House of Dynamite is a fantastic movie, it deserved the great reviews it's getting, and I found it easy to watch, though a lot of reviewers said it wasn't. It's exactly the kind of movie I like -- political thriller with ideas rich with intrigue. Great acting and writing. It...

I changed the header graphic on Scripting News today to raise a question with NYC voters. Bill de Blasio was mayor. He was elected with great vision, but the politics of NY are not in sync with the ambitions of dreamers. The police union didn't like him. I'm sure they would ...

I see that the WordPress world is getting interested in adding AI features. I had some ideas a few years ago, about how I would like AI to be hooked up to blogging, and the ideas have developed a bit in the years since. As a writer I want most is every bit of writing I’ve p...

Great to see Les Orchard reading my site again. We did some great stuff together a long time ago in Frontier. He converted code from Perl (I think) to Frontier so I could use S3 for storage for users. I still use his code to this day. He's been writing of his memories of great feed reading tools of 20+ years ago, and I keep trying to tell my friend Les that the system we have now makes those products look primitive, as it should because so many years have passed. In 2022, I decided to give RSS another try. First I did a top to bottom review of RSS, and then I built FeedLand. If you loved feeds and mourn the day the music died, I have good news, it didn't die, you all just stopped believing it could happen.

We've had a performance issue in FeedLand that we finally think we have tracked down. I'm working slowly and carefully on a new version that incorporates the new thinking. If it works, I'll tell you more about what worked and how it affecs the software (obviously for the bet...

Also after last week's conference we're starting to get help from the open source developer community around WordPress. Really friendly people, excited about what we can all do together.

I'm really happy with the way WordPress News is shaping up. Every community should have a news site like this.

Yesterday I did some research into how weblogs.com, in 1999, tracked changes in the blogs it was following. This was a precursor to feed readers. There was a main output file called changes.xml, a reverse chronological list of sites, not feeds, feeds didn't exist yet. From...

Tell the people who make AI's -- I want a way to have apps run in your browser that has direct connections to the AI engine, and it connects via the user's credentials, not the app devs (though you are entitled to know who the developer is). When I explored the idea of makin...

You know how the AI companies are all doing browsers. Why don't they have a local url that I could put into an <a> element that pops up the result of a question asked of the chatbot. Something like this. When you click on the link you find out what the Mets did.

Still looking for more great WordPress news sites.

I'm okay with Trump destroying the White House step by step. We're going to need a lot of new things once he's done. There's going to be a lot of broken stuff that needs fixing. Feces covered monuments. Probably a new cemetary somewhere for his victims. But you know how when...

Journalists report conventional wisdom thread on Bluesky.

Question came up on TPM as to whether the blogosphere might reboot in Substack. The author concluded it can't, and I agree. Here's why. "One thing the blogosphere had that Substack can’t have is all parts were replaceable. You could use any blogging tool, and any feed reader and still be part of the world. Substack is a single company that has raised VC money. Vastly different incentives." And this has been tested. You have to use their editor to publish in their enviroment. They're unable to let you see their product as part of a toolset, it has to be the whole thing.

This is a product i created a few years back but it went off the air when Twitter exploded for app devs, now it's back and still lovely.

On my drive to Ottawa and back, I never had to wait for a charger, and it never took more than 1/2 hour to fill the battery to 80%. The chargers are often in places with restaurants or supermarkets. And it's good for my legs to get out of the car and walk for a bit.

I wonder if any established open source projects are converting to having ChatGPT or other AI manage the process.

Frontier's Simple Cross-Network Scripting was one of my favorite features ever.

Took yesterday off, aside from a little blogging, which isn't work for me -- now on Monday, I'm going to do a few warmup projects, and figuring out which big item I should focus on in my post-WordCamp experience.

I wish WordPress had a "home" social network. The community is all over the place, on Twitter, Slack, Masto, Bluesky, GitHub, and probably a few other places. I hope to have a social network that is built on WordPress and RSS. That would be one I'd like to be the first user of. I'd make my account simply dave. And of course I'd offer "matt" to Matt. But it would be open to the public, and anyone could start their own, by running a very easy to install piece of software on a server.

I have a really interesting idea for Netflix. Do a MCP so I can ask ChatGPT to find a show I'd probably like on Netflix. Then Hulu would have to hook up too, and HBO and Apple and everyone else. That would fix a big entertainment problem because I've already taught ChatGPT exactly what I like in movies and serials by giving it all my favorite shows and why I liked them so much. This was the idea of Bingeworthy, which I never seem to find time to work on. I really just want the freaking functionality. Someone should buy Metacritic btw, their process, however it works, is really good at finding the good stuff. But please someone who believes in open APIs, it totally needs to be in the Chativerse.

I have to remember to use WordLand to post to Mastodon, because when I go in that way, I don't have a character limit and I can use styling. We were wrestling with this question at WC, how to market the feature in a way that would get people to go to WordPress to write for Mastodon. It would also be cool if you could turn on the ActivityPub connection in WordLand, without having to wade through all the menus and dialogs. Imagine if we had a confirmation dialog like this in WordLand.

I presented WordLand for the first time publicly, the new one with a timeline, so it more clearly shows how we can build a beautiful social network just from open formats and protocols.

No user lock-in, every part replaceable, and open to developers to add functionality without having to reimplement the whole thing. These are all the things I think that have stood in the way of innovation in the web for many years.

A social network that starts out with no centralization and open in every sense has a much better chance of being decentralized than one that starts out centralized and swears they're going to stop doing that -- someday, fingers crossed, etc.

Just got back to the Catskills from my trip to Ottawa. Took the slow scenic route through the Adirondacks. Had an unqualified great trip. Should've gone to a WordCamp a long time ago. It's totally my type of people. I have a long list of things to organize, but for now it's time to catch up on sleep and rest and MLB and NBA, and make plans for the future.

Wouldn't it be great if there were a list of WordPress users who have turned on their ActivityPub plugin, so we know who to subscribe to on our favorite ActivityPub service.

Evan Prodromou explains all that's happening in the WordPressOSphere in the realm of ActivityPub.

I'm back at WordCamp in a big room waiting for Matt Mullenweg to answer questions for the people here. Yesterday's presentation went really well, lots of smart people really interested, fantastic discussion after. A very nice web culture. I went with three slides to get started, and then talked, demo'd, answered questions, and listened to ideas. Told a few jokes. Got a few laughs. It got the job done, help feed the word of mouth on WordLand.

Here's the link to the slides promised below. I've been going back and forth on slides. I always do this. In the end I hate slides because I digress while going through them and skip ahead, end up wishing I hadn't used them. So I decided to compromise. I'll do the first thr...

One more slide from the presentation.

And with that I'm off to Ottawa, seeking fame and fortune. 😄

PS: One more slide for the road.