Gruber is right. The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They’re acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, […]

firstSentence, a JavaScript function that returns the first sentence in a string. Useful in coming up with something to display for an untitled post. It’s always been a klooge, but this time with Claude’s help we’re using a new API in JavaScript, and supposedly it really works. I’m using it in one of my apps, […]

I’m a recent convert to new versions of the MacOS, last version I was using was Yosemite or something like that (will check). In this version, Tahoe, it’s entirely too easy to make a window go full screen with no obvious keystroke to undo the mistake. I learned if you move the mouse up to […]

Today I did something different. I wrote a little Node app, without Claude’s help. It was a revelation. It’s been most of a year since I actually started even a test app and wrote it from beginning to end. I used to do this routinely. Nothing routine about it anymore. What this app does, it […]

Twitter: “Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with […]

Top priority for Anthropic. Teach Claude how to work with humans. It has no information about how our minds work.

I pay for a NYT digital subscription. Now they have a new upsell technique, they want me to buy a family subscription. I don’t want that, no use for it. And I read so little of the NYT I think the whole thing is a ripoff. So now they make me validate by email every […]

Do you know why people like Markdown? You can’t hide the bullshit. It’s all there for you to see. Thus the bullshit never gets added. It’s so simple, I swear people are desperate for simplicity. I know I am. Where is the universal theory of the web? Actually I do know where it is. Go […]

32 is a lot of years. How much longer can this madness go on!

I don’t care for podcasts that begin with 15 minutes of giggling between the hosts who I don’t know so I don’t get how cute it is. Esp if the title of the episode is something I’d like to learn more about. Why is giggling and non-funny supposed humor. The laughing I hate the most […]

That said, surprisingly Nicolle Wallace’s podcast is really good, which surprised me because her two hour afternoon MSNOW show is kind-of nothing. On this show they have a lot of time to talk with one person, and maybe there are limits on the TV show that aren’t on the podcast? Another theory, I listen to […]

Yesterday I wrote a piece about a Markdown-only browser, that worked nicely with HTTP. Maximally minimal. I got interested in what it would take to do this, and asked ChatGPT for a plan. I definitely don’t agree with all of it, forget about the other formats, we’re only interested in Markdown. No frameworks, not “try […]

On 10/7/1994, I wrote my first blog post. I’ve been blogging ever since. In the first years when wifi wasn’t in every hotel room and restaurant as it is today, before cell phones or even iPods, there were weekly lapses when I went on vacation or to a massage retreat in the middle of nowhere. […]

How about a Markdown web browser. No CSS, no frameworks, just Markdown files. That would be how you would restart the web in 2026. When you’ve had enough of Google, let me know. I start posting my blog in that space, right away. Google will not be allowed into this web (have to figure out […]

We just hit a milesone in Atlantis. We have WebSocket support, client and server. We made a client that listens to the FeedLand stream of new and updated posts. Still waiting to see if that works. But when I started to write the code for this test app last year, I realized after 13 years […]

Google Chrome, nice browser, but it doesn’t support the web.

This is the era of very powerful bozos.

What’s the best way to block a browser from a website? Is there a meta code for that? Like Firefox is fine, but Google is blocked. Just an idea. Sort of like, you’re not blocking me, I’m blocking you.

I love what Claude Code does, but hate working with it. It doesn’t have any sense of how humans think. Its way of working with us is incompatible with what I can do. Burns me out. And it has to relearn the basics every session, and getting the rules into its memory doesn’t work, they […]

I started blogging on October 7, 1994. Thirty-two years on Wednesday. The longest running blog, and it’s still even worse than it appears.

Until last week I was mostly using an old version of Chrome, so had never seen the gate it puts in front of my blog, scripting.com. Here’s a screen shot of their awful dialog. An easy FAQ of what they’re doing wrong, why a free web is so important and why you should care. So […]

People really liked the RSS tip I posted the other day, so here’s another one, also related to the channel-level title element. Consider the screen shot below, and the Thinking about… blog. Part of a blogroll with limited info about a great blogger, Timothy Snyder. I can’t tell from the title who’s speaking, whereas with […]

Once again the app that bridges from scripting.com to daveverse.org went down for a couple of days. Just noticed it, kicked the server to get it running again, and all is good, except a couple of pieces show up today that were really posted on Thursday or Friday. The problem as often is the case […]

2001: “Like a boat, a human being has integrity if they is what he or they appear to be. That’s why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch. Change the appearance if necessary.”

If you’re psyched about what the polls say about the midterms, remember that Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win in 2016, based on polling.

I like the way AI is evolving, with Muse from Meta and Dots from OpenAI. Even the main programs, ChatGPT for example, are starting to provide real world services that the providers, ie banks, groceries, airlines, health care portals etc should be providing. They could possibly take over commerce the way Amazon has taken over […]

After running the first Bloggercon at Harvard in 2003 a famous tech company had a meetup to talk about the same stuff in a private invite-only session in the Bay Area. The invitations went to all the discussion leaders at Bloggercon. People I chose. I was not invited. Only one of my friends told me […]

September in OPML. First monthly rollover in the new system.

I keep thinking of cheesy ways I could switch over to https for new posts on Scripting News, esp now that Google is getting more militant in trying to sweep all the history of the web into the trash. I know people think it would be a snap to do the conversion, honestly, sorry — […]

When designing your RSS feeds, the top level title should be the title of the user’s account. So if Twitter had a feed for each user, the channel-level element of the feed would be <title>Twitter: Dave Winer</title> Not the address, as Bluesky does, it should be the string the user chooses for their presence on […]