedLand won't subscribe to it. Have to dig into that soon. I'm looking forward to doing some long-overdue work on FeedLand before doing the next push.

A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in 2006 and 2026.

Andy Baio noted that it was 20 years ago today that Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet. He also noted it was the day that Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on Mar 21, 2006. Nothing earth shaking but it was inter...

BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.

The text below as written by Claude. I didn't ask for it, but was blown away when I read it. There's a reason the original web worked: it was built on open formats that anyone could read, write, and extend. RSS was part of that story. So was OPML. When people ask why these...

I've written a bunch of pieces with this premise, what if I were CEO of Apple being the first, in January 1996, before Steve Jobs returned. This time I'm writing as if I were CEO of Bluesky, a company that just got a new interim CEO, Toni Schneider, formerly of Automattic, t...

Quick note on Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management probably is the reason this happened now. They should also clean up the promises they've made about Bluesky as a platform. I've done the homework, having developed a few apps using their API, some are still running. If I were their new CEO, I would announce that in addition to supporting AT Proto, they will also hook up Bluesky to the web. The web is already decentralized. Lots of developers know how to build web stuff. We can all breathe the same air.

Knight Foundation: "How did a private foundation with roots in local journalism and civic life find itself on a cap table with venture capital firms like Bain Capital Crypto and Bloomberg Beta to invest in a tech startup?" Imho because they misled you.

Bluesky raised $100 million last April, just announcing it now. No doubt part of Toni Schneider's cleanup, new CEO, need to get this out in public now. It was a mistake to keep it hidden.

Thinking about linkblogging, my blogroll software doesn't do it correctly. When you click on the link to a linkblogged link, you must go to the place the linkblog entry points to, not the linkblog itself. I know that sounds confusing, but here's an example. It's obvious we can skip the stop and go right to the thing they were pointing to. It's awkward in the code because the RSS 2.0 item-level link element is doing double duty. I think I should add a source:linkblogLink element. I also think it's a good time to start discussing this among devs. There's some very nice fertile ground here and an opportunity to work with each other.

I wanted to change the URL for the source namespace in the RSS 2.0 feed for my blog, from http to https. I thought this might be a nice warmup project. Started at 9AM and it's now 10:45AM and it might work now. Let's see. Nope. Thought of something I didn't do. Let's see. Yes! We win, sorta. Bing?

I talked with a friend who makes a feed reader app, suggesting how to hook up to a linkblogging tool. Thought I would share the instructions to everyone. I'd love to see more people using software to do linkblogs, rather than do them by hand. Then we could build systems for distributing them. This is how we create markets, by getting more people automating their work, and thus we are able to connect components together. So if you make a feed reader, how about hooking up with linkblogging tools?

Today's song: You Never Can Tell.

Small update to the source namespace. source:localTime is a channel-level element. It was incorrectly stated that it is item-level.

I have a hard and fast rule about phone calls that solicit private information. I hang up. The worst are insurance companies. They expect you to enter all kinds of confidential info on a phone from a number that doesn't even verify as belonging to the company. Caller ID has nothing to say about them. Yet at least some of these are legit and unless you do what they want, you don't get your meds.

Podcast: A one-line comment on Brent Simmons' blog got me started on a 10-minute ramble about suspension of disbelief, in software. Also a story about meeting Ted Nelson at the West Coast Computer Faire in SF in 1979. Skiing. And other miscellanea.

I asked Claude: "What is OpenClaw useful for? Do you think I could use it in my programming work, based on what you know about what I do?" Basically it's for non-programmers. Then I asked: "I wonder if I could make software that would be useful to people who love OpenClaw?" That was more interesting and included in the response I linked to, above.

A clip from a video interview with Marc Andreessen has been making the rounds. He was a very successful entrepreneur in the early days of the web and has been a very successful venture capitalist in years following. He's 54 years old. You should watch the clip before reading...

60 Minutes should do a segment on what you have to go through to get a birth certificate in any random state. It's a lot of work, I've had to do it twice in the last few years. You'd have to be a pretty committed voter to be willing to do all that work. I imagine it would be even harder if you're black, and it's going to be hugely hard for married women who changed their last name when they got married. And how much you want to bet they don't accept birth certificates from Muslim countries? It is the biggest scam ever, and if the journalists don't cover it that way, always, with no both-sides-isms, then we should all know this is the end of journalism in the US. And btw also the end of real elections in the US too. The Repubs these days like to say they're against the "deep state" -- well my friends this is about the most deep state bullshit ever.

They've been having intelligent and clear-thinking guests on CNN and MSNOW on the coverage of the Iran War, unusually good discourse. But the best coverage I've heard has been from Frontiline podcasts. There's a new one out, haven't listened to it yet, but the one I heard yesterday was very informative and probably a better briefing than our president has been getting (or paying attention to).

An example. This isn't all the data that WordPress keeps for each post, it's just the stuff that WordLand uses. We add some of our own metadata, that's how it is extensible. It's open source, and it's evolved for 20+ years, with a strong ethos of not breaking devs. It could have been twitter, or masto or even bluesky, but they don't show through enough features to be useful as "web text." We want to use all the features of text on the web. I may be the only one who sees this but I predict in a couple of years if we aren't subsumed by AI everyone will say they always knew this is what WordPress is for. 😄

I added Paul Graham to my blogroll at scripting.com. Another massive oversight.