I've heard some reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it.

A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.

In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator here, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative. I wish other people would share the load. And definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)

It's really simpler than really simple.

Here's an idea. Why doesn't Apple make a laptop with a light shining out to highlight the user's face so they look better when they're on a Zoom call. I bet someone makes a device like this to clip on a laptop. Right??

When Really Simple isn't simple enough. 😄

Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse.

I've started calling ChatGPT boss as in OK boss.

ChatGPT is great at SVG. Describe the icon you want and in a few iterations you have it, even if it's not in Font Awesome. I would have killed to have this a few years ago, before FA came out. This is the best of both -- use FA if they have the right icon, design your own if they don't. It also makes me think that now perhaps SVG-based user interfaces are within the realm of possibility. CSS is no way to design UIs. I have a podcast in the pipe about this. If you want to know what I mean, look at the docs for QuickDraw.

To people who read my blog. If you have a quick thought about something you read here, it's ok if you send me an email. It should be short and not personal, if it adds some info or perspective that might be interesting, or if you just agree feverishly (not so much if you disa...

Now would be a good time for everyone to watch this movie. This is where we are now. It's not in the future. Getting this info will help. Spread the word. Download a copy too. It's a great movie.

Podcast: WordLand, the timeline and checkboxes.

I had a flash last night during the Emmys. The Bloggers of Mastodon. I loved the concept right off the bat, so I wrote a blog post using in WordLand that went through WordPress and landed on Mastodon. It all works. Where are the other Bloggers of Mastodon? Let's start a club! ;-)

I've gotten a lovely response to the Que Sera Sera post I linked to here. It's from 1996, I was reporting from a tech conference I was at where there were all angry men on stage threatening everyone else. They may not have known they were doing that, but it was awful. And so different from the web we were just beginning to understand at that time. I'm going to start going through the posts that I remember making a difference at the time. No better way for me to remember what the web is, going back to these memories when it was all fresh and new, before the leaders of tech realized what was going on. Google didn't ship for another two years. It probably wasn't even in development at the time. Yet I think the last section is a good anthem for the web, for those of us who think it's time to cut pop all the bullshit off the stack and get back to our roots.

This question has come up quite a bit lately. People don't know that there are two places you can use FeedLand, feedland.org and feedland.com. There's a lot of history here, and some uncertainty about the future, so there's not much I can do other than explain the situation...

A very smart application of AI. Google could add it to the debugger. When my program crashes deep in jQuery code, with no stack crawl, it could suggest what the problem might be without me have to try to describe it for ChatGPT. The Google AI debugger would be able to look everywhere any anywhere in the virtual machine. Much faster than I can. As a programmer I hope they're working on this. Or maybe it's already out in testing form?

The Bloggers of Mastodon.

A couple of days ago I saw a post from Evan Prodromou asking if I had seen a product announcement, and was wondering what I thought of the name. I said it was the first I heard of it. They called their product Really Simple Lip Balm. I told him it was the first I heard about it, so I didn't know. A few days later it doesn't feel good. Kind of like feeling slimed. You don't see people coming out with products named Slaughterhouse Five, for good reason. Think of something original. Something that expresses your idea as something more than a ripoff. That's about all I have to say about it at this time.

The nightly email didn't go out last night at midnight Eastern. I believe I've found the cause and have implemented a workaround. Testing now, and with any luck last night's mail will go out in a few minutes. Still diggin.

I wrote a piece in October 1996 after attending a conference of the tech industry that as it turns out was in its final stages. This was one of the last times it met. I was coming from the web, and wanted to see if anyone else was ready to change how we work with each other....

I've found new freedom on my WordPress blog that's also on Masto.

How did a healthy well-fed and educated 22 year old man from a good family throw his life away and for what? To kill a 31 year old family man who dedicated his life to making massive numbers of people miserable? What’s more tragic? And how many other Americans are on this track?

I did a podcast interview yesterday with Nathan Wrigley at WP Tavern. I had a great time, and learned a lot. It's interesting that while I am not a member of the WordPress community, there is a big intersection between that community and one I do belong to -- the web. WordPr...

Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0. I often forget to mark that day. It's not an event that's marked by others very often, but in my humble opinion, it deserves more respect than it gets. I decide...

Today's song: When you awake.

Stephanie Booth, an OG blogger of great renown, now has a FeedLand blogroll on her blog. It is I believe going to make her blog feel less lonely. If anyone else wants to get one going, I have more confidence that it's pretty do-able. Screen shot.

I read something on Brent's blog the other day that changed my thinking. He said

Brent said he cares about desktop software but not about phone and tablet versions of same. I found that liberating. It's always been a pain in the ass to do something beautiful on the desktop only to have to destroy its utility by squeezing it into a space with no keyboard or pointing device that's more accurate than my finger (I have huge fingers, and a normal size phone). I found it liberating, but -- I'm working on the design of an app that should work well on either a phone or a laptop, and I've had that in mind the whole life of the product. But now I realize in a new way that it's a choice. It always was, but it didn't feel that way.

Heh. Yesterday I started writing a post about something Brent wrote on his blog, and then I must've gotten distracted and didn't finish it. I will now proceed to explain.

Podcast: A new model for blog discourse.