Three questions came up in overnight posts re WordLand. Where did the Bookmarks menu go? It's mentioned in the docs under Feature List, but the feature doesn't appear to be in the product. It is there, you just have to go to the Settings page to turn it on. It's in the Syst...

I think we're at the "no more new features" point of the first release of WordLand. Learned my lesson on the 0.5.7 release, there comes a point in developing product that it may not be perfect for everyone or for every possible user, and while it has bugs (all software does), it is useful for what it was designed to do. There's nothing else like it out there, and it forms a foundation to build on. So I don't expect to do any further adventures in features for WordLand for a while, instead I'm going to assume it's there and build connections to other software, my own and that of my friends, in this context products that use open formats for interop.

If you get the nightly email, the text might be a bit more readable. I've increased the font-size from 17px to 18px. I've only been able to do this lately because I could tap into what ChatGPT knew about it, whereas before I was flying blind, with no idea of the unusual things that happen when HTML is sent via email. There is another option, click on the date at the top of each email and that will open the same stuff in the web. It can be easier to make the text larger there than it is in an email client.

ChatGPT is great for finding information on the public web, but I can't figure out how to find stuff I've worked on with ChatGPT in ChatGPT. There are big usability issues. I think it's getting better in some ways, but it's leaving me more scattered and disorganized than I w...

The Detroit Psssstons were truly great in the first round of the playoffs. And I was really gratified, ecstatic even, to see the Timberwolves give the Lakers a complete shellacking. I am so fed up with LeBron James. I can't imagine another team would want him. I can't imagine...

Sometimes I think the Trumps are competing to be the one to kill the most humans.

And today I spent (or wasted) hours trying to get my WebSockets code working properly with Caddy. Hours with ChatGPT, realizing it has a long way to go before it can manage code like I can. It gets fixated on an approach and never takes a step back to think maybe I'm going a...

Spent the day in NYC, had an idea and it was a gorgeous day, and I decided to be impulsive. See you back here tomorrow, Murphy-willing.

Rewrite of WebSockets functionality in the server side of WordLand.

Has anyone thought to give ChatGPT a Turing test? According to ChatGPT, yes.

One consistent bit of feedback on the new email format, which appears to be working for just about everyone, is that the text is too small. And while it is a rewrite, for a lot of people it looks exactly the same. That's because of differences in how email clients deal with HTML.

Good morning and welcome to May 2025.

It's nice to start with a simple almost-empty outline.

Archived the OPML for April in the usual place.

I turned yesterday's Baseline Playground into a GitHub repo. I never made one of these before and thought it was worth sharing, or just writing about. I'm struggling to find the most readable font, size, line-height. I'm looking at the screen where I do most of my online writ...

Phil Donahue interview with Bernie Sanders from 1981, then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He was a novelty then, an American politician who was a socialist. He was asked if capitalism was the normal way for humans to relate, he said no. I wonder if he still agrees, because I ...

We could follow the clues in the TrumpLand with more gusto. They know their numbers are bad and likely to get worse, they did the things that made it the numbers bad. And at the same time they don't seem to care? If this were a mystery show, like Dallas or Succession or Severance, Lost perhaps, what would you think?

Here's a prototype of what a story page might look like on our baseline site for WordLand. I did this off on the side as input for the WordPress theme. I find it easier to work on style in a standalone page without much tech that can get in the way of fast iteration.

We're working on the "baseline" theme for WordLand, the default -- the one that shows the user's writing in a WordPress context. I did a survey of news sites and blogs to see how they show their titles: Gothamist puts the name in the upper left corner, leaving room for som...

Fact-checking is a ChatGPT use-case for reporters. Feed a draft of your story into ChatGPT and ask if it spots any factual errors. There may be some false positives, so you can ask another AI chatbot, or investigate yourself elsewhere. And it may miss some. But it couldn't hurt and it might save your ass.

New podcast: Building a billionaire's network.

RSS defines a network of services and readers. Each one can go down, but the whole network stays up. That's all that Bluesky has promised, and that's why a layer of RSS on top of Bluesky would deliver a huge portion of the stability it would need to survive a disaster. It could be done in a matter of weeks, if they decided to do it. I would help.

Bluesky was down this morning. Usually I don't criticize a service when it's down, because I can relate. We like to help each other when there are outages. But Bluesky is special, because they claim to be decentralized. If it were, it wouldn't go down unless the internet its...

New howto: Editing subscription lists. I'm doing a project with a friend who hasn't used FeedLand. I want him to maintain a subscription list which will then be the source for a Bluesky account. Any time the OPML changes, of course, the channel adjusts, so they have full power to add and remove feeds. "Just enough FeedLand."

Cory Doctorow coined a lovely word -- enshitified. In that spirit, I'd love to see a destodgified Harvard. See below.

If Harvard could become more American and less elite, that could change things. Make a contribution directly to the well-being of Americans. Big courage would be required for that. A great university, empowered withe the latest online information distribution systems, could be the source of reliable information to the people that's missing because the major corporations who own the media outlets are playing it safe. Harvard is no longer in a position where playing it safe is an option. The Trumps will continue to cast doubt on the truth, but in a contest between Trump and Harvard, I bet a lot of people, maybe even most, would trust Harvard first.

I’m sick of saying this over and over, the Dems need a regular snark-filled irreverent presence on social media to condemn every freaking fascist thing the Trumps do. They had it with the Kamala accounts, but they shut them down on Election Day. It’s so freaking simple. Not...

I mentioned this in yesterday's podcast -- new problems popped up with websockets in WordLand. I worked through the whole tree of possibilities with ChatGPT and it came to the conclusion that the source was an out of date package, and it was confident if I replaced it with the one "everyone else" is using, the problems will go away. Now this is the moment when human judgement prevails. I'm going to experiment in a very small app first, to make sure I have the approach right, then I will cautiously make the change on my test WordLand server, and if it works there, then I will figure out how to install it on the main site. It couldn't break all that much because for some reason the WS code stopped working, completely, with no code changes anywhere.

Well it looks like the new email app is working. I got some really nice lookin emails last night, hope you did too. Subscribe here. And there's a basis on which to build. I will now proceed to turn off the old email app that has been serving us so well since 2017 or thereabouts. Goodbye old friend. Hello new world!

New podcast: ChatGPT deserves our respect (at least).

If you're getting this via email, things might look different.