It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together. As well-intentioned we may have been, it wasn't the web we were developing for. I know the term web developer has come to mean more than it means to me. But it's like saying someone is a Mac developer. A web developer creates apps for the web. Not for a specific service. For any service that supports the open formats that everyone else uses.

I did a podcast interview with Matthias Pfefferle last week. I wanted to introduce my ideas to the Fediverse world. I haven't listened to it yet, but I remember it being a very good discussion on basically all the things I am working on and with these days. It's all a continu...

Why textcasting? When Twitter came out in 2006 they left out most of the writing features of the web. Their competitors have copied the limits. Textcasting says writers don't want the limits. Add these features to your twitter-like social network and we are happy and will sing your praise. That's it. It's no more complicated than that. People ask questions about what it means. This is what it means.

I have a plan for how to bootstrap WordLand 0.8. First I will introduce you to a new way to read my blog. It will be a timeline of items posted to many of my feeds. daveverse -- lives on WordPress and Mastodon. Great art on Bluesky -- daily version. links.daveverse.org --...

Updates to the feedlandSocket demo app.

I’ve been writing about the rebirth of WordPress in similar terms, on my blog, in podcasts, hoping people would listen. WordPress is a lot more than people think. We can have all this, a lot sooner than you think.

A new doc for RSS nerds. WordLand is an editor for WordPress docs, which then of course appear in RSS 2.0 feeds. Each WordPress site has a feed, but WordLand has a shadow feed, with a few additions and differences which I document here for the first time, with examples. The main reason is I wanted to use Markdown as the default format for text in WordLand, and also wanted to be able to use it for linkblogging, which is not possible as WordPress feeds are defined. The idea is that you should use the WordPress feed for most things, but if you are using a reading app that understands Markdown, you should subscribe to the shadow feed, and if you are doing a linkblog, you must use the shadow feed, or the links won't be transmitted, kind of obviating the purpose of a linkblog.

New release of the feedlandSockets code. Still more work to do.

Here's a thought for WordPress users and developers. WordPress is huge, but it's just part of the web. That's what it means to be on the web, my friends. Everything connects to anything on the web. Once we build out a social network from WordPress, all the other systems will have no choice but to hook up too. All this talk of AT Proto and ActivityPub being the connecting glue is nonsense. The web is the connecting glue.

Last night I learned about headless WordPress installations from a tweet by Matt Mullenweg. I wrote a blog post on my WP site with what I've learned and the questions I still have. It's actually easier for me to write posts on that site when all I have is my iPad. I do all m...

In ways older people handle change better than younger ones, because we know change is here, every freaking day, and we know in a few years, at most, really big change is coming. So the attitude of the older person is often what the fuck, let's go. I'm not kidding. Maybe later in life I will get more conservative, it could happen.

They should make a ChatGPT that two or more people can chat in. I guess that's what Twitter is doing.

I'd like to see a mutual defense pact among the open source projects who depend on the stability each others' work. Not with the people, but the projects. Sort of like a NATO of open source. Where this comes from -- I'm tired of being treated like the proprietor of RSS 2.0. I transferred all my rights to Harvard in 2003. You have just as much interest in RSS 2.0 remaining stable as I do. The opposite of Embrace and Extend, rather Embrace and Preserve.

I've never been very interested in what Kimmel says but I am now.

Highly recommend today's Bill Simmons podcast where he talks about the Jimmy Kimmel situation. His perspective is very good, he says Kimmel doesn't need ABC. And I believe him.

There should be a ChatGPT "personality" for the chatbot. I'd like to start with a black lab. When I say "good work" that reinforces that what it did should be a priority. If I say that and give it a treat (by typing "treat") that should get double emphasis. I might like it better if I could train it. I don't mind a little enthusiasm, but I want it to respond to me with respect.

I'm going to call it social web not open social web. You don't need the "open" part. The web is open. It's like saying "wet water."

Cross-posted from my daveverse site. I hadn’t considered the point of view of people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. We did try to get in touch with them, even when they didn’t work there, but no one...

The penalty for ABC and Disney should be we stop watching their stuff.

The challenge we face in the open social web is seducing people off the silos with fun toys to play with that from the start don't rely on a bigco to run it, the back-end is a server you could run for $20 a month on digital ocean for example. But the logical network isn't tied to the physical server, we use urls or dns to find other nodes. They can be hosted anywhere. The reason to run lots of servers is to demonstrate that it's only as centralized as the web itself, from day 1.

Disney stock down 1.1% at 11:30AM Eastern, indicating that in the opinion of shareholders, the first amendment isn't that big a deal for a media company.

I've been getting ChatGPT to draw me product shots of all kinds of "really simple" things like ketchup, cola, cheese, baked beans (see below). Then I thought it might work pretty well as a line of books? I'll have my Python simple. Really simple. Who would want complicated baked beans?

Test post test post test post test post test post test post, my kingdom for a test post!

I got a few good error reports and that led to an easy fix. So if you had a problem creating a new post on WordLand could you please try again and report any problems, or success. Thanks!

When Paramount said firing Colbert was financial, I think they were telling the truth. Unless they dumped Colbert the $8 billion deal with the Ellisons wouldn't happen. So it was Colbert or $8 billion. They went for the money. Pretty sure it's the same thing with ABC and Kimmel.

I had a great talk/podcast interview yesterday with Matthias Pfefferle about everything I'm interested in re WordPress and networking, and our interests overlap almost 100 percent. I was telling him about WordLand and explaining how I wanted to see a whole market of editors....

This town, at the end of the Metro North line, looks like an ideal place to park yourself for easy access to the city, yet a fairly country experience.

I've heard some reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it.