FeedCity

A few random observations posted on Bluesky in the early morning hours.

5:09AM: "Biden had one job to do, and he didn’t do it."

5:17AM: "The NYT had one job to do, and they didn’t do it."

5:21AM: "The NYT is the saddest excuse for the leading news org of the most significant democracy in human history. They flushed it down the fucking toilet. They, like the Washington Post, deserve to die in darkness."

7:39AM: "Being impartial about last year’s election was not an option for the NYT. It was democracy’s Pearl Harbor. We will never forget or forgive what they did."

Editor's note: Soon, I will do all my writing in one place, and these kinds of snapshots will be easier to assemble.

Steve Jobs: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

When I put an image in the margin of a post I often pause and think about what I want to convey with the image as it relates to the writing that it's next to. In the previous piece the idea was interop. I tried to think of what images I've used in the past, then I thought why don't I just look. I switched into Daytona, entered interop, and found one I loved, but then kept scanning, and found another that I liked even more. Tools are important. Web writers haven't gotten any new tools in a long time. All the tool development has been for other stuff. Let's make tools for users again, as we did in the olden times. Craftwork in software. Playin in the band!

How easy would it be to create a twitter-like app using RSS, and in what ways would it differ from other twitter-like apps. Here's the deal. You need a place to write a posts and a way to read a timeline of posts. That's the basic functionality. To do that with RSS you would start with a blogging app like WordPress, and a feed reader like FeedLand or NetNewsWire. Manton has integrated the two into a single user interface at micro.blog. I'm going to approach it in a somewhat differently, not sure yet how it will work, but I'm getting there. And I will offer a way for people to hook in any feed reader they want, thus opening up innovation to tech-curious users. The take-away is that you need to handle inbound and outbound feeds. That's the basics of being twitter-like.

There's more to the story, but this is already a lot to ask you to digest. I'll get a demo together soon. 😄

Anyway, today I hooked up BingeWorthy to WordLand. Bingeworthy doesn't have a text editor, and it doesn't need one, because when it wants to offer a user a chance to explain their rating, like "seasons 1 and 2 were great, but season 3 sucked, but I gave it a high rating anyway," they can use WordLand which loves writers and strives to serve them better and better. Why should I put a bullshit editor in a product (Bingeworthy) that isn't about writing. Its job is very different from WordLand's. Let them work together. That's the big idea, that's why you bother having interop, so you can use more than one tool on the same data.

Then, I got a response from Nick Weaver and the Madison story continues: "Here’s a roundabout Madison connection for you. I started working at UW 28 years ago today as the World Wide Web Editor in the Office of News and Public Affairs. My first project was to implement Userla...

I posted something to my linkblog this morning that really should have been on my blog. Here's what it said. "Every blog should have a nice search engine like mine. I can search for ideas and it creates a story, like this search for 'Madison' where I had love, fun, creativity, friends, youth, music, strength, health, sex, and could see the future clearly. Best time of my life, I had everything anyone could want. Pick another term get another synthetic story." Ironically, since my linkblog doesn't flow through the search engine, I would have lost this post. Which makes a bigger point. All the ideas we throw into the silo'd social web are basically trash, not part of our collection, that we might use tools in the future to find value in (as my Madison posts surely did, for me at least).

I've come to the conclusion that you can't really use ChatGPT as a programming partner. It doesn't understand the big picture, and if you try to explain it, it probably isn't getting it, and if it does, it will forget it quickly. It's basically fairly stupid, but a way better search engine than Google. Also, it never says it doesn't have enough info to answer the question and then an hour later you figure out the answer it gave you just doesn't work. I still think it's an incredibly useful too, just not as great as I used to think. In a couple of years it has never asked for more information before it answers. That's a clue.

Pretty sure there's no supportable reason to ban TikTok, any more than banning Facebook or Twitter would make sense.

My newest server was down for an hour due to hardware problems at Digital Ocean. It appears to be running again. Please don't judge the new search feature, it was caught up in this outage. Oy.

Video demo of a the new searchbox on Scripting News.

I've changed my Bluesky avatar to MLK's image to celebrate his birthday on Monday, January 20. I dream of everyone wearing this button proudly on Monday in support of American democracy and progress. We are a proud country, beneath all the weirdness.

Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the state Capitol.

My advice for today.

Tell someone they’re right.

With gusto!

Like this.

You’re not just right, you’re fucking right!

Now that I have a search engine for my blog, I can reliably look for all instances of Wordle Kitty which was a character I was playing around with last year with ChatGPT. It even comes out in reverse chronologic order, and it's better than Google which ignores a lot of my blog these days. My own search engine doesn't do that of course.

When I buy a domain speculatively, I usually put up some kind of placeholder page with a title, picture and tagline. Like feediverse.org. I pushed a link to it yesterday, and got back this possibly snarky response, but still thought provoking. Why isn't there a feed for the ...

Sad to say I'm going to have to mention Trump from time to time. When I hear a reporter wondering what to make of his thing about all those friendly countries he wants to go to war with, here's what it means. He's trolling you. Haven't you figured that out by now. Just by mentioning the weird thing he's talking about as if it were some kind of puzzle, a brilliant chess move, etc blah blah zzzz. It's trolling. Stop falling for it. If it's Trump-initiated nonsense, don't report it. You. Are. Being. Trolled. Asshole. All he wants is attention. Always. No exceptions.

Matt Mullenweg said something provocative on Twitter two days ago that I'm just tuning into now. "The lawsuits will go years and could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org." I commented on it as a developer who views WordPress as a platform.

Daytona is the search engine for Scripting News.

I've wanted to do a rewrite for quite some time, there were a lot of decisions I wanted to redo, and I've learned a lot about databases in the three years since the first release.

You can try it out. There are docs, and a place for questions and comments. The usual caveats apply, esp since it's newly deployed, quickly.

The feediverse is not a joke. It's deployed, scaled, widely supported, far beyond AT Proto or ActivityPub. It's the HTML of the social web. And where the others are complicated, feeds are, wait for it, really simple.

Why are all the people who hate AI so pissy about it.

In the future I will be able to type a post into my blog and people who are following me will see it in their timeline.

Peeve: TV shows or movies that show text messages that are impossible to read even if you stop the video and zoom in.

I used to use Twitter for middle of the night ideas. These days I use one of Twitter's successors. No telling where my middle of the night missives will appear! 😄 Here's one. "We should be able to tweet from within any application that has the ability to create and edit tex...

I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.

I see people betting on the idea of federation in bluesky.

At the same time, we should bet on simplifying Mastodon at scale.

Approach the problem from both directions.

We may need and not have federation in bluesky at some point.

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat.

There’s a funny contradiction in the AI world. News orgs, published authors, great artists, universities, want to retain ownership of their intellectual property and don’t trust the utility of AI chatbots. They think the only application of AI technology is to steal from th...

This is one of the dialogs you encounter when getting started with Bluesky. It's easy to see how new users might be led believe that Bluesky is federated, as Mastodon is. I'm a developer and I was confused by what it was saying.

Notes on Little Feed Reader, running on Bluesky since Jan 2.