Well, I think I'm done. I've got the outline for the slides complete. I can't possibly talk about all the stuff that's in the slides. Once I leave tomorrow I think perhaps I'll post a link for the slides and maybe offer a place to comment. Maybe. I get very nervous about th...

More slides done since yesterday, having a great time. We all went through the same thing. Twitter comes online, we try to work with it. Unless your ideas fit in 140 chars, don't use links, or style, and you never make mistakes that need correction, it just doesn't work. Th...

Working on my slides for WordCamp Canada next week.

I don't think I'll actually use the F-word in the slide.

But it makes me laugh when I see it.

I'm getting ready for a trip. And part of that is getting my laptop set up so I can post to Scripting News. If you're reading this, it worked.

I am getting ready for a trip. And part of that is getting my laptop set up so I can post to Scripting News. If you're reading this, it worked.

I'm narrating development work on my Daveverse site. If you're interested, that's where I've been while I'm shaking out core bugs in the new WordLand. These are the things I want to stay fixed and never have to screw with again. It does actually work that way in products that go through a shake-out process. Drummer and FeedLand both work pretty well. Sure there are bugs and things I wish worked differently, but I and a few other people use them as everyday tools. I'm trying to get WordLand with its timeline function to be that way. A bunch of new hookups via HTTP and Websockets.

I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I'll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? ;-) ...

I know so many people around my age that were never told this simple truth that I heard Steve Jobs say in a video the other day. Paraphrasing -- the people who made the rules you think you have to live by weren't smarter than you. Once you accept this as fact, then if you can find the leading edge you can make it work the way you want it to. You can be one of those people.

Today's song: Oh My Love, by John Lennon. I was trying to remember this song. It kept eluding me. It's not one of his most famous ones. It is the clearest theme for what you experience when you fall in love. Clarity. Endless possibility. At home in your life. For the first time.

This is what I point to when I want to say "Heh not likely."

Note this is for the 0.8 release of WordLand coming soooon. Not in the current released product.

A friend asked for this feature a few months back, before we had a Markdown mode in WordLand.

As I'm reviewing the product for first beta I realized I could now implement the feature he asked for.

Here's how to.

1. Put a URL on the clipboard.
2. Go into Markdown mode by clicking the M icon. It turns green.
3. Select the text you want to be a link.
4. Paste the URL copied in step 2.

A video demo.

It creates the link for you, in Markdown syntax of course.

To see it in HTML, just flip the Markdown button off.

I call this feature Cute Paste. :-)

WordPress news via FeedLand.

I stop reading every piece that begins by wondering if the Dems or Repubs are "winning" the shutdown. Anything the Dems can do that has anything to do with governing is a win for all of us, including the Repubs, but esp the Dems. This is a new world, the old one is gone. Every day is a new reality.

The same energy that force Biden off the ticket should get Schumer and Jeffries out of the top seats. Replace with people who can speak plainly about what's actually happening.

Fellow humans. If we're competing with AI, and to some extent it seems we are, consider that they have much better writing tools than we do. If we are to put up some kind of resistance to our cyber-domination, shouldn't we invest in better writing tools for bodied-intellects like us?

The ActivityPub world, which MicroPub is part of (I guess), could benefit from reading Joel Spolsky's piece about Architecture Astronauts.

The big deal with WordPress, as outlined in the Think Different piece is that the strong API makes WP into something quite different from what most people think it is. I think of it as an OS for writing on the web. Very analogous to what we use(d) PCs and Macs for before networks were everywhere. This came up in a thread on Bluesky about MicroPub which appears to be a redo of Metaweblog, with better identity system.

I try not to run away from controversy when conventional wisdom is in the way of progress.

Thanks to Tanya Weiman for observing that this blog started 31 years ago. Probably the longest-running blog on the internets. Still making trouble. And as they say, still diggin. You can always tell how long it's been by looking at the bottom of any archive page, where it's constantly calculating, down to the second, how long this blog has been running.

Why we all should love RSS. It makes the web higher level without taking anything away.

Try as hard as I can I still have distinct flows and more than one place where I edit. I think that's a consequence of working on WordLand. I have to use it for serious writing, or it doesn't work. Maybe I can find a way to merge flows, but not at the moment. I still have to do some copy/pasting.

Fascinating blog post from Jason Shellen, tech entrepreneur, formerly with Blogger and Google. Here’s my perspective on part of the story he tells about RSS and Google Reader. Netscape gave us RSS 0.91 and it was good enough to create a new powerful layer on the web. Then Ne...

I do all my shopping in ChatGPT. There must be a way to monetize that. For example, I want to buy a new backpack for carrying my laptop and other mobile web stuff. I should be able to set up anywhere there's wifi. I've got a modern MacBook Air, an iPad and two phones, one iOS and one Android. The main one is Android, I have to carry the iPhone because I use an Apple watch. I imagine there must be some improvements made in backpacks accordingly since I bought the last one, which was when I lived in Berkeley, in the late 00s.

I've been evangelizing evangelism lately. Focus on goals and help others help us achieve them. It's a virtuous cycle, because once people figure out that they can get help by helping us, they will help us more. That is, when it works.

I did a video demo of pngWriter in December 2016. I wish I had just done a Hello World demo instead of a freaking tutorial. I do better demos these days. I broke every rule of my own tutorial for software demos.

Reason #29812 you know our current writing system is broken. When you want to post something that has more than the maximum characters they post an image instead of the text. I once wasted a few months making a writing tool for those kinds of posts, hoping that if it caught on we could have a shadow network that moved the actual text around the net between users. Users weren't so imaginative then.

I've used this phrase a few times recently: "Before we were so rudely interrupted."

Or, "the big interruption."

I'm referring to 2006, when web writing was downgraded, to be 140 characters with no styling, no links, without the ability to edit.

That's when writing on the web started going in the toilet.

So when I say it again I may link to this post, because out here on the web, linking is always allowed.

In 2014 I wrote a manifesto about web writing. A decade later later, I'm still trying to get writing on the web to work again.

It had been broken since Sept 14.

If you've been waiting to subscribe or unsubscribe, it should work now.

Report problems here.

Still breaking things! ;-)

Bluesky post: "The idea is to build a social network entirely out of replaceable parts. No silos, no centralization. Just the web."